Also today...

...is the 40th anniversary of the signing into law of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which states that:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

 Despite the long list of exceptions that qualified this mandate, the passage of Title 9 was an important milestone of the second wave of the US feminist movement. While it is best known for equalizing opportunities for girls and women in school and college athletics, it has also been an influential piece of legislation in other ways.

The Title IX Blog  has a list of links to resources about Title IX and its effects on society, and posts about today's anniversary that you can find here and here. The Web site TitleIX.info has additional resources.

You might also want to read this thoughtful essay by Catherine R. Stimpson on women and sports. Among Stimpson's points is this:

On balance, the Utopian feminist fan thrills to the radical vision and uses it as the horizon of possibility. I hope that the presence of women in sports will be a rebuke to corruption and a murderous desire to win; that it will provide a moral and psychological leavening; and that it will weaken gender as one of life's organizing principles. Interestingly, the currently major study of collegiate athletics found the women athletes less materialistic than the men.[25] At the same time, the liberal feminist fan believes in that old shibboleth of "being effective." I seek gender equity in sports. Women should have as many athletic opportunities as men, be able to play as hard and well as possible, be recognized and rewarded with an income and the currency of hard-earned celebrity for it.

Given the political culture of the United States, with its oscillations between gender conservatism and belief in equality of opportunity, the liberal vision of sports is implemented more often than the radical. The push and pull towards equity is notoriously incomplete, jagged, and uneven. As the century turned, women were 56% of United States undergraduates, but in the major schools, they had only 36% of the athletic operating budgets and 32% of the recruiting dollars.[26] Even the liberal vision wrenches the guts of the diehard sports traditionalist.

Death of a pioneer

Nah. I'm not talking about Steve Jobs. I think that the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth probably did more to make the world a better place. Shuttlesworth was a leader of the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, and personally faced many dangerous situations in furtherance of the cause. According to a report on NPR's All Things Considered last night, Georgia Rep. John Lewis, himself a civil rights veteran, credits Shuttlesworth's work with making possible the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

"Fred Shuttlesworth had the vision, the determination never to give up, never to give in," Lewis said. "He led an unbelievable children's crusade. It was the children who faced dogs, fire hoses, police billy clubs that moved and shook the nation."

Reporter Allison Keyes had a fascinating retrospective on Morning Edition today.

Obama as the New Nixon?

Paul Krugman has a link to a fascinating and thoughtful post by Bruce Bartlett, a former economic adviser to Ronald Reagan and Treasury Secretary under George H.W. Bush. Bush argues that Barack Obama has been a moderate conservative president who continues the policies of his Republican predecessors--just as Richard Nixon was a moderate liberal who continued and expanded the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson.

In the process, Barlett gives a concise and cogent analysis of much of the political and economic history of the United States since the Second World War. For instance:

Liberals initially viewed Bill Clinton the same way conservatives viewed Eisenhower – as a liberator who would reverse the awful policies of his two predecessors. But almost immediately, Clinton decided that deficit reduction would be the first order of business in his administration. His promised middle class tax cut and economic stimulus were abandoned.

By 1995, Clinton was working with Republicans to dismantle welfare. In 1997, he supported a cut in the capital gains tax. As the benefits of his 1993 deficit reduction package took effect, budget deficits disappeared and we had the first significant surpluses in memory. Yet Clinton steadfastly refused to spend any of the flood of revenues coming into the Treasury, hording them like a latter day Midas. In the end, his administration was even more conservative than Eisenhower’s on fiscal policy.

And just as pent-up liberal aspirations exploded in the 1960s with spending for every pet project green lighted, so too the fiscal conservatism of the Clinton years led to an explosion of tax cuts under George W. Bush, who supported every one that came down the pike. The result was the same as it was with Johnson: massive federal deficits and a tanking economy.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

High technology reconsidered in a leisurely way

A while back--on April 1, to be exact--National Public Radio inspired much interest and controversy with a story about the Slow Internet Movement. The idea was presented as being similar to the Slow Food Movement. Going back to dial-up Internet access could have as many positive effects as going back to preparing and eating food in a leisurely fashion.

Yes, of course it was an April Fool's joke. But at least one blogger confessed to wishing that the movement was real. In a way, the proprietor of Joy and Wonder might have her wish. Blogging pioneer Rebecca Blood discussed the concept in a post in June 2010. The idea is not to use slower technology (like dial-up modems) to access the Web. The idea is for bloggers to create posts in a slower and more thoughtful fashion:

The Slow Web would be more like a book, retaining many of the elements of the Popular Web, but unhurried, re-considered, additive. Research would no longer be restricted to rapid responders. Conclusions would be intentionally postponed until sufficiently noodled-with. Writers could budget sufficient dream-time before setting pixel to page. Fresh thinking would no longer have to happen in real time.

I love the Fast Web, and I value the work that is done there. But no matter how informed, intelligent, and talented a writer may be, an idea that has been returned to and then turned away from, repeatedly, is simply different from one that is formed in a few hours, based on that afternoon's best available facts. (via @ebertchigago)

Of course, anyone who has broadband Internet access knows that it isn't always fast. And dial-up Internet access was not always slow. The trick to making it work at an acceptable speed was to use text-based tools such as the Lynx web browser. Ten years ago, a very large part of the Web was still mostly text. Using the Internet has indeed become a richer experience because of the widespread sharing of audio and video files. But for someone who is in love with the written word, the text-based Internet had its virtues.

The newest and fastest technology isn't necessarily the best. Which reminds me of the original reason for this post, which was a story from April 7 that I found on Foreign Policy in Focus. Mark Engler contemplates the history of the Luddites. Engler notes that those who demonstrate in favor of global economic justice are often accused of being "Luddites," of wishing to destroy beneficial new technology in order to bring back a bygone day. But that's not what the global justice movement is trying to do, and it's not what the Luddites were trying to do, either:

This argument was ridiculous from the start. Global justice protesters never opposed modernity; they merely had the gall to ask whether a global society should be managed by and for multinational corporations. As part of a fundamentally transnational movement—linking environmentalists, unionists, indigenous rights, and other activists across borders—they proposed a very different type of internationalism than the one favored by the U.S. Treasury Department and the International Monetary Fund.

As the historians among us will already know, the Luddites have been similarly slandered. They did not oppose technology per se, but rather asked some important questions about the ends to which new technological discoveries were being used and who in society would benefit from them.

Engler's entire post is well worth reading. And it's worth remembering that while the conventional wisdom is indeed conventional, it isn't always wise.

Time to stop History from repeating himself

Nearly 100 years ago, 146 garment workers, mostly women, burned to death at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. Workers could not escape because the fire escape doors to this sweatshop were locked. This catastrophe inspired a memorable speech by labor activist Rose Schneiderman.and served as a symbol of the dangers and indignities suffered by workers. According to Wikipedia, the fire also galvanized the International Ladies Garment Workers Union which,

(w)orking with local Tammany Hall officials such as Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner, and progressive reformers such as Frances Perkins, the future Secretary of Labor in the Roosevelt administration, who had witnessed the fire from the street below, pushed for comprehensive safety and workers’ compensation laws. The ILGWU leadership formed bonds with those reformers and politicians that would continue for another forty years, through the New Deal and beyond. As a result of the fire, the American Society of Safety Engineers was founded soon after in New York City, October 14, 1911.

Although unions have been under attack and workers' rights and protections have eroded during the right-wing backlash of the last 30 years, I'd like to think that a catastrophe such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire would not occur again. I'd like to think that this fire would be replayed only as a historical exhibit, as part of a work of literature such as Beyond the Pale, by Elana Dykewomon or as the occasion for a commemorative event.

But no. Events like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire are still taking place today. We know that US manufacturing jobs have been moved to places where workers have even fewer protections than we do in the United States. The results are predictable. According to this post on change.org, those of us who are busily purchasing fashionable clothing as holiday gifts do not know that

the young, destitute women in Bangladesh who produce those clothes in almost slave-like conditions aren’t feeling the holiday spirit after more than two dozen of them were burned to death last week.

28 workers were killed when a massive blaze broke out in an unsafe, multi-story sweatshop known as the "That's It Sportswear" factory in the Ashulia industrial park just north the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka. With a number of the exits blocked, most of the victims were burned to death, some trampled to death, some killed by suffocation and others jumped from the flames to their death. Several dozen more suffered severe burns.

According to post author Benjamin Joffe-Walt, the factory, owned by the Ha-Meem group, supplies clothing to more than a dozen US clothing companies and retail stores. The December 14 fire was the latest in "a series of deadly incidents in clothing factories in Bangladesh." For instance, a similar incident in February took the lives of 21 workers. Joffee-Walt also reports that:

Last week's fire also came just days after deadly protests over clothing manufacturers' failure to implement a required 80 percent increase in the minimum wage to 3,000 taka a month (about $42). That's right folks, the workers who were burned alive while making $25 T-Shirts were likely being paid some $24 a month, less than $1 a day.

To sign an online petition calling on US clothing companies and retailers to demand better conditions for the workers, follow this link. More suggestions for activism can be found here. One Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was too many. We don't need any more.

Human rights are indivisible

My life has become very busy and full. One of the things that has kept me from making regular posts on this blog has been a women's studies class I've been taking at the University of Oklahoma, WS 3220, US Women's Movements. We've just finished our study of the first wave of the US women's movement, up to the time that women won the vote in 1920.

One of the saddest features of this history--and one of the elements that has much applicability to social struggles today--is the way that the rich white men with the most power are able to set everyone else at each other's throats, women, people of color, workers, and so forth.

In an effort to protect the safety of freed slaves after the Civil War, was it justifiable for human rights advocates to push for African American men to get the vote, while leaving out all women? In the early 20th century, was it okay for white woman suffragists to tolerate discrimination against African American voters to win the support of the racist South?

Martha Gruening said no.

A Google search doesn't reveal much information about who she was. There doesn't seem to be a Wikipedia profile. There is a link to a New York Times article about her arrest in 1910 for inciting women workers to strike in Philadelphia. There is a brief biographical essay here. She was a lawyer and human rights activist who seems to have been a written brief articles for The Nation.

In September 1912, she also published this eloquent essay in The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP. If I'd been alive in 1912, I hope I would have had the sense to write something like this. Here is an excerpt:

If such incidents have been less frequent in recent years it is not because the profound and close connection between the Negro and women movements no longer exists. The parallel between their respective situations is as clear to-day as it was in 1848, but it is too frequently ignored by the reformers on both sides. Both have made some progress toward complete emancipation, the gains of women in the direction of enfranchisement being seemingly the more lasting. Both, however, are still very largely disfranchised, and subject to those peculiar educational, legal and economic discriminations that are the natural results of disfranchisement. And finally, both are being brought with every onward step nearer to the identical temptation -- to sacrifice the principle of true democracy to the winning of a single skirmish. So when one sees a national body of suffragists refusing to pass a universal suffrage resolution, one is compelled to wonder at the logic of those who, knowing so well what disfranchisement means, would allow it to be inflicted on others. "Let us not confuse the issue," these suffragists plead, some in good faith. Yet the confusion, if any, exists only in their minds. Here are not two distinct issues at stake, but merely the vital principle of democracy. Others insist that the granting of the ballot to women must precede all other reforms because "women have waited long enough" and recall the fact that women were forced to stand aside and see Negro men enfranchised at the close of the Civil War. This is undoubtedly true and was quite justly a source of bitter disappointment to the suffrage leaders of that day -a disappointment we should not underestimate -- but merely to reverse the principles in an unjust occurrence is not to work justice. It is strange to see so many suffragists who point with pride to the action of Garrison in withdrawing from the anti-slavery convention, blind to the larger significance of that action. Stranger still to see them following, not Garrison's lead, but that of the convention in their attitude toward colored people, and forgetting that no cause is great to the exclusion of every other. This Robert Purvis, a noted colored leader, understood, as is shown by his noble reply to the suffragists' appeal: "I cannot agree that this or any hour is specially the Negro's. I am an anti-slavery man. With what grace could I ask the women of this country to labor for my enfranchisement and at the same time be unwilling to put forth a hand to remove the tyranny in some respects greater to which they are exposed?" This is what all suffragists must understand, whatever their sex or color -- that all the disfranchised of the earth have a common cause.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

Feminist abortion activist Jody Howard dies

Our Bodies Ourselves on Facebook has posted a link to the obituary for Jody Howard at chicagotribune.com. Howard was a co-founder of "Jane," the abortion service provided by the Chicago Women's Liberation Union before Roe v. Wade legalized the procedure.

According to the obituary, Howard became a feminist at Michigan State University,.After graduation, she moved with her husband to the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. She became involved in a variety of progressive causes, including the Chicago Women's Liberation Union and the American Civil Liberties Union. She was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease while pregnant with her daughter. She needed an abortion for health reasons as the result of a later, unexpected pregnancy. In order to get a legal abortion, she was required to go through two psychiatric evaluations. This experience helped to inspire Howard to co-found Jane.

A forceful advocate for causes she backed, Ms. Howard "had a great deal of personal charisma and (at the same time) could offer a very nice analysis of the issue," [former Jane member Martha] Scott said.

With her daughters, Ms. Howard participated in a blockade of the Rock Island Arsenal to protest war. At an ACLU fundraiser at Hugh Hefner's Gold Coast mansion, she showed up with small pictures of naked men that she posted here and there.

"She was escorted out," her ex-husband said.

A commenter on Our Bodies Ourselves Facebook post pointed out that more information about Jane can be found at this page on the Chicago Women's Liberation Union herstory site.

Historian Howard Zinn is dead

Howard Zinn, radical activist, historian, and author of the People's History of the United States, died yesterday at the age of 87.

Amy Goodman has a tribute with Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein, and Anthony Arnove at Democracy Now. Daniel Ellsberg has a remembrance at CommonDreams.org.

Common Dreams has also republished this commentary that Zinn wrote in December 2001 for The Progressive, right at the beginning of the "War on Terror." This, of course, was the period of time shortly after the terrorist bombings in New York and Washington in September of that year. Many commentators, at that time, were referring to the US invasion of Afghanistan as a "just war." Zinn wrote:

I have puzzled over this. How can a war be truly just when it involves the daily killing of civilians, when it causes hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children to leave their homes to escape the bombs, when it may not find those who planned the September 11 attacks, and when it will multiply the ranks of people who are angry enough at this country to become terrorists themselves?

This war amounts to a gross violation of human rights, and it will produce the exact opposite of what is wanted: It will not end terrorism; it will proliferate terrorism.

I believe that the progressive supporters of the war have confused a "just cause" with a "just war." There are unjust causes, such as the attempt of the United States to establish its power in Vietnam, or to dominate Panama or Grenada, or to subvert the government of Nicaragua. And a cause may be just--getting North Korea to withdraw from South Korea, getting Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait, or ending terrorism--but it does not follow that going to war on behalf of that cause, with the inevitable mayhem that follows, is just.

Nixon's resignation 35 years ago today

I was not yet 18 years old, finishing up my first summer as a Girl Scout camp counselor in Red Lodge, Montana, when Richard Nixon left the presidency. Someone found a television, and we gathered in the dining hall and turned it on to watch the occasion. I was reminded of this anniversary Saturday morning on National Public Radio. Here is the text of today's NPR commentary on the occasion by Daniel Schorr, who watched Nixon resign and who was once on that president's enemies list.

Schorr observes:

In his first speech as president, Ford said that the national nightmare had ended. A resilient nation had survived, but the episode had left its scars on the body politic. Since Nixon, no president has been fully trusted.

Because I was around during the Nixon era, I am constantly asked how his abuse of power compares to the misdeeds of the recent Bush administration. Both employed illegal wiretaps. Bush compiled no list of enemies meriting special persecution — at least, as far as is known.

Jimmy Carter leaves Southern Baptists to protest women's subordination

Oklahoma Voice of Reason reports that former president Jimmy Carter has left the Southern Baptist Church, because of that church's support for the subordination of women. I found Carter's explanation of this decision, published in The Age, to be quite moving. Not that I necessarily agree with all of it. Carter writes:

The truth is that male religious leaders have had - and still have - an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world. This is in clear violation not just of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but also the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul, Moses and the prophets, Muhammad, and founders of other great religions - all of whom have called for proper and equitable treatment of all the children of God. It is time we had the courage to challenge these views.

I not convinced by the argument that a "true" interpretation of the world's major religions would show that they support dignity and equality for women. See, for instance, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's The Woman's Bible.

I'm trying to find words to express all my mixed feelings about Jimmy Carter and his record on women's rights. I cast my first presidential vote in the 1976 election, in which Carter defeated Gerald Ford. I voted for Ford, largely because I was uncomfortable with Carter's Southern Baptist religious background. I feared he would undermine women's rights.

I think that voting for Ford was a mistake, but I think my uneasiness with Carter was justified. Doing online research just now, I'm not finding much to document what I remember. Carter's Wikipedia entry has limited information on his record on women's issues.

Carter (like Presidents Nixon and Ford before him) did give at least lip service to the Equal Rights Amendment. But The Socialist Webzine documents Carter's support for the Hyde Amendment, which cut off Medicaid funding for abortions for poor women. And about.com notes that

In 1977-1978 Bella Abzug served as co-chair of the National Advisory Committee on Women. She was fired by President Jimmy Carter, who had originally appointed her, when the committee openly criticized Carter's budget for cutting women's programs.

Of course, that was then, this is now. Maybe Carter has grown over the years. Feminist Philosophers points out that Carter is now part of a group called The Elders, which has recently taken a stand saying that the use of religion to subordinate women is unacceptable. As Carter himself says:

(M)any political leaders can be reluctant about stepping into this minefield. Religion, and tradition, are powerful and sensitive areas to challenge. But my fellow Elders and I, who come from many faiths and backgrounds, no longer need to worry about winning votes or avoiding controversy - and we are deeply committed to challenging injustice wherever we see it.

The Elders are an independent group of eminent global leaders, brought together by former South African president Nelson Mandela, who offer their influence and experience to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity. We have decided to draw particular attention to the responsibility of religious and traditional leaders in ensuring equality and human rights and have recently published a statement that declares: "The justification of discrimination against women and girls on grounds of religion or tradition, as if it were prescribed by a Higher Authority, is unacceptable."

I don't share Carter's optimism about the role that religious leaders might play in ensuring women's rights. I think I do respect him for making this statement.

One thing leads to another...

Speaking of Elizabeth Cady Stantonand the 100th anniversary of the start of suffragette hunger strikes in Britain, I think I've finally found a reliable link to all six volumes of the old History of Woman Suffrage,  which Stanton co-authored. If you follow the link, you will find a Wikipedia article about this history, and at the end of the article are separate links to all six volumes on Google Books. This is a massive work--I downloaded one volume yesterday afternoon, and that one volume took up 35 megabytes of disk space, but well worth looking at.

British suffragette hunger strikes began 100 years ago

I found this fascinating and inspiring story by June Purvis at CommonDreams.org. It originated on www.guardian.co.uk.

One hundred years ago, on 5 July 1909, the imprisoned suffragette Marion Wallace Dunlop, a sculptor and illustrator, went on hunger strike. A member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded by Emmeline Pankhurst in 1903 to campaign for the parliamentary vote for women, she had been sent to Holloway prison for printing an extract from the bill of rights on the wall of St Stephen's Hall in the House of Commons. In her second division cell, Wallace Dunlop refused all food as a protest against the unwillingness of the authorities to recognise her as a political prisoner, and thus entitled to be placed in the first division where inmates enjoyed certain privileges. Her hunger strike, she claimed, was "a matter of principle, not only for my own sake but for the sake of others who may come after me … refusing all food until this matter is settled to my satisfaction". After three and a half days of fasting, she was released.
Other suffragettes that summer of 1909, believing they had found a powerful weapon with which to fight a stubborn Liberal government, also went on hunger strike. However, the government feared that the early release of such rebellious prisoners would make a mockery of the justice system and by the end of September forcible feeding was introduced, an operation justified as "ordinary hospital treatment" to save the women's lives. Over the next five years, this vicious circle of events was to shape the representation of the suffragette movement for years to come.

Purvis implies that British suffragettes invented the hunger strike, and says that their use of this tactic influenced such activists as Mahatma Gandhi and the Irish nationalist James Connolly. Wikipedia, however, implies that the tactic dates back thousands of years.

Although Purvis doesn't mention this, one political activist much influenced by the tactics of the British suffragettes was the US suffragist Alice Paul. According to Wikipedia, Paul studied in Britain between 1907 and 1910. After hearing suffragette leader Christabel Pankhurst speak in 1908, Paul joined the Women's Social and Political Union, and she was arrested and imprisoned three times as a result of her suffrage activism in Britain. Upon her return to the US, Paul became active in the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Dissatisfied with the conservatism of NAWSA, Paul and her colleague Lucy Burns founded the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage.

When their lobbying efforts proved fruitless, Paul and her colleagues formed the National Woman's Party (NWP) in 1916 and began introducing some of the methods used by the suffrage movement in Britain. Tactics included demonstrations, parades, mass meetings, picketing, suffrage watch, fires, and hunger strikes. These actions were accompanied by press coverage and the publication of the weekly Suffragist.^[3]

Alice Paul is widely credited with helping to revive a near-dead US suffrage movement and playing a critical role in winning the vote for US women in 1920. And she used the tactics that she'd learned from her British sisters.

Happy belated 250th birthday to Mary Wollstonecraft

Thanks to Feminist Law Professors for pointing out the birthday of this fabulous fore-sister, which took place on April 27.

Remembering Patsy Mink

Women's Media Center has an interesting post by Emily Wilson on Kimberlee Bassford's new documentary film on Patsy Mink, scheduled to air on PBS in May.

No joke.

So I was hanging out in a local coffee shop the other night when I overheard some young folks telling Helen Keller jokes. You know me. I felt impelled to deliver a political lecture. But before I delivered the lecture, I needed to check my facts. So I looked up Helen Keller on Wikipedia.

It didn't surprise me to learn that Keller was the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor's degree. And I thought I already knew that "Keller was well traveled and was outspoken in her opposition to war. She campaigned for women's suffrage, workers' rights, and socialism, as well as many other progressive causes." That was exactly the piece of information that I was looking for.

But then I read further. We've all heard the story about how Anne Sullivan taught Keller to understand the concept of language. But before there was Anne Sullivan, there was Martha Washington (and we're not talking about the first First Lady) :

Helen Keller was not born blind and deaf; it was not until she was nineteen months old that she contracted an illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain," which could possibly have been scarlet fever or meningitis. The illness did not last for a particularly long time, but it left her deaf and blind. At that time, her only communication partner was Martha Washington, the six-year-old daughter of the family cook, who was able to create a sign language with her; by the age of seven, she had over sixty home signs to communicate with her family. According to Soviet blind-deaf psychologist A. Meshcheryakov, Martha's friendship and teaching was crucial for Helen's later developments.

By Keller's own account, she was downright mean to the companion to whom she owed so much:

In those days a little coloured girl, Martha Washington, the child of our cook, and Belle, an old setter, and a great hunter in her day, were my constant companions. Martha Washington understood my signs, and I seldom had any difficulty in makingher do just as I wished. It pleased me to domineer over her, and she generally submitted to my tyranny rather than risk a hand-to-hand encounter. I was strong, active, indifferent to consequences. I knew my own mind well enough and always had my own way, even if I had to fight tooth and nail for it.

I did some web searching to find out more about little Martha Washington, and didn't find much beyond Keller's description and the mention in Wikipedia. I did, however, find a long essay about Keller in the Journal of Southern History. In this essay, Kim E. Neilson explores "The Southern Ties of Helen Keller." What emerges is a complicated and interesting portrait of a Keller's position as a disabled southern white woman from a powerful Confederate family who often challenged "southern gender and racial traditions."

Neilson notes that as a child, "Keller maintained her tyranny (over Martha Washington) with the threat of personal violence, but that aggression was simply a part of and enabled by the much larger racial realities of post-Redemption Alabama." Her northern tutor Anne Sullivan exposed Helen Keller to ideals of racial equality. Keller's education at Radcliffe College further radicalized her. Sometimes she took bold stands against racism. Sometimes, giving way to family pressure, she backed away from those bold stands.

In her brilliance, in her struggle to live as a whole person in a world that wanted to patronize and control her as a disabled person and a woman, in her bravery as a human rights activist, and yes, in her failures to live up to her own ideals, I find the real complicated Helen Keller more inspired than the cardboard heroine and butt of stupid jokes that is sometimes presented to us. Helen Keller gives me hope that I myself, sometimes brave, sometimes brilliant, sometimes failing to live up to my own ideals, can also contribute to creating a free and equal world

The mother of us all?

I was just looking at Susan B. Anthony's Wikipedia biography, because it is Anthony's 189th birthday today.

As long as I'm talking about birthdays so much recently, I don't want to omit The Mother of Us All. That is the title of a fanciful opera about Anthony's life that was written by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson in 1947.

If I were to write an opera about Susan B. Anthony, I think I would call it something else. If anything, Anthony was a sort of un-mother, though she did help to raise the children of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Anthony refused the roles of wife and mother in order to remain an effective campaigner for women's rights. In this refusal, she was motivated at least in part by the fact that women who married in her day gave up many of the rights they had, such as the right to sign a contract.

Anthony is at least as complicated as anyone else I've discussed this week. She can be viewed as an activist of limited vision who subordinated all other interests to gaining the vote for women, in contrast with Stanton. Stanton was the revolutionary who challenged women's place in such institutions as religion and marriage. Then again, Stanton was mostly a theorist who, after her children were grown, supported herself on the lecture circuit. She could well afford to make thought-provoking radical statements--this may even have helped to increase the size of her audiences. And for all her radicalism, Stanton had a pronounced strain of elitism in her world view.

Anthony was the practical political organizer who built the political machinery that eventually gained women the right to vote. Anthony, in my estimation, was a true egalitarian, and probably as much a committed anti-racist as any white person in America in her day. Nevertheless, she was willing to accomodate to racists in her goal of winning the vote for women. She seemed to believe that until she herself was fully empowered as a citizen, she had to give other issues and causes less priority. Nevertheless, she viewed the vote as a means to an end, as a tool for political power. She said something like "Men will sell their vote, but not their right to vote."

I also think she seemed more radical when she was young and more conservative as she grew older. This is because she was young in times when radical political movements were gaining in strength, and later lived during the collapse of Reconstruction, when US politics veered sharply to the right. We are all so affected by the times we live in and the people who surround us, and that simply seems to be part of being human.

My favorite book on Anthony is Kathleen Barry's Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist. It's rather difficult to find, which is why I included the online link to a site that sells used books. I was able to special order it locally at Full Circle Bookstore a year or two ago.

Online, you can find Ida Husted Harper's Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, and also Alma Lutz's biography of Anthony. You might also want to check out the History of Woman Suffrage which Anthony co-authored.

Happy birthday, Susan B. Now I've got to go and get that voter registration form in the mail...

A journey toward Truth

I started writing this post because, on second thought, I regretted not having any kind words about Abraham Lincoln in my recent post remarking on the shared 200th birthday of Mr. Lincoln and Charles Darwin.

Lincoln is not a particular hero of mine. This has been true at least since I took Mrs. Gentile's history class back at Northeast High School in Philadelphia. She had us read Richard Hofstadter's American Political Tradition, which, among other things, demonstrated that Lincoln shared many of the racist views of his time. Later reading told me that many abolitionists and woman's rights advocates were deeply suspicious of him. Furthermore, I don't like the "great man" theory of history that always finds some dead white man to credit for important events and social changes.

Despite all that, Lincoln was a complicated and interesting person who did play a central role in ending slavery in the United States, and who paid with his life for this. A public radio program last Sunday noted that Frederick Douglass said that Lincoln was one of the few white men who treated him as a man, rather than a black man--even though Frederick Douglass knew many abolitionists. I had also read that Sojourner Truth thought highly of him.

So I started poking around for something else to say about Mr. Lincoln. One thing I found was a fascinating speech given by Douglass in 1876:

I have said that President Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race. Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation actual speechof his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.

Another thing I found was this collection of speeches and commentaries by Sojourner Truth at the Sojourner Truth.org home page. It does indeed carry an account of a meeting she had with Lincoln in October 1864.

But it also includes an account of the actual speech Truth gave to a women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851.This account, by abolition journalist Marcus Robinson, is quite brief, and I'll include most of it below:

I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a woman's rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal. I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now. As for intellect, all I can say is, if a woman have a pint, and a man a quart -- why can't she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much, -- for we can't take more than our pint'll hold. The poor men seems to be all in confusion, and don't know what to do. Why children, if you have woman's rights, give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they won't be so much trouble. I can't read, but I can hear. I have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well, if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again. The Lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right. When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept and Lazarus came forth. And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and the woman who bore him. Man, where was your part? But the women are coming up blessed be God and a few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.

If this sounds familiar, it should. A much more colorful version of this oration was published by white feminist and abolitionist Frances Dana Gage in 1863, 12 years after it happened. This famous Ain't I A Woman? speech was probably heavily fictionalized by Gage, according to historian Nell Irvin Painter. If nothing else, Painter points out, Truth--who was born and enslaved in New York State before that state abolished slavery--would not have spoken in the southern dialect that Gage put into her mouth.

Painter's Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol is available through the Oklahoma County Metropolitan Library System, or you can see a Google Books preview. It's not an easy book to read. Truth's early life was extremely difficult, and included sexual abuse by both white men and white women. From this difficult background, the slave Isabella reinvented herself as Sojourner Truth, a powerful public speaker and activist, although unable to read or write. Painter analyzes the difficulty of truly knowing anything about a woman who never was able to write her own story, but who was portrayed only by others, mostly white women activists.

I think that Painter says that ultimately, we can't know the truth about Truth, but it seems to me that it is more interesting and ultimately more inspiring to explore the nooks and crannies of complicated reality than to rely on the oversimplified myths that have been handed down to us about historical figures.