Right after the Civil War ended in 1865, enslaved Africans were granted, not just their freedom, but their full rights as America citizens. For a brief, all too brief, period, they made immense progress as they were finally allowed to vote, to run for, and be elected into, public office. And they did. Until Samuel Tilden was elected and Rutherford Hayes was inaugurated in 1877. The Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction and withdrew the federal troops from the South, and with them went the full freedom and the civil rights of African Americans.
Women in America, although they were granted the vote by men in 1920, did not achieve full equality for another fifty years, until 1973, when the Supreme Court recognized their right to control their own bodies in Roe v. Wade. For without bodily autonomy, there is no true freedom. Sadly, that freedom lasted only until the Hyde Amendment passed in 1977 and restricted the right to bodily autonomy to those who could afford it.
Since then, in state by state, we have seen our rights restricted as one after another barrier has been placed between women and a legal medical procedure that is safer than childbirth. Every attempt has been made to not only deprive us of easy access to medical procedures, but to even deny us access to professional reproductive health care.
When those who felt that electing a reality star to the most demanding job in the world was a good thing, it was women who were out on the streets of DC the day after his inauguration in much larger numbers than those who attended the day before. In what was the largest single day demonstration that the nation had ever seen, women took their anger to the streets in cities and towns across the country.
I have said it before, beware the anger of women, they can change the world.
Our anger has been written about by a member of the Georgetown Prep School, class of 1983, Mark Judge, in his negative review of The Book of Jezebel, published by the Daily Caller in 2013 and quoted by MediaMatters on September 17, 2018:
When you say feminists are angry, they respond that you are a “Frat Bro” or a right-winger, and the conversation stops. And a deeper analysis of feminist apoplexy is important because the rage of the Jezebels is indicative of a serious cultural problem that is potentially fatal for the United States, which has become a very, very angry country. [...]
More than thirty years later, and judging by The Book of Jezebel, feminists are so angry that debate with them is no longer possible. To them the only solution to their rage is through politics. There is a steady undercurrent of animus towards conservatives and Republicans in The Book of Jezebel, which is to be expected. But what is revealing is the intensity of the antipathy and its obsessive-compulsive quality (there’s also the heavy juvenile snark which is Jezebel’s calling card). [...]
The writers at Jezebel are angry women. Their pain is beyond the reach of politics to solve. To be fair, there are many funny entries in The Book of Jezebel, like the one for Hipster: “Identifier claimed by no one but freely subjected on any person more Navajo-printed, leather-jacketed, asymmetrically-hairstyled, unshowered, ironically racist, Pitchfork-reading, warehouse-dwelling, amateur-mandolin-playing, or neon than you.” But the jokes can’t mask the rage. This is why that even as America has progressed and the treatment of women has vastly improved, the anger of the feminists has grown more acute. Nothing short of a matriarchal utopia will suffice. It’s easier than admitting what really ails you. [The Daily Caller, 10/21/13]
And you know, Mark Judge was right.
We are angry.
And he was wrong, for although the America of straight white men raised in wealthy suburbs and taught at expensive private prep schools may have progressed, the treatment of women and people other than those who look like him and were from families like his, has not improved. If anything, it has gotten worse.
Mothers, whose skin has been deemed not white enough, have had their babies torn from their arms at the border and then lost in the burgeoning private concentration camp industry. That doesn’t even sound like the American I knew. That made us angry.
Our young black men are shot in the streets, and in their homes, by police who appear to be utterly terrified by the color of their skin and who are then granted paid leave until they are either not charged, or not convicted of the murders they have committed. That made us angry.
Our children learn where to hide in their classrooms from an active shooter in regularly scheduled drills. We learn to live with fear every day that we see them off to school, hoping they will return safely. That made us angry.
You know what else made us angry? The way Professor Anita Hill was treated by the Senate Judiciary Committee who tormented her for coming forward with valid information about the man they were considering for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court in 1991. I watched her testimony during the re-opened Clarence Thomas nomination hearing. Her dignity and poise put those men to shame. Try as hard as they could to smear or belittle her, she remained professional and polite, and clearly tried to be as accurate as possible.
Appended to the congressional record of the questioning are an assortment of newspaper clippings from the era, one of which, from the Charlotte Observer, outlines the experiences of Angela Wright, a one time employee of Thomas. Although she never filed a claim, the actions and words she describes being used by Clarence Thomas were clearly sexual harassment. Because she was unbothered by them, finding them not a threat, but an “annoyance,” multiple senators claimed that there was no evidence to back up Professor Hill’s claims and that in all of the years since the harassment of Hill, no one had raised a complaint similar to hers. Even though the report by Angela Wright included the exact same harassment.
In a New York Times article published on October 10, 1991, and appended to the congressional testimony includes this little gem about the need for the committee to seek an FBI investigation:
The White House issued a statement tonight critical of the committee's action, saying it had neglected the "normal practice" of first seeking an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In reading the testimony, I was struck by a comment made by Senator Grassley about how the committee should handle cases like hers in the future:
On another point there has been much said—and, of course, each of us on this committee have had to deal with this, as the press has asked us how come we did not consider all of these things prior to voting this out of committee. This concerns the process of the Judiciary Committee. People are asking how we could have let your statement slip past us? How could we have had the committee vote without airing this matter? Those are valid questions.
And let me say that I am going to work towards assuring that this never happens again. I realize, of course, that our committee gets hundreds, maybe even thousands of allegations in a nomination like this one. And we rely upon our chairman and ranking member to determine which ones need investigation and which ones might be coming from cranks and crackpots. They determined this one needed investigation and they called in the FBI. But somewhere along the process something broke down.
So I would like to work with the chairman and ranking member and other colleagues to establish a new ground rule. Whenever the FBI is dispatched, every committee member should be notified about the nature of the allegation. And when the FBI has completed its work, every committee member should be notified and have access to that report. And a determination by the committee should be made as to how we need to proceed with any allegations.
A rule like this should ensure, once and for all, that even an 11th hour charge, like yours, has been fully considered.
I have added the emphasis on Grassley’s indication that the committee chairman and ranking member have the right to call for and receive an FBI investigation into claims like Professor Hill’s. Apparently, now that he is the chair of that committee he is incapable of ordering an FBI investigation, and we all know that the only ranking member entitled to call for, and get an FBI investigation is one who is a Republican. When the GOP is in charge the rules change so that when a Democratic ranking member sends the letter to the FBI, an investigation is not started, the letter is instead just appended to the background report that the FBI had written earlier.
Grassley wrote a letter to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s attorneys last week, which completely contradicts the comments he made at the time of the Thomas hearing.
The FBI does not make a credibility assessment of any information it receives with respect to a nominee. Nor is it tasked with investigating a matter simply because the Committee deems it important. The Constitution assigns the Senate, and only the Senate, with the task of advising the President on his nominee and consenting to the nomination if the circumstances merit. We have no power to commandeer an Executive Branch agency into conducting our due diligence.
What happened to your concern for process, Sen. Grassley? Apparently it has fallen into the same black hole that required you to hold no hearing for Merrick Garland because he was nominated eleven months before a new president would be inaugurated. The fact that he is starting out this way does not bode well for the hearing on Monday. If one actually occurs.
From a 2016 Vanity Fair article about the HBO film, Confirmation (which, if you haven’t watched, you should) concerning the Thomas hearings and the sexism that Hill faced for her testimony:
In a book trashing Hill’s reputation, the conservative operative famously called her “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty,” a phrase that speaks for itself. Nearly a decade later, Brock, who went on to found the left-wing watchdog group Media Matters, apologized for the statement in his book, Blinded by the Right, admitting that he published “virtually every derogatory and often contradictory allegation” he could find in order to discredit her, and even coordinated with the Thomas camp in that effort.
What the brief Vanity Fair article doesn’t cover is just how angry the treatment of Anita Hill made American women. We had long faced sexual harassment on the job. Most of us dealt with it as best we could, valuing our future careers and fearing the harm that reporting would cause to them. Just like Anita Hill. But it did include a fact that showed how her testimony broke open the damn, freeing women to say “Enough!”
According to the Equal Employment Opportunities Commision—ironically, the very commission that Thomas headed when he and Hill worked together—the number of sexual-harassment cases doubled in the five years following the event, a legacy Hill’s proud to claim. “A conversation which had been private can become public,” she recently told Time magazine, “and you see the legacy of that now with college women protesting sexual harassment and assault.”
Not only did the number of reported cases of sexual harassment double, the anger carried over into the political realm. Anita Hill was smeared by a bunch of old white men in October 1991. A year later in what became known as The Year of the Women,
In 1992 women went to the polls energized by a record-breaking number of women on the federal ticket. Nationally, 11 women won major party nominations for Senate races while 106 women contended for House seats in the general election.46 The results were unprecedented. The 24 women who won election to the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time that November comprised the largest number elected to the House in any single election, and the women elected to the Senate tripled the number of women in that chamber by the start of the 103rd Congress.47 Dubbed the “Year of the Woman,” 1992 also marked the beginning of more than 20 years of remarkable achievements for minority women. Forty-seven of the 58 African-American, Hispanic-American, and Asian-Pacific-American women who have served in Congress were elected between 1992 and 2016.
No longer content to sit at home and watch men demean women, we became angry and demanded a seat at the table. Barbara Mikulski made it clear that we were there to stay:
Headline-writers hailed “The Year of the Woman.” To this, Senator Mikulski responded, “Calling 1992 the Year of the Woman makes it sound like the Year of the Caribou or the Year of the Asparagus. We’re not a fad, a fancy, or a year.”
I plan on watching Monday’s hearing in the matter of Brett Kavanaugh’s rushed nomination to the Supreme Court. I will be very interested in hearing the testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. What she experienced as a 15-year-old girl at the hands of two 17-year-old boys has damaged her life, a fact which is overlooked by her critics that suggest a childhood escapade should not be allowed to damage Kavanaugh’s life. MediaMatters has collected a few of the nuggets from the right wing:
- Fox Business host Bob Massi: “The thing that’s remarkable to me” is that someone “with amazing credentials, amazing resumes, and an allegation like this comes out … and their entire career credibility is gone. … That’s the trouble with this.”
Not content to vilify her, the right lies about her. See Laura Clawson’s piece: Lie, smear, repeat: Right wing spreads vicious, false rumors about Kavanaugh’s accuser.
Should this attitude continue and should it be reflected in the actions of the Senate committee, it will make women angry. Or rather, angrier than they are already.
As Mark Judge wrote:
To them the only solution to their rage is through politics.
Although he writes this like it was a bad thing, since clearly he would never resort to politics to solve the rage of the under-represented, it is true. We do continue, for some strange reason, to believe that the solution to our rage can be found through politics, which is simply the way in which civil societies resolve disputes.
Judge also wrote:
… the anger of the feminists has grown more acute. Nothing short of a matriarchal utopia will suffice.
I don’t know if a matriarchal utopia is even possible, but with a record number of women running for local, state, and federal offices in November, we could get a start on such a utopia. It certainly sounds like a goal worth setting.
I, for one, am quite tired of the patriarchal utopia that has ruled my entire life.