Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan are widely considered to be the three leaders of the Modern Women's Movement.
While you are listening to your current leader in her speech tonight in Denver, allow your selves to compare her with the three great women who fought for ALL women and earned the respect of any worthwhile man. There are plenty of us who sincerley want a woman President. We have daughters who we want to be treated equally in every facet of life.
I am one of those men. I love women, not because of cosmetic reasons or out of a need to "complete myself". I love you even more, after having fathered 3 daughters than I did before those happenings.That is a biological issue over which I have no control.The important issue is that I love you women of Puma because I feel your hurt. I sincerely wish that hurt was over a woman like Bella,Gloria or Betty. Hillary Clinton, in my opinion, is not that woman.
The inequalities women face today are tragic and must be addressed by women who have suffered the most from them. The leader of these women and of all women on a national level must never be a woman who has leaned on a man all her life; a woman who still does tonight as she speaks to you.
You women of Puma ( I know you have some men among you but I ignore them because you don't need them;)you have suddenly assumed a position of power in this convention, and in this country, out of proportion to your number. Your actual number is irrelevant, because you represent so many millions of women who feel the historic injustices of a male dominated Capitalistic society as strongly as you do.
The last thing you will welcome is advice from a man, but your actions in the next 70 days go far beyond gender distinctions. According to latest polls you represent approximately 20% of the 18 million who voted for Senator Clinton in the primaries. You are 3.5 million voters who are so angry (I understand that anger) that you are ready to vote for John McCain in November.
Let's look at why you are so angry:
In today's N.Y. Times,Susan Faludi, on the op-ed page lists some astonishing realities,
Today, the United States ranks 22nd among the 30 developed nations in its proportion of female federal lawmakers. The proportion of female state legislators has been stuck in the low 20 percent range for 15 years; women’s share of state elective executive offices has fallen consistently since 2000, and is now under 25 percent. The American political pipeline is 86 percent male.
Women’s real annual earnings have fallen for the last four years. Progress in narrowing the wage gap between men and women has slowed considerably since 1990, yet last year the Supreme Court established onerous restrictions on women’s ability to sue for pay discrimination. The salaries of women in managerial positions are on average lower today than in 1983.
Women’s numbers are stalled or falling in fields ranging from executive management to journalism, from computer science to the directing of major motion pictures. The 20 top occupations of women last year were the same as half a century ago: secretary, nurse, grade school teacher, sales clerk, maid, hairdresser, cook and so on. And just as Congress cut funds in 1929 for maternity education, it recently slashed child support enforcement by 20 percent, a decision expected to leave billions of dollars owed to mothers and their children uncollected.
Astonishing statistics especially after all the hard work and promise of the three powerhouse founders of modern day feminism.
There was steady progress for decades until about 1992. Ironically, that was the same year when a young dazzling woman from Arkansas burst on to the stage with the potential to be the most influential person of her gender since Susan B Anthony, who will also be recognized tonight in Denver.
She has remained centerstage for 16 years now in spite of very few tangible accomplishments achieved solely by her efforts. As First Lady
she could not get health care legislation off the ground. Why didn't her husband risk some of his political capital to help her? I don't know and I doubt whether you women do.
She travelled internationally as an ambassador for her husband and I suppose did some good for the country and the world but she was representing his interests and not yours.
She was no doubt a great First Lady but not for the same reasons as Eleanor Roosevelt.
Here is what Ester R. Fuchs wrote in Political Science Quarterly in 1992, the year the women's movement began investing in Hillary Clinton:
In 1992, women's time may have come. Deemed the Year of the Woman by some, a number of factors combined to open the door wider for women seeking higher office.The end of nearly half a century of cold war and an almost reflexive reaction in the aftermath ofthe Persian Gulf conflict turned the nation's attention inward to domestic problems.
Why would increased attention to domestic politics be of special advantage to women candidates? In part, because women have been especially hard hit by these problems. Supreme Court decisions in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989) and Rust v. Sui/ivan (1991) chipped away at the right to an abortion, reenergizing what had become an admittedly complacent pro-choice movement. Women, who earn on average 60 percent of what men do, suffer disproportionately in a failing economy. As the primary care givers in most families, they most directly feel the pinch of tighter budgets and the pain of inadequate health care. And women are most likely to be victimized by violent crime, a seemingly unavoidable outgrowth of hard economic times and deteriorating inner cities.
It seems clear that 1992 has been a watershed of sorts and that the 1990s may well be the Decade of the Woman.
Flash forward 16 years after this optimistic projection. Hillary spends 8 years at the side of the most powerful man in the country. Then four years testing her own strength by being elected New York's Senator. And now the past 4 years running for the highest office in the land.
What is clear is that Senator Clinton threw every cent of her potential to forward your cause into being elected president. There was no way she could get near that attainment without the help of a powerful man.
This is not the way true progress in your movement was acheived by Bella,Gloria or Betty. They vented their anger towards the men who hold women down, face to face, not by using them. Their accomplishments will live in American history for centuries.
This is not to say that Hillary's election as President would not have advanced your causes ten times as much as the efforts of the 3 founders combined.I am not even criticizing the methods she used to leapfrog over the slow seemingly never ending actions your previous leaders used.
But when you live by the sword you sometimes die by the sword.
Now let me give you my opinion why she fell short and why tonight she leaves you Puma women so angry; angry enough to hurt your own efforts for decades to come.
Hillary Clinton was the wrong person at the wrong time. I interact with white males daily and for the past 4 years, or right after her Senate victory, I have never heard such unbridled hate expressed towards any person, no less a woman. Ask any white male and they will tell you basically what I am telling you. I should be more explicit;the demographic I am referring to,is white males 50 to 70 years of age. the demo which runs this country.
It was a post-rational hate ( the great word coined by the great Rachel Maddow last night.) It was so vitriolic in nature that it completely confounded me. I made a conscious effor to get to the origin of this hatred. I asked these men, some friends of mine and some just acquaintences, why they used such horrendous words to describe their feelings. Almost universally, they disliked her because she used her husband to get ahead, as if thier wives weren't doing the same.
But there's the rub. These men want there wives to advance through their husband's accomplishments but in their thinking, these women would know how they got where they were.More importantly for these egotistical bastards their wives would know they could stay at that level only if they remained kow-towed to thier "breadwinner."
The fear ,leading to hate, was that Hillary was taking this one step to far. She was,so to speak, "forgetting her place."
Of course these type men hated Gloria,Betty and Bella also, but not with the same vehemence. They would not be Presidents.
So to sum up my long dissertation. I liked Hillary Clinton and would have worked for her and voted for her until Barack came along. But I knew she could never be elected President because of the white male 50 to 70 demo.
So you women of Puma must really feel rotten today and probably will feel worse tonight. You rode the wrong horse right up to the pinnacle or ceiling and the gate closed.
That gate did not close because of Obama. No candidate in my long lifetime has been more respectful of an opponent than Barack was in the primaries. I feel your pain but the gate you sought so desperately to enter was not open to you with this person as your candidate.
Its is definitely, however ready to open, not because of Hillary but in spite of her. Please ,do not,in your anger compare the sting of sexism with the sting of racism which the victim of your wrath feels every day.
Here is what one of your greatest sisters said recently in regard to this election:
Still, the larger question is: Why compare allies and ignore the opposition? Both Senators Clinton and Obama are civil rights advocates, feminists, environmentalists and critics of the war in Iraq, though she voted early and wrong, and he spoke out early and right. Both have resisted pandering to the right, something that sets them apart from any Republican candidate, including John McCain. Both have Washington and foreign policy experience; George W. Bush did not when he first ran for president.
But the greatest reason for progressives to refuse to be drawn into an irrelevant debate about Senators Clinton and Obama is that it is destructive. We can accomplish much more if we act as a coalition. Think, for instance, of the powerful 19th-century coalition for universal adult suffrage. The parallels between being a chattel slave by race and chattel as a wife, daughter or indentured worker turned abolitionists into suffragists, and vice versa. This coalition against a caste system based on race and sex turned the country on its head — until it was divided by giving the vote to its smallest part, Negro men.
Sojourner Truth famously warned that this division would cripple the movement for decades to come — and it did. Only a half-century later did white and black women get the vote, by then tarnished by the racist rhetoric of some white women and diminished by racist restrictions and violence at polls. And only decades after that, in the 1960s, did the civil rights movement start a new wave of equality that spread into feminism, the Native American movement, the gay and lesbian movement, and much more.
But those activists were reinventing the wheel. They were rediscovering Gunnar Myrdal’s verdict of the 1940s that "the parallel between women and Negroes is the deepest truth of American life, for together they form the unpaid or underpaid labor on which America runs."
This time, we could learn from history. We could double our chances by working for one of these candidates, not against the other. For now, I’ve figured out how to answer reporters when they ask if I’m supporting Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.
I just say yes.
Gloria Stienem
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
other links for this diary:
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