Open Writing

I suppose it speaks to the true mystery of woman that so much has been written about her over the millennia, oddly enough, mostly by men. I say “oddly,” because over much of history, women have been regarded by men as mere chattels, useful only for bearing children and keeping house. In some cultures, women have also been the farmers, and in several cases the hunters and warriors, but seemingly it didn’t raise their status in society.

Though men have admitted to valuing women as child bearers and rearers, they have, at the same time, always been impatient to resume their highest priority - sexual gratification; that is if they are honest with themselves. In the animal world, males have been known to kill their offspring so that the female would be available for mating. That doesn’t make a lot of sense in the cold light of day, but then Mother Nature never intended us to make good sense out of sex.

Given the low esteem in which women have been held throughout history, I find it fascinating to contemplate what men have been prepared to risk and to sacrifice for women. The incidences are legion, but some high profile examples include Admiral Lord Nelson, who came close to ruining a shining career for Lady Hamilton; The Duke of Windsor, who gave up the throne of Great Britain for Mrs. Wallace, and most recently, President Bill Clinton, who tarnished a brilliant presidency for his tawdry dalliance with Monica Lewinski.

In America, women started to rebel against their low position on the totem pole in the early 1900’s, a few years ahead of their British sisters. At the time, the Women’s Suffrage Movement had only the narrowly defined objective of the right of women to vote, though succeeding in that endeavor would open up an array of other opportunities. Once the right to vote was attained in 1920, the Suffrage Movement morphed into the Feminist Movement, which had the much broader and less sharply defined objective of equal rights.

From that point on, there has been a divergence between feminism in the USA and feminism in the UK, largely in the methods used to further the cause. In America the movement has had more strident and therefore more visible protagonists. The literature is replete with writers and activists who have become household names: Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Virginia Wolf, Germaine Greer, etc. Women in the UK are much less vociferously represented, yet have achieved as much, or more in the case of abortion rights.

There are several possible explanations for this dichotomy. The UK is more compact politically, and has experienced significant periods of socialism, which created a receptive environment for sociological change. America too has had its left-leaning administrations since emancipation, but the Democratic Party has never been left-wing enough to have the will and the votes to deal with the entire slate of social inequities with which they were presented.

Often, Democratic administrations also had to contend with the political make-up of a Supreme Court bench, the majority of whose members may have been appointed by the Democrats’ right wing opponents in prior administrations. Laws that Congress passed that could have advanced women’s rights therefore stood the chance of later being struck down or modified by the Court.

The political landscape in America also is a stumbling block to radical social change. Not only do the Feminists have to contend with Congress and the Supreme Court, but they also are required to sway the State Assemblies. In fact it’s a ploy of the Supreme Court to pass off to the state legislators appeals with which they don’t want to deal.

An example is the so called “Reproductive Rights Law” governing birth control and abortion, which was passed by Congress in 1972 as part of the Equal Right Amendment. In the 1980’s and 90’s, the Law was reverted to state control by the Supreme Court, thus forcing abortion rights proponents to deal separately with every state that voted not uphold the law as passed by Congress.

In 1966, the first major organization devoted to American women's rights to be established since the 1920s, the National Organization for Women (NOW), was formed. The organization currently has 500,000 contributing members and 550 chapters in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It has been successful in achieving a number of important gains for women, and brought about the enforcement of Title VII of the 1964, Civil Rights Act, which prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sex.

But withal, women’s battle for equality in America now is being fought on many different fronts, and is a much more fragmented and less strident endeavor than in the past. In part, this can be attributed to the degree to which women have become emancipated. Changes in the laws, and the resulting empowerment, mean that women are much better equipped, more willing and more able to fight their own, individual battles.

In her book “The Feminine Mystique,” published in 1963, the NOW founder member, Betty Friedan, began by describing what she called "the problem that has no name." In words that touched a sensitive nerve in thousands of middle-class American women, she wrote, "the problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States.”

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