Heidi Li's Potpourri

The latest from 51 Percent

• Via the generous financial support of a donor, we now have 51 Percent lapel pins - and for every $10.51 donated between now and March 30 we will send you a lapel pin (if you donate $21.02, for example, we'll send two), to help spread the word about 51 Percent. Offer good while supplies last. As of March 9, we have just mailed our first batch and we have about 30 pins left.
  
• Donate to 51 Percent here.  You can donate by mail by sending a check to 51 Percent, 2118 Bancroft Place NW, Washington DC 20008. You can also support 51 Percent by supporting this blog. See donation button at upper right.
• For Women's History Month, we are rolling out downloadable fliers about just a few women who worked their way over, around, and through whatever misogyny the world threw at them and by doing so put women - and men - forward. The second one is ready - check it out, by going here and downloading. We hope people will print them out and leave them at local libraries, shops, schools, colleges, and coffeehouses - wherever permitted. Not only is the information worthwhile, but if you have a printer and can remember to grab a few on your way out to do your errands, you can help 51 Percent without laying out cash.

-from Heidi Li at 51 Percent

International Women's Day: Women - the Forgotten 51 Percent Minority

This picture from the 1970s, reprinted in a March 8, 2009 story in the New York Times, is heartbreaking. It is heartbreaking  because even though such a picture today would, I fervently hope, show women more diverse in age and rage, it would be easy enough to find women - millions of them - who came out of the 2008 Presidential election cycle realizing that women are the forgotten majority in this country.

Women are the people who can be called anything for supporting another women's bid for higher office; indeed a woman governor who runs for vice-president can publicly be called a c*nt and absolutely no member of the punditry nor any politician in high office of either party denounces this. Imagine if photos of young people wearing shirts that called our current President a n*gger had circulated widely during the last election. The media and politicians would have been absolutely up in arms. They would have been right to have been, too. But what many women are only realizing now, after surviving the dashed hopes of seeing Hillary Rodham Clinton given a fair shot at the nomination in Denver (instead the Democratic Party held a rigged process where pledged delegates were pressured to change their votes for the first ballot and superdelegates were pressured, starting in June, to act as if they had already voted for a candidate to lead the Democratic ticket) is that the entire political and cultural situation in this country not is stacked against them, but that almost no progress in the fight for political and economic equality has been made since the "Women's Liberation" movement of the early 1970s. The wretched and persistent wage gap persists; no Equal Rights Amendment has been added to our constitution; and despite the de jure legality of abortion, women's reproductive rights generally cannot be vindicated by actual individual women, at least not without hardship.

Our current President had his inauguration blessed by a pastor who believes in "wifely submission" and has retained as his chief speechwriter a man who blithely posed for a picture depicting himself metaphorically groping the most powerful person in the president's own Senate - a person who happens to be a woman, Secretary of State Clinton. This same President has ignored calls for a Presidential Commission on Women modeled on John F. Kennedy's 1961 - 1961! - Commission on Women; and has displayed zero interest in creating an even stronger institution, one that would be on par with the President's Advisory Boards on Intelligence (spying) and Economic Recovery.

The other day I was reading and listening to Mario Cuomo's address to the 1984 Democratic Convention. Well into a classic speech, Cuomo delivers this message:

We speak for women who are indignant that this nation refuses to etch into its governmental commandments the simple rule "thou shalt not sin against equality," a rule so simple -- I was going to say, and I perhaps dare not but I will. It's a commandment so simple it can be spelled in three letters: E.R.A.

In 1984, the Democratic hall went wild when Cuomo added this apparent ad lib. The crowd chanted over and over E - R - A.

Thou shalt not sin aginst equality, thou shall pass and ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Can you imagine a keynote speaker from either major political party today uttering these words at its presidential nominating convention?

The closest we came in 2008 was Hillary Rodham Clinton's convention speech, which included this declaration:

And I know what that can mean for every man, woman, and child in America. I’m a United States Senator because in 1848 a group of courageous women and a few brave men gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, many traveling for days and nights, to participate in the first convention on women’s rights in our history.

And so dawned a struggle for the right to vote that would last 72 years, handed down by mother to daughter to granddaughter – and a few sons and grandsons along the way.

These women and men looked in-to their daughters’ eyes, imagined a fairer and freer world, and found the strength to fight. To rally and picket. To endure ridicule and harassment. To brave violence and jail.

And after so many decades – 88 years ago on this very day – the 19th amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote would be forever enshrined in our Constitution.

My mother was born before women could vote. But in this election my daughter got to vote for her mother for President.

This is the story of America. Of women and men who defy the odds and never give up.

How do we give this country back to them?

By following the example of a brave New Yorker , a woman who risked her life to shepherd slaves along the Underground Railroad.

And on that path to freedom, Harriett Tubman had one piece of advice.

If you hear the dogs, keep going.

If you see the torches in the woods, keep going.

If they're shouting after you, keep going.

Don't ever stop. Keep going. (emphasis added)

Although the convention applauded wildly it should be noted that in 20 years the Democratic Party went from demanding the Equal Rights Amendment to reminding women that when they hear the dogs, they must keep going.

Many women and women understand that women's rights are human rights and human rights are women's rights. They demonstrate this knowledge in this country and around the world as they keep going. Some make small contributions, financial and otherwise, to new organizations like 51 percent (disclosure: the author of this post is the president of 51 percent), WomenCount, and The New Agenda - organizations formed in direct response to the unresponsiveness of the Democratic Party to American women's dreams and hopes for their emancipation and autonomy. In other countries, too, women take action on the local level. A friend from Europe decided that she would mark International Women's Day (a holiday not recognized in the U.S.) by protesting a local piece of artwork that, however unwittingly, depicts a woman in a subordinate and demeaned posture compared to her male coworkers (the art is meant to celebrate rice harvesting). Here is the artwork as it looks on an ordinary day:

 But on International Women's Day, the woman sweeping wore a placard that, translated, read:

"I feel enslaved in this humiliating posture next to the two strapping men standing up. I demand equality."

Dones endavant! (Translation: "Put women forward!")

I believe that 2008 will be remembered not as a year of defeat for women, but as year of galvanization. Despite the wretched economic uncertainty that plagues men and women today, those who want to see the majority-minority - women of the world - put forward, are banding together and one placard or one donation or one blog post at a time these men and women realize that we must renew the fight against oppression and for emancipation of women everywhere.

To read Secretary of State Clinton's 2009 International Women's Day statement on the importance of advancing the interests of women throughout the world, go here.

Read it and weep: "the seemingly unbridgeable chasm" that is the gender wage gap

Crossposted from Heidi Li on Equality at 51 Percent.

All quotes from Why Is Her Paycheck Smaller? By HANNAH FAIRFIELD Published: February 28, 2009 - The New York Times (Click graphic to go to large interactive chart). Full story here.

Nearly every occupation has the gap — the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between the size of the paycheck brought home by a woman and the larger one earned by a man doing the same job.

"There's no measurable way to explain the gaps within occupations," said Barry T. Hirsh, a labor economist at Georgia State University. "Other wage gaps, like racial gaps, can be almost fully explained by factoring in the differences in education, geography and age." (emphases added)

This is economic misogyny plain and simple; embedded in our economic habits deeply and seemingly insurmountably - although with enough political and legal action not actually insurmountable is a belittling of women's work compared to men's. This sort of systemic, measurable inequity is, to borrow a phrase from Mario Cuomo, a "sin against equality."

Virginia Apgar - Woman of Interest: surgeon, anesthesiologist, scientist

 "Nobody, but nobody, is going to stop breathing on me!"
--Dr. Virginia Apgar, ca. 1950s, explaining why she kept basic resuscitation equipment with her at all times.

It has been said that every baby born in a modern hospital anywhere in the world is looked at first through the eyes of Dr. Virginia Apgar. Her simple, rapid method for assessing newborn viability, the "Apgar score," has longbeen standard practice. Developed in the early 1950s and quickly adopted by obstetric teams, the method reduced infant mortality and laid the foundations of neonatology. While best known for this achievement, Apgar was also a leader in the emerging field of anesthesiology during the 1940s and in the new field of teratology (the study of birth defects) after 1960. [The Virginia Apgar Papers]

Virginia Apgar at age 20, below

 Virginia Apgar was brilliant surgeon, yet discouraged by her mentor from practicing in that field because of his belief that women did not fare well [source]; so, Dr. Apgar joined the first residency program in anesthesiology, and became an expert in that field; eventually combining her expertises in both surgery and residency to innovate radically and successfully in the field of neonatology. Below, first row, fourth from left, Virginia Apgar pictured with her classmates in the first residency program in anesthesiology in the United State.

Dr. Apgar was the first woman at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons to be named a full professor [source]. After ten years in that post, she completed a master's degree in public health at Johns Hopkins University. Apgar was approached by the National Foundation-March of Dimes in the spring of 1959, and offered the position of chief of its new Division of Congenital Malformations. She accepted and eventually served also  Director of Basic Medical Research (1967-1968) and Vice-President for Medical Affairs (1971-1974) [source].

Virginia Apgar teaching at Columbia obstetric anesthesiology at Columbia.

Virginia Apgar attending a newborn.

Text cross posted at 51 Percent as an installment in an occasional series highlighting exceptional women.

A letter to President Obama (or should I say "Jock in Chief")?

Dear President Obama:

One of your Cabinet Secretaries, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is striking a chord with women abroad and at home as she mixes in, with her discussion of global warming and economic security, the issue of women's empowerment, as a matter of democracy and social justice. Might you consider taking a lesson from the Secretary of State? If you did, you would incorporate her message about the importance of women to democratic politics and economic security into every aspect of your own programs and many of your public statements.

Those of us interested in the emancipation of American women would be delighted to hear you echo Secretary Clinton when she states, "I think that it’s imperative that nations like ours stand up for the rights of women. It is not ancillary to our progress; it is central" or "We have to highlight the importance of inclusion for women. We have to make clear that no democracy can exist without women’s full participation; no economy can be truly a free market without women involved." (Secretary Clinton, February 20, 2009).

You, Mr. President, are in a flurry of summits, initiatives, and speeches, leading up to the announcement of your budget this Thursday, February 26, 2009. Those who wonder whether you understand the significance of women in the U.S. economy need to hear you speak at home in terms your Secretary of State speaks abroad. We need to hear this partly because many of us doubt whether you are as forward thinking about women's issues as we would expect a Democratic president who will be seeking our votes again ought to be but also because we doubt you are as forward thinking about economic matters as we expect a Democratic president to be. Women do not dominate the boardrooms and executive suites of Fortune 500 companies; they do depend heavily on Social Security; they are a major source of small business initiatives in this country. When you discuss "entitlements" or "business" this means something different to the majority of women than it does to the majority of men.

Even in symbolic ways, we need you to do better if you want us to trust your commitment to women's empowerment. Just recently you cooperated with Men's Journal, a men's lifestyle magazine, that along with so many other publications, decided to devote a cover story to you. This is the cover:

For those who cannot read the headline, running alongside a photo of you holding a football in your hands, it says: "Barack Obama, Jock in Chief: His Moves, His Trash Talk & His Weekly Power Basketball Game."

Mr. President, I am not sure whether you are proud of being depicted as a trash-talking jock-in-chief - that seems to me to fulfill both sexist and racist stereotypes you yourself might find personally offensive. But the magazine editors certainly mean this headline to be laudatory, although they would never write the same sort of headline about a woman president or cabinet secretary and mean it to have the connotations of hipness and coolness they meant this one to carry. ("Trash-talking" is not a phrase used to praise powerfully positioned women.)

You, Mr. President, could by word and deed use your bully pulpit to discourage this sort of sexist pigeonholing not only of yourself but therefore of what power is supposed to look like or be like. I have written before about the need for you to convene a Presidential Empowerment of Women Advisory Board, to be as significant and influential with you as you suggest your PERAB and PIAB (Economic Recovery and Intelligence boards, respectively). This is becoming more urgent, not less. If you want the American economy and American democracy to remain strong, you must empower the 51 percent of the population who are women to participate as fully and on fair terms in our society.

Yours truly,

Heidi Li Feldman, founder and president, 51 Percent

ERA action in Florida

From a friend:

Subject: Special ERA Action Alert - Florida, Feb. 20

Efforts to ratify the ERA in Florida are at a boiling point and they can use our help.  Sandy Oestreich, Founder/President, Equal Rights Alliance, Inc., asks for the following assistance from Fthe ERA is heard by the Florida legislature:

On this FRIDAY, Feb. 20:  Call Speaker Cretul's Gainesville office - (352) 955-6407 (or alt. -- (352) 625-6407). Let him hear the phones RINGING OFF THE HOOK! Leave the message, "PLEASE HOLD ERA HEARINGS EARLY MARCH!"

Also, keep the postcards coming. Write now to: Rep. Larry Cretul, 1911 SW 34th St, Gainesville, FL 32608. And again! Urge him to "HOLD HEARINGS ON THE HCR 8003 asap."

Women beheaded in New York State

See 51 Percent for more information courtesy of NOW-NY.

If Iranian women can put themselves forward, American women have no reason not to

(Cross-posted from Heidi Li on Equality, 51 Percent)

Today's New York Times has a front-page story, above the fold, headlined "Starting at Home, Iran's fight for Women's Rights".  At home in Iran things obtacles to putting women forward are more obvious than they are at home in the United States.   In Iran:

Despite the gains they have made, women still face extraordinary obstacles. Girls can legally be forced into marriage at the age of 13. Men have the right to divorce their wives whenever they wish, and are granted custody of any children over the age of 7. Men can ban their wives from working outside the home, and can engage in polygamy.

The article highlights amazing things that can be done by women - and men - determined to resist these signs of pervasive misogyny. Chief among them is the rise in the ratio of women to men in university: "Today, more than 60 percent of university students are women, compared with just over 30 percent in 1982, even though classes are no longer segregated."

If an officially theocratic state, whose official religion is most definitely patriarchal, can achieve this ratio in higher education, certainly we in the United States can achieve comparable gains in not only in higher education but elsewhere, including especially in the use of smart power to encourage the promotion of human rights around the world.

I recommend not only the full New York Times article, but encourage all to visit the One Million Signatures website, which is font of information about sex discrimination and misogny in Iran; efforts to end this, and host of the One Million signatures petition supporting these changes.

Second invited guest essay at 51 Percent; some other news and notes

Go here to read Homophobia 101; and some connections between homophobia and misogyny.

It is with great pleasure that 51 Percent announces the publication of this guest essay by Gary Rosche. 51 Percent continue to seek unsolicited essays on topics related to its mission; go here for information on how to contact 51 Percent with submissions.

The list of tasks for the website is growing: a downloadable flier is in the works; a wonderful contribution to the online museum of misogynistic memorabilia has come in and will be added to the collection as soon as possible. 51 Percent has been contacted by a new media company and there may be opportunities for partnership in producing materials for wide distribution. As founder of 51 Percent I am grateful to all those who have been reaching out to 51 Percent, particularly those who have added approximately another $400 dollars to the organization's slowly growing treasury. Every contribution is important as we get started, and every contribution that adds .51 cents to the main amount or 1 extra dollar to a fifty dollar donation gives me special pleasure. Women may be earning only 78 cents on the dollar compared to men, but for every person whose donation reflects that women are the majority of the population, 51 Percent directly benefits.

Sam Donaldson manages to disparage Carly Fiorina, Cokie Roberts, Kirsten Gillibrand - and David Paterson - in one fell swoop

[Cross-posted at Founder's Blog, 51 Percent; h/t to friend M.M. for drawing my attention to the clip from This Week with George Stephanopoulos] [update, 3:00 pm, improved link to video]

Watch this. Set aside the matter of whether being a woman helped or hindered Ms. Kennedy's bid for Secretary of State Clinton's Senate seat. Pay attention, careful attention, to Sam Donaldson. Notice that the minute Cokie Roberts and Carly Fiorina even mention broader issues of gender parity, and more particularly, when Roberts notes that in the November general election that only 36 percent of the electorate were white men, Donaldson cuts her off, with an assist from George Stephanopoulos, and launches into a into a combination whine ("please try to continue to do it without us") and pompous bloviation (Governor Paterson has, by defying the New York powers-that-be "shot himself in both feet").

Scared, Sam?

I agree with with the commentator at The New Agenda: "The patriarchy is especially threatened by our push for equal representation...."

So scared that blustery old men like Sam Donaldson cannot even hold back from a move familiar to any woman who has ever partaken in a profession "round table" or meeting. The minute a woman starts pressing a significant and weighty point that a man does not want to hear he starts talking over her. Rather than the male moderator - in this case Stephanopoulos - telling him to pipe down so Roberts could at least finish her sentence, the male moderator tries to gloss over the moment of sexist rudeness (no, not just rudeness, sexist rudeness) with a lame joke ("at least you asked [before seamlessly launching into your interruption]"). As with racist put-downs, this sort of joviality in the face of sexist rudeness compounds the problem. It certainly does not put in his place the original sexist interrupter, who could not even bear to hear out the comment being made about proportional representation.

With four men (including Stephanopoulos himself) and two women at the round table, there is not even 51 percent representation on This Week, at least this week. But I would love to get a careful breakdown of the speaking time of the four men and the two women: if Stephanopoulos and his producers cannot produce a panel of 4 women and two men or at least three and three, then it would useful if Stephanopoulos careful made sure that the two women get close to 51 per cent of the air time. It would be better if this were achieved by having 3 or 4 women on the panel, because that would further the more tangible goal of 51 percent women in every public sphere, and because it would not require deviation from with ingrained norms (albeit ill-fitting in this case) about speaking time being roughly alloted per person (assuming that is the norm on talk shows like This Week). But listen again to the clip and imagine if Fiorina and Roberts had had 51 percent of the air time. Whether you agree with their specific views or not, how might the overall conversation have been different? More representative of a range of views and ideas more likely to be held by women than by men?