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History > 2013 > USA > Women rights (I)
Arkansas Adopts
a Ban on Abortions After 12 Weeks
March 6, 2013
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM
Arkansas adopted what is by far the country’s most restrictive
ban on abortion on Wednesday — at 12 weeks of pregnancy, when a fetal heartbeat
can typically be detected by abdominal ultrasound.
The law, the sharpest challenge yet to Roe v. Wade, was passed by the newly
Republican-controlled legislature over the veto of Gov. Mike Beebe, a Democrat,
who called it “blatantly unconstitutional.” The State Senate voted Tuesday to
override his veto and the House followed suit on Wednesday, with several
Democrats joining the Republican majority.
The law contradicts the limit established by Supreme Court decisions, which give
women a right to an abortion until the fetus is viable outside the womb, usually
around 24 weeks into pregnancy, and abortion rights groups promised a quick
lawsuit to block it. Even some anti-abortion leaders called the measure a futile
gesture.
Adoption of the law, called the Human Heartbeat Protection Act, is the first
statewide victory for a restless emerging faction within the anti-abortion
movement that has lost patience with the incremental whittling away at abortion
rights — a strategy used by groups like National Right to Life and the Catholic
Church while they wait for a more sympathetic Supreme Court.
“When is enough enough?” asked the bill’s sponsor in the legislature, Senator
Jason Rapert, a Republican, who compared the more than 50 million abortions in
the United States since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision to the Holocaust and the
Rwandan genocide. “It’s time to take a stand.”
But abortion rights groups and many legal experts, including some in the
anti-abortion movement, say the law so deeply contradicts existing
constitutional doctrine that it may quickly be voided.
“The 12-week ban actually bars abortion within the first trimester,” said Nancy
Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York. “It has no
chance of surviving a court challenge.”
The center and the American Civil Liberties Union have vowed to bring a case in
federal court, aiming to head off the law before it takes effect, 90 days after
the legislature adjourns in the next month or so.
Senator Rapert, who cited strong backing for his bill from conservative
evangelical groups like the Arkansas Family Council, hopes the law will start a
groundswell of support. “We crafted a bill that apparently has the ability to
stand the test in courts and change abortion policy in our nation coast to
coast,” he said in an interview this week.
But so far, more radical measures elsewhere have fallen short. In Mississippi a
so-called personhood amendment lost at the polls, while in Ohio a “fetal
heartbeat” bill resembling that in Arkansas was defeated in the legislature, in
part because it was opposed by one of the state’s leading anti-abortion groups,
Ohio Right to Life.
Those proposals have caused soul-searching and dissension within some of the
largest anti-abortion groups, with many traditional leaders expressing
skepticism or opposition to such sweeping challenges to constitutional law until
a more conservative Supreme Court seems ready to scrap the legacy of Roe v.
Wade.
Much like Tea Party activists, who have caused exasperation among Republican
leaders with demands to slash budgets almost indiscriminately, the abortion
rebels feel there is little to lose by pushing for aggressive curbs and testing
the courts. But other anti-abortion leaders say that strategy, exemplified by
the Arkansas law, is likely to backfire, causing courts to endorse the current
limits and wasting resources that could bring real, if smaller, gains.
“As much as we would like to protect the unborn at that point, it is futile and
it won’t save any babies,” said James Bopp Jr., a prominent anti-abortion lawyer
who opposed the Arkansas law. Mr. Bopp, who lives in Indiana, is general counsel
of National Right to Life.
He said that lower courts are virtually certain to affirm existing Supreme Court
rulings and, like many other legal experts, he predicted that the Supreme Court
was very unlikely to agree to hear such a case.
Mr. Rapert originally proposed setting the Arkansas ban even earlier, at about
six weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period. But the nascent fetal heartbeat
can be detected at that point only by using intrusive technology like a
trans-vaginal ultrasound.
Wary of the national firestorm that erupted last year after Virginia tried to
require the intrusive procedure, Mr. Rapert and his allies revised the bill to
specify that a fetal heartbeat should be detected by abdominal ultrasound or
other external methods, which are not feasible at six weeks.
The strategy of incrementally narrowing abortion rights has yielded results,
especially since 2010, when Republicans gained control of many more states.
Measures have been adopted by the dozens in the past few years, including
waiting periods, parental consent for minors, ultrasound requirements and
stringent regulations aimed at making it harder for abortion clinics to operate.
In Mississippi, a rule requiring doctors performing abortions to have visiting
privileges at local hospitals threatens to close down the state’s only remaining
abortion clinic, which relies on traveling doctors. A court decision on the
measure is expected any day.
Ten states have pushed time limits for abortions down to 20 weeks into pregnancy
on the theory, disputed by most medical experts, that a fetus can feel pain by
then. Such laws have wider support in the anti-abortion movement. Arkansas
adopted a 20-week ban over the governor’s veto last week, and most who supported
it went on to vote for Mr. Rapert’s more stringent bill as well.
The 20-week laws also violate the existing standard of fetal viability. They are
under legal challenge in Arizona and Georgia, and on Wednesday, a federal judge
ruled the 20-week ban in Idaho to be unconstitutional, Reuters reported. But the
laws are in effect in seven other states. Very few abortions take place so late
in pregnancy, and those are often for serious medical reasons that may be
permitted in any case.
By contrast, a 12-week ban would affect an estimated 12 percent to 15 percent of
abortions nationwide, said Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager with the
Guttmacher Institute, a research group in Washington that supports abortion
rights. In Arkansas in 2011, 4,033 abortions were performed; 815 of them, or 20
percent, were at 12 weeks or more after the last menstrual period, according to
state data. How many of these later procedures involved medical emergencies or
cases of rape or incest — exceptions allowed under the new law — is not known.
The state currently has only one clinic, in Little Rock, that performs surgical
abortions; a second, run by Planned Parenthood, offers medicinal abortions,
which are done only within the first eight weeks of pregnancy.
The final approval of the bill on Wednesday was a surprisingly unemotional
event, with the House consideration of the override taking only moments — less
time than it took just before to recognize a college volleyball team.
With the outcome, at 55 votes to 33, a foregone conclusion in a state that has
turned steadily to the right in recent years, two House Republican leaders spoke
briefly in favor of the bill, and not a single legislator spoke against it.
Representative Ann V. Clemmer, the bill’s House sponsor, called it “a statement
consistent with what Arkansas voters want.”
“It will be tested,” she said. “I’m O.K. with that. That’s the job of the
courts.”
Abortion rights advocates, however, watched the legislation with chagrin.
“It sets Arkansas back several decades in the eyes of the nation and the world,”
said Rita Sklar, director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas. “It
shows an utter disregard for women and their ability to make important personal
decisions about their own reproductive health.”
Steve Barnes contributed reporting.
Arkansas Adopts a Ban on Abortions After 12
Weeks, NYT, 6.3.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/us/arkansas-adopts-restrictive-abortion-law.html
In Arduous Officer Course,
Women
Offer Clues to Their Future in Infantry
February
17, 2013
The New York Times
By JAMES DAO
Last fall,
two newly minted female lieutenants joined about 100 men in Quantico, Va., for
one of the most grueling experiences that soldiers not in war can experience:
the Marine Corps’ Infantry Officer Course.
During the 86-day course, candidates haul heavy packs and even heavier weapons
up and down steep hills, execute ambushes and endure bitter cold, hunger and
exhaustion. Uncertainty abounds: they do not know their next task, or even how
long they will have to perform it. At I.O.C., calm leadership under duress is
more important than physical strength, although strength is essential.
One of the women — the first to enter the course — was dropped on the first day
with about two dozen men during a notoriously strenuous endurance test. But the
second woman lasted deep into the second week, when a stress fracture in her leg
forced her to quit.
“She was tough,” Gen. James F. Amos, the Marine Corps commandant, said of the
woman, who is now at flight school. “She wasn’t going to quit.”
General Amos hopes that the experiences of those women, and others to come, will
provide crucial clues about the future of women in the infantry, a possibility
allowed by the recent lifting of the 1994 ban on women in direct combat units.
For the Marine Corps, probably more than any other military service, gender
integration is a difficult affair. Not only is the corps the most male of the
services, with women making up only about 7 percent of its ranks, but it is also
a bastion of the infantry. Nearly one in five Marines are “grunts,” proud of
their iconic history of bloody ground battles, from Belleau Wood to Iwo Jima to
Chosin Reservoir to Falluja.
Not surprisingly, the idea of women in the infantry draws sharp questions from
many active-duty Marines and veterans, who express concerns that standards will
be diluted for women.
In an interview, General Amos acknowledged hearing those worries and insisted
that the corps would not lower its standards. To guarantee that, he plans to use
the course, which Marines consider the gold standard of infantry training, to
study the performance of potential female infantry officers and then use that
data to develop requirements for enlisted infantry Marines.
In March, two Naval Academy graduates will become the second set of women to
enter the course. Over the coming years, General Amos is counting on dozens more
female volunteers to provide him with enough information to decide whether women
can make it in the infantry. The outcome, he says, is far from certain.
“I think there is absolutely no reason to think our females can’t be tankers, or
be amtrackers, or be artillery Marines,” he said, referring to tracked
amphibious assault vehicles. “The infantry is different.”
General Amos said that if too few women were able, or willing, to join the
infantry, he or his successor might ask the secretary of defense to keep the
infantry closed to women. The deadline for that request is January 2016.
“You could reach the point where you say, ‘It’s not worth it,’ ” General Amos
said. “The numbers are so infinitesimally small, it’s not worth it.”
Advocates for women in the military would almost certainly protest any effort to
keep the Marines infantry male only. Those advocates acknowledge the harshness
of infantry life: carrying heavy loads on foot for long distances and enduring
spartan environments are requisite. But they say that properly trained women
will make it through I.O.C. and, eventually, whatever program the corps creates
for screening and training enlisted infantrywomen.
Even if very few women pass I.O.C., enlisted women should still be allowed to
join male-led infantry units, said Greg Jacob, a former Marine officer who is
the policy director for the Service Women’s Action Network, an advocacy group.
“Leadership is leadership,” Mr. Jacob said. “You don’t need a female leader to
lead female Marines.”
General Amos, a fighter pilot, opposes doing that, saying enlisted female
Marines will do best if they have female officers as mentors. “I’m not going to
bring in 18-year-old females and put them in an infantry battalion when I’ve got
no female officers,” he said. “I can’t do that.”
In the coming months, the most pressing task for all of the armed services will
be establishing gender-neutral requirements for every combat job, known as
military occupational specialties. Of the 340 job categories in the Marine
Corps, 32 had been closed to women under the 1994 ban.
The Marine Corps has set out a two-tiered process for creating those
requirements: one short-term for armor, artillery, combat engineering and
low-altitude air defense units, and a longer-term one for the infantry.
For noninfantry combat units, Marine commanders will be expected to establish
requirements for every job by June. For example, artillery crews, working in
pairs, must be able to lift and load shells weighing about 100 pounds. Tank crew
members must be able to lift 40-pound shells using arm strength alone, because
of the vehicle’s tight quarters.
Those requirements will become the basis for physical tests intended to screen
men and women for particular jobs. It is possible that the tests already
administered to all Marines annually — the physical fitness test and the combat
fitness test — will be deemed adequate for determining physical ability for some
jobs. But where those tests are not adequate, the corps will develop additional
ones.
The corps will also begin using a new physical fitness test next January that
will require all Marines, male and female, to do a minimum of three pull-ups
and, for Marines under the age of 27, 50 crunches in two minutes. The three-mile
run time will be scored by gender.
Marine officials say that the 15 women who volunteered to use the new fitness
test this year all passed with maximum scores for pull-ups, doing eight or more.
For men, 20 pull-ups are needed for a maximum score.
General Amos said he hoped that tests for the noninfantry combat units would be
in place by the end of this year, potentially allowing women who are finishing
boot camp early next year to move into some combat units.
“I’m really pretty bullish on this thing,” he said.
The infantry will take longer. The Marine Corps produces only about 110 female
officers a year, and so far, only four have volunteered for I.O.C. General Amos
said he would need many more volunteers to draw conclusions.
Given the heavy dose of infantry life that all officers experience in their
initial training, he said he was unsurprised that women were not knocking down
the door to enter I.O.C.
“By the time you’ve spent six months of this, picking ticks off of every part of
your body, freezing cold, smelling like a goat and eating M.R.E.’s, you may go,
‘Well, this infantry stuff isn’t for me,’ ” he said, referring to packaged
military meals. “So we don’t have a lot of volunteers.”
In Arduous Officer Course, Women Offer Clues to Their Future in Infantry, NYT,
17.2.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/us/marines-look-to-infantry-course-for-insight-on-women.html
Why Gender Equality Stalled
February
16, 2013
The New York Times
By STEPHANIE COONTZ
THIS week
is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s international best
seller, “The Feminine Mystique,” which has been widely credited with igniting
the women’s movement of the 1960s. Readers who return to this feminist classic
today are often puzzled by the absence of concrete political proposals to change
the status of women. But “The Feminine Mystique” had the impact it did because
it focused on transforming women’s personal consciousness.
In 1963, most Americans did not yet believe that gender equality was possible or
even desirable. Conventional wisdom held that a woman could not pursue a career
and still be a fulfilled wife or successful mother. Normal women, psychiatrists
proclaimed, renounced all aspirations outside the home to meet their feminine
need for dependence. In 1962, more than two-thirds of the women surveyed by
University of Michigan researchers agreed that most important family decisions
“should be made by the man of the house.”
It was in this context that Friedan set out to transform the attitudes of women.
Arguing that “the personal is political,” feminists urged women to challenge the
assumption, at work and at home, that women should always be the ones who make
the coffee, watch over the children, pick up after men and serve the meals.
Over the next 30 years this emphasis on equalizing gender roles at home as well
as at work produced a revolutionary transformation in Americans’ attitudes. It
was not instant. As late as 1977, two-thirds of Americans believed that it was
“much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home
and the woman takes care of the home and family.” By 1994, two-thirds of
Americans rejected this notion.
But during the second half of the 1990s and first few years of the 2000s, the
equality revolution seemed to stall. Between 1994 and 2004, the percentage of
Americans preferring the male breadwinner/female homemaker family model actually
rose to 40 percent from 34 percent. Between 1997 and 2007, the number of
full-time working mothers who said they would prefer to work part time increased
to 60 percent from 48 percent. In 1997, a quarter of stay-at-home mothers said
full-time work would be ideal. By 2007, only 16 percent of stay-at-home mothers
wanted to work full time.
Women’s labor-force participation in the United States also leveled off in the
second half of the 1990s, in contrast to its continued increase in most other
countries. Gender desegregation of college majors and occupations slowed. And
although single mothers continued to increase their hours of paid labor, there
was a significant jump in the percentage of married women, especially married
women with infants, who left the labor force. By 2004, a smaller percentage of
married women with children under 3 were in the labor force than in 1993.
SOME people began to argue that feminism was not about furthering the equal
involvement of men and women at home and work but simply about giving women the
right to choose between pursuing a career and devoting themselves to full-time
motherhood. A new emphasis on intensive mothering and attachment parenting
helped justify the latter choice.
Anti-feminists welcomed this shift as a sign that most Americans did not want to
push gender equality too far. And feminists, worried that they were seeing a
resurgence of traditional gender roles and beliefs, embarked on a new round of
consciousness-raising. Books with titles like “The Feminine Mistake” and “Get to
Work” warned of the stiff penalties women paid for dropping out of the labor
force, even for relatively brief periods. Cultural critics questioned the
“Perfect Madness” of intensive mothering and helicopter parenting, noting the
problems that resulted when, as Ms. Friedan had remarked about “housewifery,”
mothering “expands to fill the time available.”
One study cautioned that nearly 30 percent of opt-out moms who wanted to rejoin
the labor force were unable to do so, and of those who did return, only 40
percent landed full-time professional jobs. In “The Price of Motherhood,” the
journalist Ann Crittenden estimated that the typical college-educated woman lost
more than $1 million dollars in lifetime earnings and forgone retirement
benefits after she opted out.
Other feminists worried that the equation of feminism with an individual woman’s
choice to opt out of the work force undermined the movement’s commitment to a
larger vision of gender equity and justice. Joan Williams, the founding director
of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California’s Hastings
College of the Law, argued that defining feminism as giving mothers the choice
to stay home assumes that their partners have the responsibility to support
them, and thus denies choice to fathers. The political theorist Lori Marso noted
that emphasizing personal choice ignores the millions of women without a partner
who can support them.
These are all important points. But they can sound pretty abstract to men and
women who are stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to arranging
their work and family lives. For more than two decades the demands and hours of
work have been intensifying. Yet progress in adopting family-friendly work
practices and social policies has proceeded at a glacial pace.
Today the main barriers to further progress toward gender equity no longer lie
in people’s personal attitudes and relationships. Instead, structural
impediments prevent people from acting on their egalitarian values, forcing men
and women into personal accommodations and rationalizations that do not reflect
their preferences. The gender revolution is not in a stall. It has hit a wall.
In today’s political climate, it’s startling to remember that 80 years ago, in
1933, the Senate overwhelmingly voted to establish a 30-hour workweek. The bill
failed in the House, but five years later the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938
gave Americans a statutory 40-hour workweek. By the 1960s, American workers
spent less time on the job than their counterparts in Europe and Japan.
Between 1990 and 2000, however, average annual work hours for employed Americans
increased. By 2000, the United States had outstripped Japan — the former leader
of the work pack — in the hours devoted to paid work. Today, almost 40 percent
of men in professional jobs work 50 or more hours a week, as do almost a quarter
of men in middle-income occupations. Individuals in lower-income and
less-skilled jobs work fewer hours, but they are more likely to experience
frequent changes in shifts, mandatory overtime on short notice, and nonstandard
hours. And many low-income workers are forced to work two jobs to get by. When
we look at dual-earner couples, the workload becomes even more daunting. As of
2000, the average dual-earner couple worked a combined 82 hours a week, while
almost 15 percent of married couples had a joint workweek of 100 hours or more.
Astonishingly, despite the increased workload of families, and even though 70
percent of American children now live in households where every adult in the
home is employed, in the past 20 years the United States has not passed any
major federal initiative to help workers accommodate their family and work
demands. The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 guaranteed covered workers up
to 12 weeks unpaid leave after a child’s birth or adoption or in case of a
family illness. Although only about half the total work force was eligible, it
seemed a promising start. But aside from the belated requirement of the new
Affordable Care Act that nursing mothers be given a private space at work to
pump breast milk, the F.M.L.A. turned out to be the inadequate end.
Meanwhile, since 1990 other nations with comparable resources have implemented a
comprehensive agenda of “work-family reconciliation” acts. As a result, when the
United States’ work-family policies are compared with those of countries at
similar levels of economic and political development, the United States comes in
dead last.
Out of nearly 200 countries studied by Jody Heymann, dean of the school of
public health at the University of California, Los Angeles, and her team of
researchers for their new book, “Children’s Chances,” 180 now offer guaranteed
paid leave to new mothers, and 81 offer paid leave to fathers. They found that
175 mandate paid annual leave for workers, and 162 limit the maximum length of
the workweek. The United States offers none of these protections.
A 1997 European Union directive prohibits employers from paying part-time
workers lower hourly rates than full-time workers, excluding them from pension
plans or limiting paid leaves to full-time workers. By contrast, American
workers who reduce hours for family reasons typically lose their benefits and
take an hourly wage cut.
Is it any surprise that American workers express higher levels of work-family
conflict than workers in any of our European counterparts? Or that women’s
labor-force participation has been overtaken? In 1990, the United States ranked
sixth in female labor participation among 22 countries in the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development, which is made up of most of the globe’s
wealthier countries. By 2010, according to an economic research paper by Cornell
researchers Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn, released last month, we had fallen
to 17th place, with about 30 percent of that decline a direct result of our
failure to keep pace with other countries’ family-friendly work policies.
American women have not abandoned the desire to combine work and family. Far
from it. According to the Pew Research Center, in 1997, 56 percent of women ages
18 to 34 and 26 percent of middle-aged and older women said that, in addition to
having a family, being successful in a high-paying career or profession was
“very important” or “one of the most important things” in their lives. By 2011,
fully two-thirds of the younger women and 42 percent of the older ones expressed
that sentiment.
Nor have men given up the ideal of gender equity. A 2011 study by the Center for
Work and Family at Boston College found that 65 percent of the fathers they
interviewed felt that mothers and fathers should provide equal amounts of
caregiving for their children. And in a 2010 Pew poll, 72 percent of both women
and men between 18 and 29 agreed that the best marriage is one in which husband
and wife both work and both take care of the house.
BUT when people are caught between the hard place of bad working conditions and
the rock wall of politicians’ resistance to family-friendly reforms, it is hard
to live up to such aspirations. The Boston College study found that only 30
percent of the fathers who wanted to share child care equally with their wives
actually did so, a gap that helps explain why American men today report higher
levels of work-family conflict than women. Under the circumstances, how likely
is it that the young adults surveyed by Pew will meet their goal of sharing
breadwinning and caregiving?
The answer is suggested by the findings of the New York University sociologist
Kathleen Gerson in the interviews she did for her 2010 book, “The Unfinished
Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work, and Family.” Eighty
percent of the women and 70 percent of the men Ms. Gerson interviewed said they
wanted an egalitarian relationship that allowed them to share breadwinning and
family care. But when asked what they would do if this was not possible, they
described a variety of “fallback” positions. While most of the women wanted to
continue paid employment, the majority of men said that if they could not
achieve their egalitarian ideal they expected their partner to assume primary
responsibility for parenting so they could focus on work.
And that is how it usually works out. When family and work obligations collide,
mothers remain much more likely than fathers to cut back or drop out of work.
But unlike the situation in the 1960s, this is not because most people believe
this is the preferable order of things. Rather, it is often a reasonable
response to the fact that our political and economic institutions lag way behind
our personal ideals.
Women are still paid less than men at every educational level and in every job
category. They are less likely than men to hold jobs that offer flexibility or
family-friendly benefits. When they become mothers, they face more scrutiny and
prejudice on the job than fathers do.
So, especially when women are married to men who work long hours, it often seems
to both partners that they have no choice. Female professionals are twice as
likely to quit work as other married mothers when their husbands work 50 hours
or more a week and more than three times more likely to quit when their husbands
work 60 hours or more.
The sociologist Pamela Stone studied a group of mothers who had made these
decisions. Typically, she found, they phrased their decision in terms of a
preference. But when they explained their “decision-making process,” it became
clear that most had made the “choice” to quit work only as a last resort — when
they could not get the flexible hours or part-time work they wanted, when their
husbands would not or could not cut back their hours, and when they began to
feel that their employers were hostile to their concerns. Under those
conditions, Professor Stone notes, what was really a workplace problem for
families became a private problem for women.
This is where the political gets really personal. When people are forced to
behave in ways that contradict their ideals, they often undergo what
sociologists call a “values stretch” — watering down their original expectations
and goals to accommodate the things they have to do to get by. This behavior is
especially likely if holding on to the original values would exacerbate tensions
in the relationships they depend on.
In their years of helping couples make the transition from partners to parents,
the psychologists Philip and Carolyn Cowan have found that tensions increase
when a couple backslide into more traditional roles than they originally
desired. The woman resents that she is not getting the shared child care she
expected and envies her husband’s social networks outside the home. The husband
feels hurt that his wife isn’t more grateful for the sacrifices he is making by
working more hours so she can stay home. When you can’t change what’s bothering
you, one typical response is to convince yourself that it doesn’t actually
bother you. So couples often create a family myth about why they made these
choices, why it has turned out for the best, and why they are still equal in
their hearts even if they are not sharing the kind of life they first
envisioned.
Under present conditions, the intense consciousness raising about the
“rightness” of personal choices that worked so well in the early days of the
women’s movement will end up escalating the divisive finger-pointing that stands
in the way of political reform.
Our goal should be to develop work-life policies that enable people to put their
gender values into practice. So let’s stop arguing about the hard choices women
make and help more women and men avoid such hard choices. To do that, we must
stop seeing work-family policy as a women’s issue and start seeing it as a human
rights issue that affects parents, children, partners, singles and elders.
Feminists should certainly support this campaign. But they don’t need to own it.
Stephanie
Coontz is a professor of family history
at Evergreen
State College
and the author
of “A Strange Stirring:
The Feminine
Mystique and American Women
at the Dawn of
the 1960s.”
Why Gender Equality Stalled, NYT, 16.2.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/opinion/sunday/why-gender-equality-stalled.html
Geraldine Rhoads Dies at 98;
Edited Woman’s Day
January 30,
2013
The New York Times
By DENNIS HEVESI
Geraldine
Rhoads, who in 16 years as editor in chief of Woman’s Day magazine guided it
toward covering the women’s movement while still embracing its tradition of
homespun advice, died at her home in Manhattan on Saturday, three days before
her 99th birthday.
Her longtime friend Jeannie McCloskey confirmed the death.
Miss Rhoads (she preferred the old courtesy title to Ms.) was editor of Woman’s
Day from 1966 to 1982, during the heyday of the so-called Seven Sisters, a group
of national women’s magazines that also counted Family Circle, Good
Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Better Homes and Gardens, and
Redbook. During her tenure, Woman’s Day’s circulation grew to more than eight
million, from about five million.
“It was a period of enormous change in women’s lives,” Jane Chesnutt, who was
Woman’s Day’s editor from 1991 to 2009, said on Monday. The magazine was then at
the forefront of issues like domestic violence — “ahead of the law on that
issue,” she said — and women’s health.
“In the mid-’70s, under Gerry’s leadership, we wrote about lumpectomy as an
alternative to radical mastectomies,” Ms. Chesnutt said.
That was a significant shift from the days in which women’s magazines featured
only recipes, needlework and proper etiquette.
Woman’s Day was first published in 1931 as a menu sheet handed out to shoppers
at grocery stores owned by the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. By 1937,
it was a magazine priced at 2 cents a copy and sold only at A.&P. stores. Today,
five owners later, Woman’s Day is published by Hearst Magazines and has a
circulation of about 3.25 million.
Ellen Levine, who is editorial director of Hearst Magazines and was Miss
Rhoads’s immediate successor at Woman’s Day, called Miss Rhoads’s editorship “a
balancing act.”
“She had an eye and ear for what was going to matter for women,” Ms. Levine
said, “particularly in the health area, in money management for women, stories
about women’s emotional needs. And she managed to get that on pages between the
stories on hobbies and recipes.”
Still, Miss Rhoads never disavowed traditional homemaking advice. In 1988, with
Edna Paradis, she wrote “The Woman’s Day Help Book: The Complete How-to for the
Busy Housekeeper.”
Geraldine Emeline Rhoads was born in Philadelphia on Jan. 29, 1914, the only
child of Lawrence and Alice Fegley Rhoads. Her father was a teacher at a
boarding school. Miss Rhoads never married, and no immediate family members
survive her.
Miss Rhoads graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1935, where she had been editor of the
College News and the Lantern, a literary magazine. After answering a classified
ad, she was hired as an editor by a start-up magazine in New York, The Woman.
She held editing positions at Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s and other women’s
magazines before being named editor in chief and vice president of Woman’s Day.
“Gerry was especially proud,” Ms. Chesnutt said, “of the fact that Woman’s Day
was, and still is, the only one of the Seven Sisters that was never edited by a
man.”
Geraldine Rhoads Dies at 98; Edited Woman’s Day, NYT, 30.1.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/business/media/
geraldine-rhoads-dies-at-98-edited-womans-day-magazine.html
She’s (Rarely) the Boss
January 26,
2013
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
DAVOS,
Switzerland
IT’S the annual conclave of the presumed powerful, the World Economic Forum in
Davos, with the wealthy flying in on private jets to discuss issues like global
poverty. As always, it’s a sea of men. This year, female participation is 17
percent.
Perhaps that’s not surprising, considering that global business and political
leaders are overwhelmingly male. In America, only 17 percent of American Fortune
500 board seats are held by women, a mere 3 percent of board chairs are women —
and women are barely represented in President Obama’s cabinet.
Indeed, I’m guessing that the average boardroom doesn’t have much better gender
equality than a team of cave hunters attacking a woolly mammoth 30,000 years
ago.
So what gives? A provocative answer comes from Sheryl Sandberg, the chief
operating officer of Facebook, who has written a smart book due out in March
that attributes the gender gap, in part, to chauvinism and corporate obstacles —
but also, in part, to women who don’t aggressively pursue opportunities.
“We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence,
by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in,”
Sandberg writes in the book, called “Lean In.”
“We internalize the negative messages we get throughout our lives, the messages
that say it’s wrong to be outspoken, aggressive, more powerful than men. We
lower our own expectations of what we can achieve. We continue to do the
majority of the housework and child care. We compromise our career goals to make
room for partners and children who may not even exist yet.”
Sandberg and I discussed the issue on a panel here in Davos, and I think that
there is something real and important in what she says. When I lecture at
universities, the first questions are invariably asked by a man — even at a
women’s college. When I point at someone in a crowd to ask a question, the women
in the area almost always look at each other hesitantly — and any man in the
vicinity jumps up and asks his question.
A McKinsey survey published in April found that 36 percent of male employees at
major companies aspired to be top executives, compared with 18 percent of the
women. A study of Carnegie Mellon M.B.A. graduates in 2003 found that 57 percent
of the men, but only 7 percent of the women, tried to negotiate a higher initial
salary offer.
Sandberg, one of the most prominent women in corporate America, is not known as
a shrinking violet. She confesses that when she was in elementary school, she
trained her younger brother and sister to follow her around, listen to her give
speeches and periodically shout: “Right!”
Yet she acknowledges that she has harbored many insecurities, sometimes shedding
tears at the office, as well as doubts about her juggling of work and family.
When she joined Facebook as its No. 2, she was initially willing to accept the
first offer from Mark Zuckerberg, the founder. She writes that her husband and
brother-in-law hounded her to demand more, so she did — and got a better deal.
“I am hoping that each woman will set her own goals and reach for them with
gusto,” Sandberg writes. “And I am hoping that each man will do his part to
support women in the workplace and in the home, also with gusto.”
Yet I wish that there could be two versions of Sandberg’s book. One marketed to
young women would encourage them to be more assertive. One marketed to men (and
women already in leadership) would emphasize the need for structural changes to
accommodate women and families.
Is Sandberg blaming the victim? I don’t think so, but I also don’t want to relax
the pressure on employers to do a much better job of recruiting and promoting
women.
Nature and social mores together make motherhood more all-consuming than
fatherhood, yet the modern job was built for a distracted father. That’s not
great for dads and can be just about impossible for moms — at least those who
don’t have great wealth or extraordinary spouses.
Sandberg famously leaves the office at 5:30 most days to be with her kids, but
not many women (or men) would dare try that.
Some people believe that women are more nurturing bosses, or that they offer
more support to women below them. I’m skeptical. Women can be jerks as much as
men.
But we need more women in leadership positions for another reason: considerable
evidence suggests that more diverse groups reach better decisions. Corporations
should promote women not just out of fairness, but also because it helps them
perform better. Lehman Brothers might still be around today if it were Lehman
Brothers & Sisters.
So, yes, let’s encourage young women to “lean in,” but let’s also change the
workplace so that when they do lean in and assert themselves, we’re directly
behind them shouting: “Right!”
She’s (Rarely) the Boss, NYT, 26.1.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/opinion/sunday/kristof-shes-rarely-the-boss.html
Women in
the Battlefield
January 24,
2013
The New York Times
The
Pentagon’s decision to end its ban on women in combat is a triumph for equality
and common sense. By opening infantry, artillery and other battlefield jobs to
all qualified service members regardless of sex, the military is showing that
categorical discrimination has no place in a society that honors fairness and
equal opportunity.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who overturned the ban this week, and the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, who unanimously urged him to do it, deserve praise for bringing
military policy in line with reality. Women have been in the thick of combat in
Iraq and Afghanistan for more than a decade. More than 280,000 have been
deployed there, thousands have been injured and more than 150 killed. With the
rule abolished, such service and sacrifice will no longer be unofficial and
unrecognized.
It is encouraging that the push for change came from the top, from leaders who
said integration was no bar to a stronger, better military. The Pentagon also
was facing pressure from lawsuits, including one brought last November on behalf
of four service women and the Service Women’s Action Network, an advocacy group,
claiming that gender-based discrimination was unconstitutional and unfairly
harmed their careers.
One plaintiff, Maj. Mary Jennings Hegar, an Air National Guard helicopter pilot
who was shot down and wounded in Afghanistan, said she could not seek combat
leadership positions because, in the Pentagon’s view, she had not officially
seen combat. Major Hegar is only one of untold thousands of women whose career
paths have been sharply limited by that gap in their résumés.
When the new policy is fully in place, we hope many more women will apply for
jobs that they wouldn’t have considered, in certain schools, leadership courses
and in those branches of service — namely the Army and Marine Corps — where
their opportunities have been most proscribed. The result will be more
diversity, from a deeper pool of talent, and thus a stronger, better military.
There will also be grumbling. When the news broke Wednesday afternoon, military
news sites like Army Times and Marine Corps Times lit up with comments, some
ranging from laughably sexist to reprehensible. “They shouldn’t be bused in from
the field every 3 days for a shower while the guys stay out for 45 days,” said
one commenter. “The castration of the U.S. Army continues,” said another. “God
help us all.”
Some right-wing commentators rehashed false stereotypes that women couldn’t hack
it, and warned that women would be captured and raped and men would get shot
trying to protect them instead of killing the enemy. These lurid hypotheticals
deny the reality that military women face far greater danger of sexual assault
and harassment from their fellow troops — a crisis that the Pentagon has slowly
been addressing, and that full combat integration should help to remedy. Adding
women to the leadership corps will foster a healthier military culture freed
from testosterone-soaked abuse and scandal.
Many in the military already understand that many women can do combat jobs as
well as men, if not better, but none have the chance to prove it. “Fully
support,” one Army Times commenter wrote of the new policy, “as long as the
training and the physical standards for such positions remain what they need to
be to accomplish the mission and make every team member able to provide support
and cover for their teammates.”
Women in the Battlefield, NYT, 24.1.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/opinion/women-in-the-battlefield.html
Is Delhi
So Different From Steubenville?
January 12,
2013
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
IN India, a
23-year-old student takes a bus home from a movie and is gang-raped and
assaulted so viciously that she dies two weeks later.
In Liberia, in West Africa, an aid group called More Than Me rescues a
10-year-old orphan who has been trading oral sex for clean water to survive.
In Steubenville, Ohio, high school football players are accused of repeatedly
raping an unconscious 16-year-old girl who was either drunk or rendered helpless
by a date-rape drug and was apparently lugged like a sack of potatoes from party
to party.
And in Washington, our members of Congress show their concern for sexual
violence by failing to renew the Violence Against Women Act, a landmark law
first passed in 1994 that has now expired.
Gender violence is one of the world’s most common human rights abuses. Women
worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be maimed because of male
violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and traffic accidents combined.
The World Health Organization has found that domestic and sexual violence
affects 30 to 60 percent of women in most countries.
In some places, rape is endemic: in South Africa, a survey found that 37 percent
of men reported that they had raped a woman. In others, rape is
institutionalized as sex trafficking. Everywhere, rape often puts the victim on
trial: in one poll, 68 percent of Indian judges said that “provocative attire”
amounts to “an invitation to rape.”
Americans watched the events after the Delhi gang rape with a whiff of
condescension at the barbarity there, but domestic violence and sex trafficking
remain a vast problem across the United States.
One obstacle is that violence against women tends to be invisible and thus not a
priority. In Delhi, of 635 rape cases reported in the first 11 months of last
year, only one ended in conviction. That creates an incentive for rapists to
continue to rape, but in any case that reported number of rapes is delusional.
They don’t include the systematized rape of sex trafficking. India has, by my
reckoning, more women and girls trafficked into modern slavery than any country
in the world. (China has more prostitutes, but they are more likely to sell sex
by choice.)
On my last trip to India, I tagged along on a raid on a brothel in Kolkata,
organized by the International Justice Mission. In my column at the time, I
focused on a 15-year-old and a 10-year-old imprisoned in the brothel, and
mentioned a 17-year-old only in passing because I didn’t know her story.
My assistant at The Times, Natalie Kitroeff, recently visited India and tracked
down that young woman. It turns out that she had been trafficked as well — she
was apparently drugged at a teahouse and woke up in the brothel. She said she
was then forced to have sex with customers and beaten when she protested. She
was never allowed outside and was never paid. What do you call what happened to
those girls but slavery?
Yet prosecutors and the police often shrug — or worse. Dr. Shershah Syed, a
former president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Pakistan,
once told me: “When I treat a rape victim, I always advise her not to go to the
police. Because if she does, the police might just rape her again.”
In the United States, the case in Steubenville has become controversial partly
because of the brutishness that the young men have been accused of, but also
because of concerns that the authorities protected the football team. Some
people in both Delhi and Steubenville rushed to blame the victim, suggesting
that she was at fault for taking a bus or going to a party. They need to think:
What if that were me?
The United States could help change the way the world confronts these issues. On
a remote crossing of the Nepal-India border, I once met an Indian police officer
who said, a bit forlornly, that he was stationed there to look for terrorists
and pirated movies. He wasn’t finding any, but India posted him there to show
that it was serious about American concerns regarding terrorism and intellectual
property. Meanwhile, that officer ignored the steady flow of teenage Nepali
girls crossing in front of him on their way to Indian brothels, because modern
slavery was not perceived as an American priority.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has done a superb job trying to put these
issues on the global agenda, and I hope President Obama and Senator John Kerry
will continue her efforts. But Congress has been pathetic. Not only did it fail
to renew the Violence Against Women Act, but it has also stalled on the global
version, the International Violence Against Women Act, which would name and
shame foreign countries that tolerate gender violence.
Congress even failed to renew the landmark legislation against human
trafficking, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. The obstacles were
different in each case, but involved political polarization and paralysis. Can
members of Congress not muster a stand on modern slavery?
(Hmm. I now understand better the results of a new survey from Public Policy
Polling showing that Congress, with 9 percent approval, is less popular than
cockroaches, traffic jams, lice or Genghis Khan.)
Skeptics fret that sexual violence is ingrained into us, making the problem
hopeless. But just look at modern American history, for the rising status of
women has led to substantial drops in rates of reported rape and domestic
violence. Few people realize it, but Justice Department statistics suggest that
the incidence of rape has fallen by three-quarters over the last four decades.
Likewise, the rate at which American women are assaulted by their domestic
partners has fallen by more than half in the last two decades. That reflects a
revolution in attitudes. Steven Pinker, in his book “The Better Angels of Our
Nature,” notes that only half of Americans polled in 1987 said that it was
always wrong for a man to beat his wife with a belt or a stick; a decade later,
86 percent said it was always wrong.
But the progress worldwide is far too slow. Let’s hope that India makes such
violence a national priority. And maybe the rest of the world, especially our
backward Congress, will appreciate that the problem isn’t just India’s but also
our own.
Is Delhi So Different From Steubenville?, NYT, 12.1.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/opinion/sunday/
is-delhi-so-different-from-steubenville.html
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