“Republican Hostile Challenge To Women”: Romney, Santorum, And Gingrich Need A Lesson In Women’s History
Disaffected women are packing up to flee the Republican Party in the wake of the War on Women, The Washington Post reported on its front page. Meanwhile, President Obama’s re-election campaign is sending out a massive signal to energize pro-choice women and welcome them into the Democratic Party, The New York Times said on its Sunday front page.
Good, good. Women are clearly the critical constituency to choose the next president. That’s just what the Republican Party deserves for its hostile challenge to women and girls making their own decisions about their own lives. Sometimes you wonder if Republican candidates know that women actually have the right to vote. Let’s face it, neither Mitt, Rick, nor Newt is exactly a woman’s man. They are out-and-out men’s men.
Has former Gov. Mitt Romney or former Sen. Rick Santorum or former House Speaker Newt Gingrich ever read Virginia Woolf? Do they even know who Margaret Sanger is? What about the spitfire Quaker Alice Paul? She led the women suffrage movement to victory over seven or more years of struggle. This happened in 1920, like 92 years ago, gentlemen. Paul took women’s suffrage public, to the streets and to the White House gates, where the strategy was to remind President Woodrow Wilson what the right thing to do was. Paul and other suffragettes were arrested, abused, and force fed in jail. Nothing would stop them until women won the right to citizenship in our democracy.
Note: women suffrage was not given; it was taken. We women today should study pages from Paul’s book on civil disobedience, especially if the War on Women continues to close in on overturning Roe v. Wade, the cornerstone Supreme Court decision that makes reproductive rights—human rights—legal and private.
Margaret Sanger brought you and me birth control. She made up the useful phrase in the interest of saving women’s lives. As a nurse, she was outraged to see young married immigrants on the Lower East Side dying in childbirth or from botched abortions. The death of Sadie Sachs was the catalyst, she said, a 28-year-old mother who begged a doctor to tell her how to prevent another pregnancy. “Well, it can’t be done,” he answered. “I’ll tell you the only thing to do….Tell Jake to sleep on the roof.”
Months after witnessing that predicament, Sanger answered a call to the Sachs home, where she found Sadie Sachs on her deathbed, surrounded by a scene of her weeping family.
Sanger’s cause came from that personal encounter. “The sun came up and threw its reflection over the house tops. It was the dawn of a new day in my life,” she declared. “I would tell the world what was going on in the lives of these poor women.” In 1916, she opened a women’s health clinic in Brooklyn and founded the organization that became Planned Parenthood, the gleam in the eye of one spirited, determined woman. Like Roe v. Wade, it has been besieged lately, as another front in the War on Women.
Sanger’s life is an incredible mirror of her times, especially the free-thinking, defiant mood of Roaring ’20s. Like her contemporary Paul, she too got arrested and spent time in jail in 1917. Under a court order not to give a public speech, she gagged herself and stood next to the eminent historian and Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. as he read her words. She traveled the world to seek ways of safe birth control. Unfortunately, she subscribed to an intellectual trend called eugenics (before the Nazi era.)
Paul and Sanger would ask, what’s wrong with us, defending what’s already been done? If I were to interview them today, they would be eager to know what progress women have made. And what would I tell them—President Clinton’s Family and Medical Leave Act?
They might say to me that their endeavors went beyond the ballot and women’s health. These were vehicles to empower women to speak with their own voices and to determine their own destinies to make this more truly a democracy.
Virginia Woolf, the brilliant English novelist, essayist, and diarist, created the feminist metaphor of a room of one’s own in a manifesto on furthering women’s liberties in life. She lived in the same age as Sanger and Paul. Such a shame these three never met.
Getting back to Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich, well might we ask how much room there is for women in their Americas.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, March 13, 2012
“Forward Economic Momentum”: Obama’s American Recovery And Reinvestment Act Has Been A Success
The short answer is yes, the economy has improved due to the policies President Obama implemented with the support of Congress.
Labor market conditions are the most important indicators of whether the economy has improved. Most people get the majority of their income from paid employment and having a good job, with decent pay and benefits including health insurance, retirement, and policies that make sure employees can also be good caregivers for their families. Most have little savings, if any, to rely on.
The labor market is moving in the right direction and this is a testament to the success of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and other steps taken to address the Great Recession. Recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the private sector has added jobs every month since March 2010, with 245,000 jobs added on average over the past three months. This is a remarkable turnaround from when President Obama took office and the economy was shedding about 20,000 jobs per day.
As a result of job creation, the share of Americans with a job in February edged up to 58.6 percent, higher than it’s been since June 2010. Further, there has also been steady progress to bring unemployment down from its peak of 10.0 percent in October 2009 to 8.3 percent in February.
The Recovery Act and other programs worked because they targeted funds toward a variety of specific job-creation efforts that have been shown to have created jobs and been cost-effective. The President’s Council of Economic Advisers credits the Recovery Act with increasing employment through the second quarter of 2011 by 2.2 million to 4.2 million jobs and reducing unemployment by between 0.2 and 1.1 percent. Economists Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi estimate that the Recovery Act and other fiscal policies resulted in 2.7 million jobs, and that without them unemployment would have hit 11 percent and job losses would have totaled 10 million.
Make no mistake, there has been sure and steady progress in the economy. But, these gains would have been much stronger had conservatives not blocked efforts to invest in much-needed infrastructure and help state and local governments keep employees on the job teaching children and policing streets. The forward economic momentum continues to be at risk as Congress and state and local governments move toward an austerity agenda that will hinder, not promote, strong growth and an improved labor market.
By: Heather Boushey, Sr. Economist, Center for American Progress, Published in U. S. News and World Report, March 13, 2012
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