[Only a handful of countries are nearing full equality for women;
and ours is not even close. Indeed, US women’s progress in gaining
equality has both stagnated and lost ground. ]
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SETTING OUR SIGHTS ON THE EQUALITY OF WOMEN  
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H Patricia Hynes
March 3, 2023
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_ Only a handful of countries are nearing full equality for women;
and ours is not even close. Indeed, US women’s progress in gaining
equality has both stagnated and lost ground. _

, Keisha Leon of Leon Design.

 

A month ago, I heard on the news that Boston public schools would be
closed on February 3 because of the severe Arctic cold and wind chill
forecast for that day and the next.  My first thought was: what if
the students’ mothers are working single mothers, what if they
cannot take off or cannot afford to lose the pay – given inflation
of food, energy and rents and the impoverishing impact of Covid? 

Boston is a severely unequal city with an extremely segregated public
school
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system: 80 percent of children in public school are low income; 90
percent are students of color, mainly Latino and Black; higher income
families with children leave for suburbs when their children become of
school age, according to the Dorchester Reporter.  All new
residential building is high income; and the city is referred to as
“two Bostons.”

In one of these “two Bostons” live low wage women workers, a wage
that consigns them to poverty compounded throughout their lives and in
old age.  “Nearly two-thirds
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of all low-wage workers in the United States are women,” an
inequality worsened by racial inequality.  Consider, too, the
persistent “motherhood penalty”—whereby mothers are further set
back financially by lack of paid parental leave and government-funded
child care.

But, my worry for these working mothers and their children that day
concerned only one dimension of the arduous reality facing many women
– most egregiously women of color – as we approach International
Women’s Day, March 8, a day founded on the fact of women’s
inequality.  Female textile workers launched the first march on March
8, 1857 in protest of unfair working conditions and unequal rights for
women – one of the first organized strikes by working women, during
which they called for a shorter work day and decent wages. 

Women have gained considerable rights since that and subsequent
marches, through our own organizing, protests, and arrests: the right
to vote, to own property, to inherit, to education, to have once-legal
rape in marriage criminalized.  _A revolution for human rights
without weapons, fists or a drop of blood spilled_.  Yet, only a
handful of countries are nearing full equality for women; and ours is
not even close.  Indeed, US women’s progress in gaining equality
has both stagnated and lost ground. 

Worst of all, violence against women by men in all its forms:
pornography, rape, prostitution, physical beating, murder increased
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Women’s reproductive rights have been trampled by the 2022 Supreme
Court decision to void the right to abortion; and many states are
sponsoring a plethora of regulations to deny women access to abortion
and birth control.  The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently
ruled
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that domestic abusers can own guns – a “death sentence for women
and their families,” given “abusers are five times more likely to
kill their victims if they have access to firearms.” 

From 2001 to 2019, approximately 7,000
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soldiers died in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, a period of time in
which more than 18,000 US women were killed
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– nearly 3 per day – by current or former intimate partners. 
(For those who assume male violence and war are inevitable, don’t
waste your time on a doomed view.  Consider this: during thousands of
years in Neolithic Europe women and men lived in egalitarian, peaceful
societies, according to respected archeologist Dr. Marija Gimbutas
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In that same period of US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, an estimated
14,400
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US women died before, during and just after childbirth –  more than
twice the number of US soldiers killed in these wars.  Thousands of
memorials commemorate those who gave their lives for their country in
war; name one for women killed by men or who lost their life in giving
birth to the next generation. 

The injustice of women’s inequality ripples out to national
governments.  Peace and the security of nations are powerfully linked
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the security and level of conflict within 175 countries to the overall
security of women in those countries, researchers have found that the
degree of equality of women within countries predicts best how
peaceful or conflict-ridden their countries are.  Further,
democracies with higher levels of violence against women are less
stable and more likely to choose force rather than diplomacy to
resolve conflict. 

So, if you care about turning back from the war path the US is on and
eliminating nuclear weapons, consider the words of the revered Ghanian
statesman and former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi
Annan:

“There is no policy more effective in promoting development, health
and education than the empowerment of women and girls … and no
policy is more important in preventing conflict or in achieving
reconciliation after a conflict has ended.” 

_[Pat Hynes, a member of the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice
Board in Western Massachusetts and Women’s International League for
Peace and Justice, is author of the recently published book, Hope, But
Demand Justice.]_

 

* International Women's Day
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* womens rights
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