There’s a great many stories being posted on Daily Kos with respect to current feminist issues. Understandably, they are all concerned with the present time, specifically the last week. However, it may be helpful to view these stories, and the concerns they express, through the spectacles of times past.
This brief history is not intended as an argument for or against the current controversies of who said what and what they meant by it. I’ve particularly endeavoured to steer clear of expressing any partiality one way or the other (though I freely admit I find it impossible to view the anti-suffragists and Phyllis Schlafly with indifference).
In the interests of brevity, I’m going to turn to lifelong suffragist, Carrie Chapman Catt, who adroitly summarized the fifty-two years of struggle from 1848 to 1900, in this memorable quote:
"To get the word male in effect out of the Constitution cost the women of the country fifty-two years of pauseless campaign…
During that time they were forced to conduct:
- 56 campaigns of referenda to male voters;
- 480 campaigns to get Legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters;
- 47 campaigns to get State constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into State constitutions;
- 277 campaigns to get State party conventions to include woman suffrage planks;
- 30 campaigns to get presidential party conventions to adopt woman suffrage planks in party platforms, and
- 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses.
Millions of dollars were raised, mainly in small sums, and expended with economic care. Hundreds of women gave the accumulated possibilities of an entire lifetime, thousands gave years of their lives, hundreds of thousands gave constant interest and such aid as they could.”
Carrie Chapman Catt
Fifty-two years of unrelenting and motivated activism that expanded to seventy-two by 1920. It’s an extraordinary commitment by women in a patriarchal society. But for all that it embraced hundreds of thousands of women over the years, in all that time it never boasted a majority of women in support of its cause. It battled fierce opposition.
The anti-suffrage movement was just as strong among women as men. Opposition known first as “remonstrants” and later as the "antis" organized as early as 1870 when the Woman's Anti-Suffrage Association of Washington was formed. Their antagonism to the suffrage movement was emotional, manipulative and often malicious. Their spite is clearly on display in this popular poster circa 1909:
Even when American women were finally granted the vote nationally in 1920, very few actually exercised their hard-won suffrage. Women did not turn out to the polls in the same numbers as men until 1980. Yep, it took sixty years for American women to get anywhere close to parity with men when it came to voting turnout. That’s a strong empirical argument for asserting that change takes time; the greater the change, the longer the time it takes for society to adapt.
But how disappointed those suffragists and suffragettes must have felt by the lack of interest in voting after such a long and arduous struggle. Mixed in with elation and relief there must also have been some sense of despondency in discovering that most of their own sex failed to share in the victory.
Now we come to the present day when America lags behind other developed nations in equal pay and equal opportunities for women, particularly in terms of breaking through the glass ceiling. It’s also the only developed nation in the world without guaranteed paid parental leave. Moreover rights won in the past century are being excoriated in this one. Women’s health particularly falls into this category.
Like the antis against women’s suffrage, opposition to the feminist movement isn’t comprised solely of men. There are women in the vanguard, as there have always been; the ones which immediately come to mind are those filling the ranks of anti-abortion protestors.
Then there’s conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly who founded STOP (an acronym for “Stop Taking Our Privileges”, one of which was that of “dependent wife”) and succeeded in preventing the Equal Rights Amendment becoming the twenty-seventh amendment of the US Constitution. As political scientist, Jane J. Mansbridge, concludes in her history of the Equal Rights Amendment Why We Lost the ERA:
Many people who followed the struggle over the ERA believed—rightly in my view—that the Amendment would have been ratified by 1975 or 1976 had it not been for Phyllis Schlafly's early and effective effort to organize opponents.
American women paid, and are still paying, a high price for Schlafly’s activism. The defeat of that Amendment has made the current war on women easier in so many more ways than would have been possible if the ERA had been ratified.
Schlafly’s activism is rooted in vehement anti-feminism. Among her favorite sayings is:
Feminism is doomed to failure because it is based on an attempt to repeal and restructure human nature.
No doubt Phyllis Schlafly would wholeheartedly agree with Madeleine Albright’s 2006 quote:
“There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”
Keynote Speech: Celebrating Inspiration
Given at a luncheon with the WNBA’s All-Decade Team
However, Schlafly and Albright would differ markedly in what constitutes “help” in “help other women”. Both, in their own way, believe their activism helps other women regardless of the fact that each leads women in opposite directions.
It’s just fourteen words yet it’s easy to see how differently two women from opposite ends of the feminist spectrum would interpret them. A decade later this same quote has taken on yet another interpretation, a very different meaning again for those in the present. With such marked differences — a disparity now split three ways — it’s possible to see how all sides can feel equally right and certain about their particular stance and that there are women at every corner of this triangle.
I hope this ‘expresso’ history has provided a larger context from which to view current feminist issues. I hope too that, without provoking discord, it has also shown that there really are women on all sides — there always has been. Acknowledging this fact is just that: recognition that it is the way it is; that women are people and people disagree.