According to one book, both a lot and very little has changed in the last 100 years.
From the moment I saw The Woman’s Book sitting on a dusty shelf in a secondhand shop, I knew I had to rescue it. I was fascinated: At 719 pages, the hefty tome—browned around the edges and threatening to fall apart—promised to teach well-off British women of 1911 everything they ought to know about womanhood, from poultry-keeping to child-rearing to overseeing the servants.
According to the hand-inked inscription, one lucky Miss Wilson received the manual as a Christmas gift in 1911, with “best wishes” from what looks to be a “Mr. Brooke.” Color me intrigued as to that relationship—but flipping through it, I could only assume that this Mr. Brooke had hoped to begin training his intended future wife, by sending her a literal manual on womanhood. While laying out various tasks, the book gives hints at what a woman’s purpose was in the early 20th century. The gentlewoman’s aim is to avoid attracting the eye of the crowd. To contain boisterous laughter. To please.
So much has changed! I thought. But so little had, too.
There’s plenty in The Woman’s Book that feels like it’s from another world — the etiquette of visiting cards, how to make a fur muff. Yet a lot also feels familiar: the domestic and family labor that too naturally falls to women, the fact that if we want to embark on certain careers, we better expect a fight to get there. While some of the details might differ, it’s clear that the ultimate purpose of this prescriptive book was to tell women how to exist—and in that regard, we have work to do.
Courtesy of the author.
On Pregnancy
When I picked up The Woman’s Book, I was heavily pregnant, and reading every feminist birthing book I could get my hands on (a sure fire way to terrify yourself about childbirth). I immediately skipped to the baby section to find out what the women of the early 20th century were being told, only to discover that the section titled “Baby’s Arrival” was merely two paragraphs long, with nothing whatsoever about the act of giving birth itself.
On the general topic of dressing during pregnancy, however, there was a full page: three times the space given to pushing the thing out. One important part of pregnancy that is very well covered is whether or not one should wear a corset when with child—not for the safety of the fetus, of course, but because “an effort must be made to avoid appearing conspicuous.” (The author’s advice is to keep the corset, but to wear ones that aren’t quite so tight, giving an inch of priority to health over some idea of vanity.)
And ladies, no snacks during this special time (or, actually, ever), no trips to the theatre, and for god’s sake, please do avoid traveling by bus, train, or tram towards the end of the final trimester. Most importantly, “All morbid and sensational literature should be avoided.”
Over a century later, people who are not medical professionals still tell pregnant women what to do and when. We’re told to take all the drugs, do it without drugs, have a birth plan, don’t have a birth plan— meanwhile, some pregnant women aren’t told an awful lot at all. But never is unwanted advice more abundant than during this magical time. When a yoga teacher told me I had complications in birth because I “didn’t try hard enough” to do it naturally, it took every ounce of peace I had left not to finish her off with a flying warrior pose. I imagine I’d have felt the same if someone chided me for not wearing the proper pregnancy corset.
On Beauty
Unsurprisingly for a book with such strong opinions on pregnancy fashion, The Woman’s Book also has a fair amount of beauty advice. The book is packed with gold like: “Try and cultivate a more cheerful outlook upon life if you would permanently rid yourself of these vexing little lines between brows” and “Overwork and worry are powerful deterrents to all culture of beauty.” Because we women really should prioritize the absence of wrinkles over thinking too hard, of course. (For the record, mischievous grey hairs are usually also caused by worry—so we should all really just STOP WORRYING if we want to remain youthful.)
It’s also in this chapter that it becomes clear who, exactly, the book is targeting. One tip in particular that speaks pretty strongly to the diversity of the UK’s upper-class in 1911 is a set of instructions on how to whiten your neck and arms. For real. It involves bathing in milk (the service of dairy cows is never ending) and dusting on plenty of powder, effectively telling wealthy white women to transform themselves into donuts in order to be beautiful.
But don’t fret gentlewomen, because by 2024, we’ve been freed from this obsession with how contorting our faces makes us hideous, how our bodies must be a certain way, and why any of that matters. Unless of course you count the endless “new beauty obsessions” we’re encouraged to spend our hard-earned money on (which we still make less of than men, of course), the smoothing Instagram filters that it’s now normal to view the world through, and the constant need to define a bikini body as anything other than a body that happens to have a bikini on it.
On Work
After I got the book home safely, I decided to take a closer look at the contents page. Did I spy “careers for women” and “women in politics”? Had I been too quick to judge?
What’s incredible is that Florence B. Jack, the editor of The Woman’s Book, suggests the 1911 woman has it pretty good in the world of work. There are many vocations for a young lady, unlike in those pesky olden times. A woman can be a teacher, a private secretary, a florist, a beekeeper, even a lady clerk, for heaven’s sake! (Not to be confused with a regular clerk, of course.) She can also be the most “womanly profession” of them all: a nurse. But no matter your choice, Jack cautions, there is a catch—you have to be really good. There’s no room for mediocrity when you’re a woman. (Arguably, still true today.)
When it comes to my own profession of journalism, I might have found breaking through a bit trickier in 1911, as Jack warns this is a job “not so easily accessible as other callings.” It’s possible, but the budding female journalist has to be “really clever.” When it comes to training, a girl should get a position as a typist or secretary in a newspaper office. Leave journalism school to the chaps, eh? But if a woman is able to make a success of being a reporter, “her powers of intuition and her tact are so much greater than that found in the average man reporter that she is at times entrusted with very special duties.” Imagine that. An exceptional employee being given more responsibility than an average one. Do we even need feminism anymore?
Shockingly, the book also gives women of 1911 permission to be a doctor. It only asks that there be no female medical students at Oxford and Cambridge, thank you very much. Apparently there’s little “old-fashioned prejudice against the ‘woman doctor’” anymore, either, and even more encouragingly, “there is none of that ‘under-cutting of fees’ which has to be adopted by women in most other professions.” So if you want to earn the same as a man for the same job (will we women ever be satisfied?), start getting to grips with human biology. (Perhaps just don’t consult The Woman’s Book for anatomy lessons.) Oh, and if being a woman surgeon (prefix compulsory, of course) is your raison d'etre, best to get a new raison, because in this profession above all others, “prejudice will prove one of the most formidable opponents.” That old chestnut.
Comparatively, you would hope advice on “careers for women” in 2024 would encourage you to do any job you damn well please. But of course, that doesn’t mean that women and nonbinary people are treated the same as their male coworkers. Call me when female pilots aren’t getting mistaken for air stewards and the gender pay gap has been eradicated. And that’s before we intersect gender with class, race, geography, sexuality, and everything else that has an impact on salary and treatment in the workplace.
On Politics
At last, we get to “women in politics.” In 1911, British women could be canvassers, speakers, and campaign organizers. But let’s not get carried away—they couldn’t be trusted to actually vote, let alone stand as political candidates themselves. Still, after all the advice on household management, what to wear, and how to correctly visit your neighbors, I was surprised that the final section of The Woman’s Book turned to the women’s suffrage movement. Now the men have lost interest, it seems to suggest, here’s what we really think.
There’s plenty of talk of servants and country houses throughout The Woman’s Book, so it’s no surprise that it wasn’t a book for all women: It was a book for privileged women. But I found it somewhat encouraging that one of its final comments is devoted to how the suffragist movement brought together women of all classes and politics, “the peeress and the laundry girl,” walking together in processions and fighting for what’s right. In particular, Jack talks about women’s desires to improve work and wages, so that work could be judged by its “true market value and not by the sex of the worker.” It’s a passionate take on why women want freer lives, and how their involvement in politics can create better circumstances for all of humanity.
In many ways, the same holds true today—and frustratingly, it feels like we’re still fighting for the same things. It also feels like we’re still fighting against the same things, too. I don’t know that a Woman’s Book of 2024 would pay quite so much attention to how to iron frills. But look at the pages of mainstream publications targeted at women and there’s an abundance of pieces on how to outfit prep, how to make a charcuterie board bigger than your actual house, and how to get a smoky lip. Aren’t we still being told how to exist? Isn’t this more of the same?
If instead of treating it as an endnote, there was a central focus on how to collectively push for progress for all of us, we might just be able to surpass all these objective measurements of how a woman should “be,” and instead tick the box of what we actually ought to know.
Courtesy of the author.
[post_title] => "Everything a Woman Ought to Know"
[post_excerpt] => According to one book, both a lot and very little has changed in the last 100 years.
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I worried that coming out would further ostracize me from other feminists. Instead, it reinforced why I became one in the first place.
The reason why I waited so long to come out as nonbinary was because I thought it would ostracize me even further from other feminists. As a person disabled by chronic pain and fatigue from fibromyalgia, I’d already been made to feel out of place within feminism for the entirety of both my professional and academic careers. I'd also developed my writing voice during the so-called heyday of feminist blogging—a heyday that unfortunately wasn’t as utopian as people might suspect—and had experienced firsthand the complicated dynamics that arise when one’s platform makes them a target. Not wanting to separate myself further from other feminists, I chose to keep my complex feelings about my gender identity to myself. Until eventually, of course, I couldn’t.
It’s a bit of a cliché for people in the LGBTQIA community to say that they always knew they weren’t straight, or that they weren’t cis. But a part of me always knew I was nonbinary, even before I’d fully admitted it to myself. One of the defining features of my childhood and adolescence was my inner “eh…no” when people—mostly adults, but often my peers, as well—would try to label me as a “girl” or “young woman.” It would happen at school, and at home: As a child, I was prone to slouching, and my mom would encourage me to improve my posture by insisting, “Stand up straight! Like my dad used to say, ‘Be PROUD you’re a woman!’” Each time, a tiny voice inside my brain would whisper but I’m not a woman in response.
As my adolescence chugged on, I began receiving even more unwanted attention and scrutiny from peers regarding my “manly” voice—a direct quote from one of my bullies—as well as my rapidly changing body. I was not a fan of this attention, nor of the insistence that I was a girl, its implication that I should adapt myself to better seem like it. What was so great about being a girl, anyway? Or for that matter, being a boy? I just wanted to be myself.
It was around this time that I first discovered feminism. As a seventh grader, I read Dr. Mary Pipher’s book Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls and started quietly identifying as a feminist. Despite the difficulties I still faced from being bullied, Pipher’s book, and the idea of feminism, made me feel less alone. I daydreamed about finding a feminist community that I could contribute to and feel valued by in return—one that included a wide variety of perspectives from people with different life experiences, all working together to make a world where oppressions like sexism, ableism, racism, classism, and anti-fat bias were no longer the norm. In high school, I began openly identifying as a feminist, and eventually, got better at ignoring my peers’ asinine comments. But I still yearned for something more—something I couldn’t yet put my finger on.
I eventually found a community of feminist friends when I started college and chose to pursue a major in Women’s and Gender Studies. Needing a break from academic writing, I also started my own blog in 2005. I quickly noticed that most of the feminist blogs with the largest audiences tended to cover issues that catered to young, educated, white, middle/upper class, cis women. Sexism, body image, popular culture, media representation, sexuality, and reproductive rights are, of course, all subjects that deserve coverage, but the ways in which they intersected with disability never seemed to be covered in any depth. Despite the use of the word “intersectionality” from some of the more popular feminist bloggers, it seemed to me that few actually practiced it.
As it happened, I was not the only one to notice the absence of disability from the feminist blogosphere. In 2009, I collaborated with a group of disability bloggers to form a site called FWD/Feminists With Disabilities as a response. The tipping point had come when several of us noticed that one of the most popular feminist blogs had never published a post specifically about disability and feminism; and when disabled readers had raised their concerns in the comments, other commenters had piled on, insisting disability and feminism were two separate things, and that the disabled commenters were being “bullies.” FWD ultimately only lasted for two years; the amount of threats, derailing, and angry e-stomping we received—in our comments, inboxes, and elsewhere—mostly from other feminists, all ostensibly on our side, proved to be enough to burn us out.
Having to repeatedly explain what feminism and disability had to do with each other—and that disability and chronic illness are feminist issues—was grating. It was isolating. This isolation got worse when I entered a Master’s program for Women’s and Gender Studies, where I was the only physically disabled person in my grad cohort. I faced pushback from multiple professors in the department for supposedly not being energetic enough. Another professor, the department head at the time, threatened to fail me when I missed more than the allotted two classes due to pain and fatigue from my fibromyalgia, on the grounds that it “wouldn’t be fair to the other students.” I later found out that I was not the only disabled person whom she had treated this way.
Throughout this period, I kept wondering if I was a failure as a feminist because I was not performing youthful, sisterhood-uplifting feminism the right way. I was repeatedly made to feel “difficult,” just for pointing out how feminism was leaving disabled people behind. Yet resolutely declaring I am a disabled woman, and I belong here didn’t feel right, either. I had this slippery, niggling feeling in the back of my brain that the reason this was the case was that I was not a woman at all. But at the time, I was in close contact with enough feminists eager to tell me how I was doing both feminism and academic work wrong, that keeping quiet about my weird gender stuff was easier than further othering myself.
Eventually, in my mid-30s, the discomfort of performing as someone I was not outweighed the comfort of avoiding negative attention or questioning from people skeptical as to whether the nonbinary identity is real. Surprisingly, on the other side, I became even more of a feminist than ever before, not because my core beliefs had changed, but because coming out had allowed me to be my authentic self. I no longer felt like I needed to identify as a woman to be a good feminist, because, of course, I didn't.
Since coming out, I’ve realized that I have better ways to spend my time and energy than trying to make nondisabled feminists care about disability issues. In fact, I likely would have come out sooner if I hadn’t wasted so much time trying to get (mostly white and nondisabled) women in the feminist movement to acknowledge that disabled women exist, and that many disabled people of all genders are feminists. While it’s irritating that I still get misgendered by TERFs on social media sometimes, the block button is there for a reason: I can’t be anyone other than myself, and if “feminism is for everybody,” as bell hooks once wrote, then it’s for nonbinary people, too. In a time where nonbinary and trans people of all ages are being smeared as predators, simply for being who they are—and, in the sad recent case of high school student Nex Benedict, being threatened or killed due to the moral panic surrounding trans existence, fueled by the specter of “safety” for cisgender kids—it is crucial that feminists welcome people of all gender identities in the ongoing fight for gender equality. It only benefits all of us when we do.
[post_title] => Feminism is for Nonbinary People, Too
[post_excerpt] => I worried that coming out would further ostracize me from other feminists. Instead, it reinforced why I became one in the first place.
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One hundred years after the ERA was first introduced, we've never needed it more. So what's the holdup?
Most Americans believe that the United States Constitution guarantees equal rights to women under the law. It’s only natural. Women in the U.S. can vote, own property, drive cars, fly planes, serve in the military, get divorced, and establish credit in our own names. We make up around 47 percent of the workforce and have held senior positions in business, law, and government for decades. From 1973 to 2022, we even had federally protected abortion rights. We continue to be underpaid, mistreated in low-wage jobs, and underrepresented in the highest-paying professions, but most Americans believe that women are—and should be—equal citizens.
Under current law, however, we are not: For women to attain the legal status most assume we already have, the U.S. would need to adopt the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), first introduced in Congress 100 years ago this year, and introduced in every session of Congress since.
Depending on who you ask, American women do have some constitutional protection already. Some legal scholars and Supreme Court justices have asserted that women are “persons” and thus covered by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which reads, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” But others disagree, and figures as diverse as the late archconservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg believed that the Constitution does not explicitly guarantee sex equality—something Ginsburg saw as an obstacle to full and lasting equality for women and Scalia saw as a fact not necessarily in need of a remedy.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, the stakes are higher than they have been in 50 years. The ERA would make gender equality explicit—which has been its purpose since it was first introduced. In 1923, women’s rights crusader Alice Paul authored what was originally known as the Lucretia Mott Amendment, in honor of the Quaker abolitionist and women’s rights activist. The text declared that, “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.” Over the years, this text has evolved, and today, the amendment reads, “Section 1: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Section 2: The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. Section 3: This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.” But the spirit and purpose remain the same. (Supporters say that “sex” is synonymous with “gender” for the purposes of the amendment, which would apply to women of all gender identities and sexual orientations.)
It very nearly came to pass in the 1970s. Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-NY), then the powerful long-time chair of the House Judiciary Committee, had refused to hold a hearing on the ERA for over 30 years, when he finally succumbed to pressure from a new group of younger female legislators. The ERA passed both houses of Congress in 1972 and was sent to the states for ratification, at which point 22 states voted to ratify it. By 1977, that number had increased to 35 of the 38 states required for it to become part of the Constitution. After around 100,000 supporters—described at the time by right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly, the ERA’s bitterest foe, as “a combination of Federal employees and radicals and lesbians”—marched in Washington in 1978, Congress voted to extend the original ratification deadline by three years. As supporters scrambled to reach the required threshold, lawmakers in five states—Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Tennessee—voted to rescind their states’ initial ratification. The extended deadline expired in 1982.
A major cause of this disrupted momentum was Schlafly herself. Books and television series have told the story of Schlafly, a vicious bigot who led the well-orchestrated opposition campaign that defeated the ERA, at least temporarily, at the dawn of the Reagan era. Schlafly is widely credited with having halted the amendment at a time when it enjoyed broad bipartisan support, including from then President Richard Nixon, and was all but guaranteed to pass. But the ERA foundered in that era for other reasons, too. While supporters were going on weeks-long hunger strikes and selling their blood to raise money for the cause, opponents had personal wealth and possible assistance from shadowy corporate interests and far-right organizations like the John Birch Society on their side. Motivated by religious zeal, fear, and a feeling of being disrespected, opponents of the ERA caught supporters off-guard and, ultimately, out-organized them.
Why the ERA hasn’t become a recognized part of the Constitution in the last 30 years is less well-known, but not necessarily difficult to deduce. In recent years, it has often felt like society is moving backward and forward at the same time. The election of Donald Trump and elevation of alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the cratering of women’s workforce gains and deepening of the child care crisis that accompanied a global pandemic, and the overturning of Roe have made earlier eras look positively rosy in comparison. At the same time, social media has fueled and distorted a limited feminist resurgence. This new wave delivered the #MeToo movement, a renewal of feminist organizing around abortion rights and the ERA, and a predictable cycle of counterreaction, an earlier manifestation of which Susan Faludi memorably documented in her 1991 classic, Backlash. (American women might reasonably wonder if that backlash ever ended.)
Still, there has been progress. Fueled in part by anger at Trump’s election, organizers successfully pursued ratification of the ERA in Nevada in 2017, Illinois in 2018, and Virginia in 2020, bringing the total number of states that have ratified the amendment to the required 38. (Some argue that certain states’ decision to rescind ratification means the ERA has never achieved the required number; others say those rescissions are legally invalid and should be ignored.) President Biden affirmed his support for the ERA as recently as August. While running for president, Kamala Harris vowed to get it done in her first 100 days in office. With Trump out and Biden/Harris in, what’s holding it up?
Today’s advocates believe that the ERA deadline, which only appears in the preamble and not the text of the amendment itself, can be removed or extended by Congress, or even, if the threshold for ratification has been met, ignored altogether. Yet the Biden administration—which published a new memo in 2022 essentially punting the issue to Congress and the courts—has indirectly prevented this by failing to withdraw a 2020 Trump administration memo which stated, in part, “Congress has constitutional authority to impose a deadline for ratifying a proposed constitutional amendment…Congress may not revive a proposed amendment after a deadline for its ratification has expired.” Additionally, there is enduring opposition to the ERA from the reactionary right, which now includes nearly every senior GOP leader; behind-the-scenes opposition from the business interests that fund both major parties to varying degrees; and the reluctance of top Democratic officials to make it a priority.
The ERA has always had bipartisan support, but in the modern era, most of its advocates are Democrats. Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) are the only congressional Republicans who support it today. Yet a 2016 poll found that 90% of Republicans support the ERA, which suggests that the Republican Party is, on this issue, profoundly out of step with its base. Still, it shouldn’t matter: Even with the GOP’s lurch to the right and subsequent withdrawal of support, the Democratic Party—which controlled at least one branch of government from 1992 to 2001, 2006 to 2016, and 2020 to today—should theoretically have been able to deliver by now on an amendment that most Americans want.
One theory as to why they haven’t is that if the ERA is finally adopted, it could diminish Democrats’ ability to raise money and swing elections by emphasizing ever-present threats to abortion, LGBTQ, and women’s rights. Those rights are indeed under threat, but adopting the ERA would strengthen them considerably—which is why the modern GOP so strongly opposes it, and why Democrats should rally behind it. Enshrining gender equality in state constitutions has already helped protect abortion rights at the state level; New Mexico’s state supreme court recently struck down a state law banning the funding of abortion-related services, citing the state’s ERA, which guarantees “equality of rights for persons regardless of sex.” If finally adopted, it would do the same at the national level. But without the ERA, it will be difficult and potentially impossible to safeguard those rights for the long term.
While the GOP has been largely hostile to abortion rights since Roe v. Wade, the Democratic Party has not defended them nearly as forcefully or consistently. Although many activists urged top Democrats to pass a federal law protecting abortion rights before the Dobbs decision, they essentially said that their hands were tied: Although they could and did pass such legislation in the House, it would never survive in the Senate. Right-wingers are as or more committed to banning abortion today as they were 50 years ago, while pro-choice supporters haven’t been as consistent, motivated, or likely to base their vote on abortion—although that is beginning to shift in light of Dobbs. As recently as 2019, some advocates insisted that the ERA has nothing to do with abortion rights; today, one of its main selling points is that it will protect them.
Corporate opposition to the ERA has remained steady, if covert. The amendment would make it easier to sue companies that pay women unequally or otherwise discriminate against them, which is why the insurance industry has historically opposed it. As Eleanor Smeal, then the president of the National Organization for Women, explained in 1982, “The real opposition [to the ERA], behind the visible political opposition, has been the special corporate interests that profit from sex discrimination.” In 2010, a blogger for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce approvingly quoted a characterization of equal pay advocates as possessing a “Scrooge-like fetish for money.” And as late as 2019, a Chamber of Commerce spokesman declined to comment on the ERA’s prospects, citing instead the organization’s support for the Equality Act, which would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity but would not provide protection as durable as the ERA—and which continues to languish in Congress.
Other dynamics are evolving, slowly but surely. While the causes that motivate the religious right haven’t changed much in 50 years—aside from a shift from attacking gay marriage to attacking trans children—the ERA opponents of today have had to pivot from overt sexism to co-opting the language of equality. In 1970, you could say of ERA advocates, as then Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC) did, “Now, if you want to convince me that ladies desire to be drafted, you send me some sweet young things in here of draft age and let them tell me that.” Today, opponents are often reduced to arguing that the ERA is unnecessary because American women already have equality under the law, or, in some cases, mimicking the language of advocates in an effort to sound more mainstream and modern. (See anti-ERA Republican Sen. John Kennedy’s recent declaration that, “Radical lawmakers cannot erase women or their rights from our Constitution,” which is, not coincidentally, similar to what a supporter might say of him.)
How can we move forward today? Modern supporters argue that the ERA has already been ratified and U.S. archivist Colleen Shogan, the head and chief administrator of the National Archives and Records Administration, need only recognize and publish it. This year lawmakers have introduced two major resolutions which support that interpretation. In January, Sens. Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Lisa Murkowski and Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Cori Bush (D-MO), and others introduced a joint resolution to affirm the ratification of the ERA by removing what supporters see as an arbitrary and rescindable ratification deadline. In July, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) introduced a joint resolution stating that the ERA has already been ratified as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution and calling on Shogan to certify and publish it. “In terms of which strategy is better, in my view, it's 100% the publication strategy,” Nicole Vorrasi Bates, executive director of the pro-gender equality nonprofit Shattering Glass, Inc., told me.
In response to questions about the best strategy for getting the ERA into the Constitution, what she sees as the primary obstacles to doing so, and why the Biden administration has not prioritized it, Rep. Pressley’s office sent a written statement which read, in part, “[T]he only thing standing in the way of the ERA becoming the 28th Amendment is the arbitrary deadline imposed decades ago.” The statement also explained that she was both a co-lead on Rep. Bush’s July resolution and had introduced her own because, in her opinion, “We must use every tool available to get this over the finish line.”
Gillibrand has said that she also hopes to compel the Biden administration to call on Shogan to act or change the Senate’s filibuster rules so that measures like the ERA would need only a simple majority to move forward. Kate Kelly, author of Ordinary Equality: The Fearless Women and Queer People Who Shaped the U.S. Constitution and the Equal Rights Amendment, said the “most charitable interpretation” of the Biden administration’s foot-dragging is that the president is “waiting for the moment where enough people care, where enough of the next generation pick up the fight [and] turn it into an electoral issue, that its power and potential will be fully realized.” From the administration’s perspective, she explained, there may be some risk of creating a “constitutional crisis” if the president affirms that the ERA is part of the Constitution and the Supreme Court rejects that view. “Until the groundswell of support for the [ERA] in the modern day is equal to that potential risk, there is [from Biden’s point of view] no advantage to proceeding,” she said.
As it has in the past, a strong nationwide feminist movement with a coherent set of demands and demonstrated ability to disrupt business as usual and withhold or deliver votes could exert meaningful pressure on Congress and the White House. We don’t have that. Although support for abortion rights is strongerthan it has been in decades, the movement to defend abortion rights—a critical component of the U.S. feminist movement from the 1960s to today—remains divided on vision and strategy. The task of the coming years is to build a cohesive one. As we learned from the partially successful battle for abortion rights in the 1960s and the heartbreaking defeat of the ERA in the 70s, progress is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Even constitutional amendments can be undone. The ERA, like anything of value, is worth fighting for. And American women of all stripes can’t wait another century for the law to give us our due.
[post_title] => It's Time to Pass the Equal Rights Amendment
[post_excerpt] => One hundred years after the ERA was first introduced, we've never needed it more. So what's the holdup?
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Under international criminal law, apartheid only applies to discrimination based on race. A new open letter argues it should apply to gender discrimination, too.
In March of this year, a group of over 100 Iranian and Afghan women signatories published an open letter calling for the end of gender apartheid. The purpose of the letter was threefold: to raise awareness of what gender apartheid is, and how it's affecting women in Iran and Afghanistan; to encourage public statements and policy responses condemning these regimes; and to expand the definition of apartheid under international law. As the letter explains, currently, under international criminal law, use of the word apartheid is limited to race; but for years, activists around the world—and more specifically, in Iran and Afghanistan—have been using it to describe extreme, gender-based persecution, and the regimes that perpetrate it. The letter makes the case for why it's time we update the word's definition on the global stage.
Below, we spoke to one of the people behind the campaign, human rights lawyer Gissou Nia, on the letter's longterm goals, its challenges, and why language matters when it comes to gender persecution and apartheid.
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How did the open letter come to be? How did you get involved?
The open letter came about with a core group of Iranian and Afghan women signatories. The genesis of this is that women's rights activists in Afghanistan and Iran have been using the term "gender apartheid" for years to describe, essentially, a system of subjugation and oppression that they are being repressed by. [But] when I spoke to some of these activists, not all of them had actually been aware that gender apartheid is not currently a crime under international law. Gender was not a part of that definition.
Apartheid, as defined under international criminal law—whether it’s a part of crimes against humanity or not—only applies to racial apartheid. So, [we] thought, why don’t we just change the definition? There have been incredible legal academics and jurors who have [already] been working on this, like Karima Bennoune, and what we wanted to achieve with the campaign is to supercharge [their] efforts. It’s an unbranded campaign—so there’s no one organization attached to it.
I’m curious what differentiates an apartheid regime from other forms of gender discrimination.
It’s a great question. One of the main things that people have asked is how is this distinct from gender persecution, let’s say. With gender persecution, which is a crime against humanity as defined under the ICC Rome Statute, that’s a more broadly defined crime. There may be some instances of something that you could charge as gender persecution that would amount to gender apartheid, but gender apartheid describes a certain type of treatment. It really focuses on the structures. The word “apartheid” comes from the word “apart” in Afrikaans, born out of the historical experience of South Africa—but it’s really about keeping one group separate from another. Here, you could say that [it’s] men subjugating and dominating women for purposes of entrenching power. I think that’s the distinguishing factor. Certainly, that would amount to a case of gender persecution, as well, and we’re not saying that it’s either/or—we think these are all complementary. In the case of race, we have both racial apartheid and racial persecution; so there’s no reason that we can’t have gender apartheid, as well.
I’d also say that gender apartheid, as opposed to gender discrimination, is much more extreme. Certainly misogyny and patriarchy exist everywhere. There are gender discriminatory laws in many different countries, including in the US. But a gender apartheid regime is something that’s quite distinct and different. It basically is saying that women are not worth a man. In the case of Iran, a woman’s value is worth half that of a man, legally. So they’re removed from public spaces. That’s why in Afghanistan, women and girls are not allowed to be educated, [why] they’ve been taken out of employment. The Taliban recently said that Afghan women cannot work for the UN in Afghanistan. So it’s essentially the removal of women from public spaces and from public life. And that’s enshrined in the law: You are formally not worth a man, and we are going to repress you, because that’s how we’re going to keep this regime in power.
When you say their value is less, how is that defined?
So, for example—I’m a lawyer, so this one for me is especially grating—if I was to give testimony in a court in Iran, my testimony would be worth half that of a man. I also wouldn’t be able to travel outside of Iran without the permission of my husband or my male guardian. I couldn’t ride a bike, I couldn’t go to sporting stadiums. I would be barred from certain types of higher education. Women do not have equal capacity, inheritance, divorce, marriage rights—anything that relates to the family, they’re unequal. And, of course, there’s the mandatory hijab laws, which we know sparked the outrage over Mahsa Amini’s murder.
For this particular campaign, why did you choose Iran and Afghanistan specifically? There are other countries where, arguably, [gender apartheid] would apply.
Because we were campaigning [and] were successful in removing the Islamic Republic from the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Obviously all of that came about because of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran after Mahsa was killed at the hands of the Islamic Republic’s morality police. There were a lot of Afghan women activists that wrote me after that and were congratulating me. [But] Afghanistan was still on the UN Commission on the Status of Women. True, the Taliban is not formally recognized before the UN, so the representative is from the former government and basically doesn’t represent anybody. Nonetheless, they’re still there.
And it really struck me, that while we’re speaking about Woman, Life, Freedom in Iran, and while there’s been such a global outpouring of attention and action and policy engagement and energy, right across the border, our Afghan sisters are dealing with a horrendous situation, of which the globe is exhibiting some form of paralysis, and a lack of direction on how to improve their circumstances.
I think a lot of Iranian women who are championing women’s rights have been thinking about our Afghan sisters, who we’re tied to through shared borders, shared culture, and in some cases shared language. These issues are interlinked and they’re not separate, and so we’ve been keen to do some joint activism. It’s something a bit new in terms of campaigning, and certainly once the law is adopted or as discussions continue, there may be other women that choose to engage with it who feel that they’re living under gender apartheid regimes. This was a campaign that Iranian and Afghan women came together to launch, but it doesn’t preclude other groups of women wanting to [sign] or get involved with this advocacy or get behind this mission. Anybody can sign, and support. But the number of gender apartheid regimes in the world is actually pretty few.
How many people have signed it so far?
I haven’t checked lately to see what the tracker is, but it was something like 5000.
Can you talk me through the three chief demands the letter makes?
So basically, the [three demands] are the way that we envision [passing the law] would happen. I’ll just walk you through the timeline. In the immediate, first of all, there’s a lot of people who are not familiar with what the term apartheid is even, [especially] under the age of 35. However, most of the decision makers that we are seeking to engage with are above the age of 35, and they’re in government, and they have direct recollection of those events in the eighties [in South Africa] until the dismantling of the apartheid system in 1990. It has a real moral and resonant power for those decision makers, so part of this campaign is aimed around introducing the term gender apartheid, so people are familiar with what that actually means. What does apartheid refer to, what does it refer to in the context of Iran and Afghanistan, and why is this still going on.
The second thing is, we want parliaments around the world to issue resolutions condemning the apartheid in Afghanistan and Iran. That’s moving forward in Canada, in the UK, in New Zealand, and now we’re doing a lot of outreach to states in South America and Africa because we think that will be very important to have a global frame. This isn’t just a Western effort, and we want to make sure that is understood.
The ultimate goal is to have some of the legal frameworks that apply to apartheid amended or introduced to include gender apartheid. One of our main goals is to have gender apartheid included in the definition at the upcoming global convention on crimes against humanity. It should be adopted at the end of 2024, with any luck, and we want to be included.
Do you think the history of the term being so associated with race helps or hinders the movement?
Well, it’s not called racial apartheid. It’s just called apartheid. The reason that apartheid doesn’t include gender is because it was created in the 20th century out of the South Africa experience. I [also] think a lot of international criminal law [has been] created by men in small rooms, and not necessarily with women’s input and that’s changing. We see that there is an increased focus on gendered crimes. There’s even a reevaluation of the crime of genocide to focus more on the gendered aspects of it. Historically, people have assumed that genocide has to be mass killing, not realizing that actually, it could also just be sterilization, and those forms of genocide are much more focused around women.
The point is a lot of crimes that we grapple with are really viewed through more of a male lens, and there’s been a concrete effort to apply a gender lens to that. I think this ties into the reason why apartheid didn’t focus on gender. It wasn’t because there weren’t gender apartheid regimes. It was just because of the kind of dialogue that was happening in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s.
Longer term, what happens if you succeed in changing international law? What happens if [gender apartheid] is criminalized?
The biggest thing is just that then it’ll be possible to be prosecuted, and there’ll be a lot of new pathways for accountability. It also ultimately will enforce prosecution of crimes like gender persecution, as well, because prosecutors will start to think more deeply about the gender aspects of crime. But while the end goal might be to have this legally enshrined, really, the goals are all along the way. Because what we want to do is raise awareness about what this crime is, but also drive policy actions.
I mean, with South Africa, the ask was really to financially isolate that regime and to get people—governments, companies—to stop doing business with them. With Iran and Afghanistan, they’re already very isolated, they’re already very sanctioned. It’s not about introducing new sanctions or dissuading companies from working with these states, because they already aren’t. It’s about reframing the discussion. Those sanctions are issued for nuclear proliferation, for WMDs, for ballistic missiles, for terrorism; they are not issued for human rights violations, and they’re definitely not issued for gender apartheid. So we want to start to reframe why it is that we’re saying that governments should not engage with these governments [so] they need to change their behavior. It makes it unacceptable.
The crime of apartheid as distinct to the crime of gender persecution, gender apartheid would introduce more of a question about third party actors. Because of the historical example of South Africa apartheid, there’s a question of liability. If governments and companies are complicit, or doing business with regimes that are perpetrating gender apartheid, are they willingly aiding and abetting this regime? It’s a bit more expansive than what’s currently on the books, in our view.
We’re not asking for increased sanctions as part of this campaign. What we’re asking for is that there clearly are demands that gender apartheid come to an end.
For more information, you can read the letter in its entirety, and join in signing it, at endgenderapartheid.today.
You Should Give a Sh*t About is an ongoing column highlighting local stories with a global impact. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
[post_title] => You Should Give a Sh*t About: Gender Apartheid
[post_excerpt] => Under international criminal law, apartheid only applies to discrimination based on race. A new open letter argues it should apply to gender discrimination, too.
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On January 4, in Enoch, Utah, 42-year-old Michael Haight shot and killed his wife, five children, and mother-in-law, before turning the gun on himself, a form of murder-suicide known as "family annihilation." Tausha Haight, his wife of twenty years, had filed for divorce a couple weeks prior. Abusers always lose it when you leave.
It's since been reported, first by the Associated Press, that Haight was investigated in 2020 for potential child abuse after someone outside the family reported it to the police. Utah's child protective services got involved. At the time, Haight’s eldest daughter Macie said the abuse had begun years earlier, in 2017. She described a time her father grabbed her by the shoulders and threw her into furniture, along with another incident in which he had strangled her. She said she’d been afraid that he would kill her. Michael blamed the then-14-year-old for his violence, saying she was "mouthy." During the same police investigation, Macie also said that her father regularly belittled her mother, and Michael admitted to surveilling his wife’s communications. No charges were filed.
Nearly three years later, Michael’s obituary in the local paper would read that he "made it a point to spend quality time with each and every one of his children," and that they were a "cherished miracle." One commenter spoke of his “Christlike love and service.” Neither the obituary nor the commenters mentioned the murders, and it was only taken down after Shannon Watts, gun reform advocate and founder of Moms Demand, tweeted it out.
Haight’s story isn’t so uncommon. In the United States alone, a man has annihilated his family every 3.5 weeks for the last two decades, a likely miniscule portion of the estimated family annihilations worldwide. Men who strangle their partners are ten times more likely to become men who kill them. And having a gun in the home increases the risk of murder in a domestic violence incident by 500%.
So why do we continue to treat what happened to the Haight family like an isolated tragedy—a “personal” matter—as opposed to exactly what it was: a domestic tyrant who felt entitled, by virtue of being a man, to enforce his will, crush dissent, and destroy his family as soon as they tried to flee?
When a head of state insists on their natural or divine right to monitor your private communications, stalk your movements, imprison you at home, and beat or kill you for wearing certain clothes, meeting friends, or maintaining a separate bank account, we rightly call them authoritarian. We are loud in our disapproval: When Iranian women took to the streets in protest over the arrest and murder of Mahsa Amini by morality police for not properly wearing hijab, the support abroad was strong, the brutality obvious. But when it's the head of a household terrorizing you, the euphemisms (and excuses) surface: family difficulties over a private matter, better dealt with behind closed doors; it’s best not to get involved, it’s none of our business. All support evaporates, because father still knows best — and if father wants to blow everything up just because he can, who's going to stop him?
Studies on familicide say in almost every case, the man claims his family as property, with the right to end their lives. Murder, after all, is the ultimate form of control. But the impulse to control or destroy isn't limited to physical violence: The easiest way to break people is to break what's precious to them. Look at Elon Musk, who had to lose 200 billion dollars before people finally stopped calling him a genius. Within months of his taking over Twitter, 80% of the company’s workforce had quit or been fired, especially anyone found criticizing him. In a recent New York Magazine piece about Musk's takeover, they describe how Twitter employees flocked to the company Slack during these mass layoffs, all anxiously waiting for the ax: "One person posted a meme of Thanos from Avengers: Infinity War, the supervillain who exterminates half the living beings in the universe with a snap.”
Advertisers fled Musk’s "extremely hardcore" site as he rolled out a disastrous verification process, threatened people who linked out to other social networks, reinstated Nazis, and ranted about eugenics, all while overseeing a radical uptick in harassment and slurs. With no clear plan to make Twitter profitable, and engineers rolling their eyes at his technical expertise, it's no wonder Twitter and Tesla's value has since plummeted. Not that he's taken any accountability for the losses or the lives he's upended. He's been too busy impregnating his employee, lashing out at mouthy critics, and, most recently, firing a Twitter engineer for informing him the reason his engagement was down wasn’t due to a bug—but because people weren’t as interested in him as they used to be.
Whether they're the head of a family, company, or state, everyone suffers so long as masculinity is wrapped up in an ability to dominate. Impunity and entitlement breed ignorance and nihilism. Patriarchy is ancient, authoritarian, incompatible with equality and democracy, and bad for everyone involved. And it’s as relevant to how Musk acquired and destroyed Twitter as it is to the protests in Iran as it is to what happened to the Haight family.
Human rights also don't disappear at your doorstep. According to the UN, 47,000 women and girls were killed by their partners or other family in 2020. On average, that means one murder every 11 minutes. But freeing women and children from violence won't happen so long as it's still taboo to speak about it. We’d rightfully consider it outrageous if someone called reports of mass rapes and murders in Ukraine by Russian soldiers "airing dirty laundry.” Yet we don’t extend the same support to women abused and murdered by partners or relatives, which happens in every community, and is far more likely than “stranger danger.” (And on the rare occasion victims do get attention, they’re usually blonde, white, and already dead.)
Meanwhile, it's the same self-destructive, patriarchal entitlement that motivates domestic violence that motivates atrocities like the Russian invasion of Ukraine – if I can't have you, nobody can – with the same results. Putin first became aggressive in 2014 after Ukraine turned down a trade agreement with Russia in favor of one with the European Union. (Again, it's most dangerous when you try to leave.) Absent consequences, including for past wars in Syria, Georgia, and Chechnya, Putin has continuously escalated the bloodshed, and will do anything short of giving up power to punish Ukrainians for daring to be free, including letting Russia crumble. In that sense, he's just like Michael Haight: Insult the sovereign, or threaten his control, and watch him burn the building down with everyone trapped inside. Whatever it takes to teach them a lesson.
Our bodies don't differentiate between state-sponsored or home-bound torture. What does your killer's institutional affiliation matter when you're dead? The lines are blurred in any case, considering the number of men who abuse in private who also abuse the public. It's not a coincidence that police abuse their families at high rates, or that two-thirds of mass shootings are either an incident of domestic violence or are perpetrated by someone with a record of it. Yet time and time again, on both a personal and policy level, we treat domestic violence as a completely separate matter – anything to avoid the reality that some homes are conflict zones, too.
Even the preeminent global treaty on women’s rights, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), does not contain the word "violence" once. In 1980, when CEDAW was passed, gender-based violence was considered outside its scope, a private matter that this public treaty wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. Men's rights, especially in war, were already covered as human rights, a courtesy not extended to everyone else. It wasn't until 1992 that the CEDAW Committee issued General Recommendation 19, which interpreted the treaty to include gender violence. (Full disclosure, I'm on the board of an organization, Every Woman, calling for a new global treaty to close this atrocious gap in international law.) Like the Refugee Treaty, which advocates fought tooth and nail to have courts interpret to include gender persecution as a "particular social group," half the world's population suffering the most pervasive human rights violation was considered niche.
When feminism states that the personal is political, it speaks to the ways the private sphere continues to oppress women. There can be no equality in public so long as violence at home is ignored. To be part of the public, you first need to make it outside. Patriarchy cuts across every divide, but its effects are worsened by poverty, racism, and other forms of oppression. When 72-year-old Huu Can Tran shot and killed 11 people at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park, California during a Lunar New Year celebration, people speculated whether this was yet another anti-Asian hate crime, a misogynist escalation, or possibly both. No motive has been found so far, or connection to any of the victims, but the shooting sparked a discussion online about domestic violence in the Asian American community. The Asian Pacific Institute on Gender Based Violence released a statement of mourning, and a plea to make the connection between femicide and mass shootings. They estimate that between 21-55% of API women in the US have experienced intimate physical or sexual violence.
In the United States, women of color are disproportionately affected by gender violence. The CDC reports that Black women are three times more likely than white women to be killed in a domestic dispute. More than half of Indigenous women in the US have experienced sexual or intimate partner violence. On a global scale, 1 in 3 women have experienced sexual assault or domestic violence.
Authoritarians know that subordinating women helps them stay in power, and systematically encourage and enact patriarchal violence to keep people in line. They claim that masculinity is under threat, and loosen laws that protect women and gender nonconforming people. Reactionary autocrats worldwide are attacking women's rights as a means of entrenching their control and weakening political participation in democratic mass movements. In Russia, Putin rolled back criminal consequences for domestic violence. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan withdrew Turkey from the Istanbul Convention, the European treaty on domestic violence. Poland keeps threatening to do the same, while Hungary never signed it in the first place. (In a move to distance itself from its neighbors, Ukraine finally ratified the Istanbul Convention last year.) Before he was voted out and supporters staged a failed coup on his behalf, Jair Bolsonaro cut 90% of funding for domestic violence prevention in Brazil. The Taliban once again won’t even let women go to school.
So long as authoritarian violence is acceptable, even encouraged, on the micro level within families, it will be impossible to defeat on a macro level. There is no democracy, no value for human rights, without the participation and inclusion of women and children. And that participation depends on feeling safe at home first. All life, and livelihoods, are devalued when we devalue vulnerable people. And for what? An ancient status quo built on brute strength. Marriage and the nuclear family still provide the basic unit for our tax code. We're incentivized by the government to create a private jurisdiction where men overarchingly rule. The patriarchs are not okay, and it's doubtful they ever have been. Their benevolent dictatorship kills, and it’s time to let the toxic institution go.
[post_title] => Why Do So Many Men Destroy What They Can't Control?
[post_excerpt] => And why do so many people support them?
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Pregnancy and parenting will never "just work out” for everybody.
Nine years ago, I told my mother that the man I was seeing didn’t want children. I wasn’t yet sure what I wanted, and at the time his certainty was both comforting and concerning: I appreciated that he knew his own mind but wanted to keep my options open. “Oh, well,” my mom said. “Sometimes certain people meet, and someone gets pregnant, and—BOOM!—everybody's happy.” She was sort of joking, and sort of not. I knew she hoped that he, and I, would change our minds about becoming parents. Nine years later, for a variety of reasons, we haven’t.
Despite her Catholic education, my mother is fervently pro-choice. Having suffered a difficult miscarriage and carried three pregnancies to term, she is not cavalier about the toll pregnancy and labor take on the body and soul. She recognizes what most people—including anti-abortion activists, who get abortions when they need them—intuitively know: that forcing someone to remain pregnant and give birth is an act of brutality.
Yet, like many Americans, my mother also wants to believe that even unexpected pregnancies can sometimes turn out for the best, especially when those involved are ready, willing, and able to become parents.
It’s not wrong to wish this were always the case. It would certainly be better if it were impossible to make a baby unless you were ready and willing to parent, and always possible when you were; if every pregnancy and delivery were complication-free; and if every baby were painlessly ushered into a stable and functional family unit at birth. But that’s not the world we live in, and pregnancy is not the peaceful, glowing, rose-tinted fantasy so many want to believe it is.
Even under the best of circumstances, pregnancy can be grueling. Some people, including celebrities like the comedian Amy Schumer and Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton, experience hyperemesis gravidarum, or extreme, persistent nausea and vomiting. In 2019, Schumer, then in her second trimester, estimated thatshe’d vomited around 980 times since becoming pregnant. The Duchess, meanwhile, described her own experience with the condition as “utterly rotten.” And while hyperemesis gravidarum is relatively rare, around 70% of pregnant people still experience nausea and vomiting.
Pregnancy can also lead to a host of other debilitating symptoms, including depression, insomnia, and/or difficulty concentrating. “My body was heavy, tired from the insomnia that kept me awake from three until seven in the morning, exhausted from the constant vomiting, and bloated from all the eating, which fended off the unrelenting nausea,” writer Miriam Foley wrote in an essay for Parents.com. “I felt sick all day and woke up to be sick or eat during the night. I vomited in public on street corners, at roundabouts, beside parked cars, in the bin, in basins, in the toilet, in the sink…emotionally I was even worse; delicate, jumpy, tearful.”
This was Foley’s second pregnancy, one she and her husband had “very much wanted.” Imagine dealing with those symptoms when you don’t want or aren’t ready to be pregnant, give birth, or raise a child.
In the U.S., we force those who undergo childbirth to choose between solvency and recovery. Because the overwhelming majority of people who become pregnant and give birth are women, and we take women’s pain and suffering for granted, we have largely failed to ease it via public policy. Many see pain and danger as inescapable conditions of women’s lives, particularly Black and brown women, as demonstrated by our maternal mortality rates. In 2015, I wrote a column about the shocking number of U.S. women who return to work just two weeks after giving birth, a decades-long problem we lack the political will to solve. I’ll never forget the stories I heard. Two weeks after giving birth, one mom told me, she still looked six months pregnant and felt like her vagina was “inside out.” A then 34-year-old mother of two said her first baby tore her perineum, anus, and sphincter muscles “badly"; it was 10 days before she could even walk. Her legs and feet were so swollen she thought her skin was going to split open, and she developed mastitis in her left breast, which felt like the “jaws of life” were ripping her chest apart. Pregnancy and childbirth may always involve some degree of discomfort. But they could certainly be easier to endure and recover from than they are in the U.S.
The everyday agonies people who choose to be pregnant are expected to tolerate become a form of torture when those who had no choice are forced to endure them, too. A surprising number of well-meaning but clueless Americans join the right-wing religious fanatics in proffering adoption as a seamless alternative to abortion, despite the fact that the former is far riskier, costlier, and more physically and psychologically painful than the latter. As was true before Roe, and will keep happening in the wake of its repeal, many birth parents in states where abortion is illegal are forced to carry pregnancies to term and undergo childbirth against their will—a trauma with potentially life-long consequences for birth parents, babies, and adoptive families.
Even those who want and consciously decide to become parents know how hard it is to raise kids in an atomized, every-family-for-itself country with no universal health or child care, no paid family leave, and no guaranteed income. They suffer near-constant levels of stress, anxiety, and fear, both about big-picture existential threats and everyday survival. There are only four countries in the world where couples with young children who earn the average wage spend more than 30 percent of their salary on child care, and the United States is one of them—along with New Zealand, the U.K., and Australia. (By contrast, the average couple in Austria, Greece, Hungary, and Korea spends less than four percent.)
The same Republican officials who worked so tirelessly to overturn Roe have also fought tooth and nail against providing basic public goods and services to ease the considerable burdens the U.S. imposes on women and families. The states most hostile to abortion rights have no paid family leave and some of the worst maternal mortality rates in the nation. All except Louisiana are run by anti-abortion Republicans; meanwhile, Louisiana’s legislature is Republican-dominated, and its governor, a nominal Democrat, is staunchly anti-abortion, in defiance of his party’s platform. Earlier this year, the state’s lawmakers tried to classify abortion as homicide under state law and allow prosecutors to criminally charge patients. If anti-abortion legislators wanted to make it safer, easier, and more inviting to raise a family, they would have done so. Instead, they’re busy trying to figure out how to jail pregnant people.
When even the willing feel ensnared by the increasingly unmanageable demands of pregnancy and parenting, no one is free. Not every accident is a happy one, nor can it always be made so through sheer force of will. If individuals and families were not buried, alone, under the crushing burdens of pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing, more Americans might choose to start families. And others still wouldn’t. As New York Magazine reporter Sarah Jones recently wrote, “I am childless because that’s what I’ve chosen for myself...Congress could pass Medicare for All tomorrow, and paid family leave, and all the other policies I support, and if I became pregnant right now I would still have an abortion.”
And that is her right, whether or not a stranger or a state legislator or a Democratic governor approves it.
We need narratives that explore our shared problems and point the way toward collective liberation, but South Asian stories in U.S. popular culture haven’t kept pace with our new political realities.
Until 9/11, I didn’t feel a strong need to see my ethnicity represented in American pop culture. Growing up in the U.S. as South Asian was an experience in cultural invisibility, but not one that was necessarily undesirable. GenXers and older Millennials came after the hippie era, which convinced mainstream American culture that Indian culture could be summarized with yoga, incense, and kirtans, and there was little in the 1980s and 1990s to dispel those lingering narratives, or to ground South Asians authentically in popular culture. What we did see, whether it was Amy Irving in brownface playing an Indian princess, or Apu in The Simpsons, was often problematic and unrepresentative.
This situation changed over the last two decades. The first film I saw in theaters after 9/11 was Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, which played at New York City’s storied Paris Theater, right outside the Plaza Hotel. Steeped in joyous chaos and vitality, the film, which is set in New Delhi, portrays an exuberant, extended upper middle class family gathered at the home of the bride’s family to celebrate her arranged marriage to a suitably handsome Indian doctor. Tinged with a hint of tragedy and immersed in love for both family and the kind of colorful Desi spectacle Pico Iyer calls a “marigold tapestry,” the film was an escape, a connection, and a salve in the recovering-but-still-desolate city. I hadn’t realized how much I needed it.
The only previous occasion on which I'd had an inkling of this need was while watching Nair's 1991 film Mississippi Masala. This bittersweet and boundary-breaking love story stars Denzel Washington as Demetrius, a Black American man from a working class background, and Sarita Choudhary as Mina, an Indian woman born in Uganda. After Idi Amin expelled all the “foreigners” in 1972, Mina, who at one point in the film says she has never been to India, lives with her family in a small-town Mississippi motel owned by relatives who represent the great wave of migration from Gujarat to the U.S. during the 1980s and 1990s. The film pulsates with the same vibrancy that would be seen in Monsoon Wedding 10 years later.
But while Monsoon Wedding tells a deeply Indian story, Mississippi Masala tells a deeply American one. As Durba Mitra writes in an essay celebrating the film’s 30th anniversary, Mississippi Masala is a “love story wrapped in histories of postcolonial displacement, settler colonialism, and the shadows of Jim Crow, offer[ing] an account of the cruel circuitous routes of displacement and migration to the American South.” The film is one of the first mainstream American artworks to show both the discrimination experienced by the Indian-American diaspora, and the anti-Black racism the community directs at the Black people amongst whom they now live. Even 30 years later, it stands out as a political inquiry that interrogates what it means to seek liberation through young, urgent love across race, class, and culture.
A scene from 'Mississippi Masala,' Mira Nair's 1991 film starring Sarita Choudhury and Denzel Washington.
Mitra notes in her essay, “The Indian diaspora in the U.S. has always been imagined in the American political landscape as a people neither here nor there.” South Asians who were either born in the U.S. or came as children following the 1965 Immigration Act were so few in number—even today there are only 5.4 million—that, Mississippi Masala aside, the microculture of American-born GenX Desis made little more than a blip in popular culture. On the one hand, this environment provided a kind of freedom in which we could try to shape culture and community without a spotlight. We could try to form bonds of solidarity in the face of entrenched political, cultural, religious, national, and caste lines that separated our peers on the subcontinent and were embraced by diaspora members who clung to their xenophobic, racist, or communal ideologies. On the other hand, the community could be insular and, existing in what Shilpa Davé calls “ambiguous racialized space,” both the victim and the perpetrator of discrimination.
Events in post 9/11 America made clear the need for South Asian stories with political and cultural specificity in mainstream culture. The months immediately after that terrible day were a period of intense discrimination, surveillance, violence, and Islamophobic and anti-immigrant policies. As Representative Pramila Jayapal said, “9/11 changed what it meant to be Arab, Muslim, or South Asian in this country.” Jayapal delivered her remarks during the first ever Congressional hearing on Discrimination and Civil Liberties of Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities, held over twenty years after 9/11. Finally.
Representation in this political context matters. Rashad Robinson, the prominent civil rights activist, rightly warns us not to mistake presence for power: Being in a room doesn't necessarily establish a direct line to decision making. None of us relates to the experience of being South Asian in the same way, and none of us should have to represent any or all of the rest of us. But one of the adverse effects of underrepresentation is to convince members of a minority community that they lack power within the dominant culture—that access and opportunity are limited, and their own stories will be unheard or filtered through stereotypes. In an essay about Lisa Ling’s food docuseries on Asian food in the U.S., Marina Fang writes: “Asian Americans often start from the default position of being “the other.” We have to explain ourselves, usually to a white audience.” In this kind of cultural environment, the need to present perfect or one dimensional characters—a pillar of the toxic “model minority” myth—takes root, and division and misunderstanding flourish.
Presence and visibility may not be the entire solution to these problems. They are nevertheless crucial levers toward power. And the years between 9/11 and the 2016 U.S. election—marked by cross-MENASA community organizing to fight discrimination and state violence —gave rise to a mini renaissance of South Asian content that explored and played with the place South Asians occupy in the U.S. cultural landscape.
Rampant xenophobia in the post-2016 world makes the need for solidarity, representation, and narrative shift even stronger. But the South Asian diaspora community has splintered over the past few years. Rising authoritarianism—from Trump to Brexit to Modi—emboldened Hindu nationalists in India and around the world, greatly exacerbating existing caste and religious discrimination. On the international stage, South Asians have been slow to rise in defense of our common humanity. It feels like a fraught time to embrace South Asian identity and a deeply precarious time around the world. We desperately need narratives that explore our shared problems and point the way toward collective liberation, but South Asian stories in U.S. popular culture haven’t kept pace with our new political realities.
I’ll admit to some satisfaction these days at seeing so much South Asian content made by people in front of and behind the camera. South Asian actors are playing a variety of dynamic, complicated, and sexy (but not exoticized) characters in content ranging from the color-blind casting of Bridgerton and The Green Knight, to the coming-of-age stories in Never Have I Ever and Spin, to superheros (that most American of genres) as seen in Eternals and Ms Marvel.
In this landscape, the character that most closely represents me, at least demographically, is Seema in …And Just Like That. Played by Sarita Choudhary (who also played Mina in Mississippi Masala), Seema is a GenX New Yorker, unapologetically sexual, self-made, fabulous, and untethered to familial or cultural expectations. She is refreshing. I understand why the show disappointed many viewers with its portrayals of aging, race, class, consumerism, gender, and sexuality, but a small part of me enjoyed watching a glamorous brown woman of a certain age chewing up the scenery.
But reality these days always creeps in. It's hard to get past what is happening politically in the South Asian community and watch even escapist content with unadulterated joy. As I watched her, I couldn’t help but wonder: Is Seema enough?
Her character comes from what appears to be an upper caste Hindu background and lives the life of a one percenter in Manhattan, with a private driver and a luxurious wardrobe of exceedingly expensive designer clothes, shoes, and handbags. She sits in privilege and has origins in what is now the oppressor class in India. As do I. Not all South Asians are privileged—far from it, especially in terms of race, class, or caste. But for a community that is small in numbers, we have a relatively high level of power and privilege. This is what Seema, as fabulous as she is in some ways, also represents.
In the current state of our world, confronting society from our perspective as South Asians should require us to interrogate where we sit along the spectrum of power. What is our collective responsibility? Where do we have social power, and where do we use it for good? We need rich, complex stories that explore these questions. We need more than a few of these stories every decade.
I want to know what Demetrius and Mina would do in our world. That’s the story I’m looking for now. We are living in monstrous, devastating times. We need lightness, escape, and joy—and a more inclusive roster of characters that will shape the way people perceive one another. Even more so, we need to tell stories of solidarity.
[post_title] => Representation matters: South Asians in American pop culture since 9/11
[post_excerpt] => During the 30 years since Mira Nair's groundbreaking film 'Mississippi Masala,' the representation of South Asians in American pop culture has evolved significantly. But is it enough?
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Reproductive justice combines tenets of human rights, social justice, and reproductive rights.
What is reproductive justice?
For decades, Black feminists in the U.S. have been pushing a women’s movement too often dominated by the concerns of middle-class white women to expand its horizons. In June 1994 a caucus of Black feminists pioneered the concept of “reproductive justice,” hoping to spur their fellow advocates to broaden their definition of reproductive freedom by taking into account most women’s daily lives and experiences.
Part of what they objected to was the reduction of women’s rights to a simple, one-time choice. They knew, often firsthand, that many women who become unexpectedly pregnant do not have easy access to comprehensive health care, including abortion and other reproductive services. Because many white, middle-class feminists took stable housing, decent health care, and safe neighborhoods for granted, they did not always see that a range of other rights related to women’s bodily autonomy were also in need of defending. As Dorothy E. Roberts, author and professor of law, sociology, and civil rights at the University of Pennsylvania, explained in Dissent in 2015, “The language of choice has proved useless for claiming public resources that most women need in order to maintain control over their bodies and their lives…giving women ‘choices’ has eroded the argument for state support, because women without sufficient resources are simply held responsible for making ‘bad’ choices.”
Roberts and other champions of reproductive justice believe all women have the right to opt out of parenthood entirely, to end some pregnancies and continue others, and to have as many children as they want and raise those children in safe, healthy, and nurturing environments. Loretta Ross of SisterSong, the largest multiracial reproductive justice collective in the U.S., has described reproductive justice as “the complete physical, mental, spiritual, political, social, and economic well-being of women and girls, based on the full achievement and protection of women’s human rights.” In Ross’s view, the reproductive justice framework “analyzes how the ability of any woman to determine her own reproductive destiny is linked directly to the conditions in her community.”
Those conditions are “not just a matter of individual choice and access” but include social realities like unstable housing, poverty, racial discrimination, and lack of proximity to health care facilities that provide abortions and/or prenatal care. A 2017 study found that one in five U.S. women would need to travel at least 43 miles (69 kilometers) to reach the nearest abortion clinic. Pregnant women’s and newborns’ lack of access to health care is just as crucial to address as lack of access to abortion. Pregnant women in rural areas often receive inadequate prenatal care; some rural communities do not have even one practicing obstetrician/gynecologist. Around one in four Wyoming women receive less-than-adequate prenatal care, meaning that, on average, they begin prenatal care after the fourth month of pregnancy or attend less than 79 percent of recommended checkups.
The U.S. also has a shameful record of letting women die during or around childbirth, a particularly shocking fact in such a wealthy nation. Maternal health outcomes are even worse for women of color and low-income women. The maternal mortality ratio more than doubled in the U.S. between 1999 and 2014, and Black women are approximately three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. Stress caused by racial discrimination plays a significant role in maternal mortality rates, as does lack of proximity to hospitals providing high-quality care. Reproductive justice means ensuring that every woman has not only the right and ability to end a pregnancy, but control of her fertility, freedom from coerced or forced sterilization, adequate health care, and the ability to give birth to and raise children in a safe and healthy environment.
For the pro-choice movement to truly represent all women, reproductive justice advocates believe it must significantly broaden its demands for privacy and respect for individual choices to include, in Ross’s words, “the social supports necessary for our individual decisions to be optimally realized.” They also believe that control of one’s reproductive destiny is a human right, and that governments are obligated to protect women’s human rights by fully funding the programs required to keep them and their children healthy and safe.
Rather than focusing solely on the legal right to an abortion, reproductive justice advocates seek to work in coalition with other social justice movements, from the Movement for Black Lives to the movements for economic justice, the rights of people with disabilities, and LGBTQ rights. Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice (ACRJ) has defined three primary frameworks for fighting reproductive oppression and furthering reproductive justice:
Reproductive Health - deals with delivery of services
Reproductive Rights - addresses legal issues
Reproductive Justice - focuses on movement building
Reproductive justice goes beyond efforts to safeguard abortion rights. It is not solely dependent on courts, political parties, or sympathetic politicians and physicians. It’s about empowering women and girls to make decisions not just about a particular pregnancy but throughout their entire reproductive lives. Reproductive justice can only be achieved when all women have not just the same rights on paper, but the power, freedom, and resources necessary to exercise them.
What are the principles of reproductive justice?
Reproductive justice is a broad concept, and as such it touches on a wide range of issues. The list below is not comprehensive—however, it does provide a useful framework for understanding just how multifaceted the fight for reproductive justice can be:
The right to remain child-free
The right to end one or multiple pregnancies
The right to free health care, including abortion
Easy access to every kind of health care, including abortion and other reproductive services
The right to raise as many children as one wants
The right to raise children in a safe and healthy environment
The right of every child to a safe and healthy home
The right to support a family
The right of all mothers, including those charged with and convicted of crimes, to see and care for their children
The right of pregnant women and mothers in prisons and jails to be treated in accordance with international human rights law
The right to nonjudgmental and medically sound health care, including abortion, prenatal care, and care for new parents and newborns
The right to create a birth plan honored by all health care providers assisting in a birth
Respect and support for essential care work performed inside and outside of the home
Freedom from food deserts, contaminated water, and state violence
Freedom from prosecution for struggling with drug addiction while pregnant
Freedom from forced or coerced sterilization
Freedom from forced or coerced abortion
Freedom from shame and stigma
Who coined the term ‘reproductive justice’?
After organizing an informal Black Women’s Caucus at a national pro-choice conference sponsored by the Illinois Pro-Choice Alliance in Chicago in 1994, a group of Black women social justice advocates came up with the term and defined the framework. They recognized that the mainstream feminist movement of the time, which was led by and represented the interests of middle- and upper-class white women, was not familiar with or equipped to meet the needs of women of color, trans people, and other marginalized women.
These women, who called themselves the “Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice,” argued for a new and broader conception of reproductive freedom rooted in internationally recognized human rights standards developed by the United Nations. Advocates of reproductive justice seek to unite the struggle for reproductive rights with the fight for social justice. The women who coined the phrase published a full-page statement with over 800 signatures in The Washington Post and Roll Call to announce the birth of a new movement.
When did the reproductive justice movement start?
Though many of the ideas behind it have existed in some form for decades, it officially began in 1994, when a group of Black reproductive rights advocates who participated in a number of national conferences in the U.S. and the International Conference on Population & Development (ICPD) in Cairo, Egypt, gathered in Chicago to pioneer a new reproductive rights framework. They hoped that framing these rights as a question of “justice” would better address both the full spectrum of women’s reproductive rights and the particular experiences and concerns of Black and/or low-income women. They shared frustrations about the status of Black women’s reproductive health around the globe and the limits of a pro-choice movement rooted in narrow notions of privacy. And they urged the larger movement to contextualize abortion care as one crucial aspect of a broader spectrum of human rights, including bodily autonomy and the full range of reproductive decision-making.
Reproductive justice combines tenets of human rights, social justice, and reproductive rights. “In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda,” which employs a reproductive justice framework, focuses on three key policy areas: abortion rights and access, contraceptive equity, and comprehensive sex education.
How does reproductive justice relate to intersectionality?
The concept of reproductive justice is an outgrowth of intersectionality, which is itself related to the original meaning of identity politics as defined by the Black socialist feminists of the Combahee River Collective. Members of the Collective believed their identities and the various forms of oppression they experienced as members of different but overlapping groups—Black people, women, LGBTQ people, and working-class people—uniquely suited them to fight these oppressions.
Intersectionality means that all forms of oppression are interconnected, and all people experience oppression and discrimination differently as a result of their particular identities. As the self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde once said, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” And in the words of SisterSong, “Marginalized women face multiple oppressions and we can only win freedom by addressing how they impact one another.” Reproductive justice is about recognizing, honoring, and easing the lives of all child-bearing people by fighting all forms of oppression—including racism, sexism, able-ism, anti-LGBTQ discrimination, and economic injustice—not only in isolation, but when and where they intersect.
Why does reproductive justice matter?
Reproductive justice matters because it relates to the lives and experiences of every person capable of giving birth. By significantly broadening the lens through which most people view reproductive rights, it covers a far wider range of human experiences, is relevant to and supported by many more people, and has the potential to transform millions of lives by harnessing the collective power of various social movements—for economic justice, criminal justice reform, and civil rights, among others—that are connected but too often siloed.
Reproductive justice in childbirth
Until the mid-1800s, women in the United States managed their own birth experiences with little oversight and intervention. Abortion was common throughout the nineteenth century. It was only in the latter half of the century, when medicine became a respected profession and the American Medical Association was established, that physicians lobbied to have abortion banned. Their concern was not about the morality of abortion, but the financial and professional implications of being forced to compete with midwives and purveyors of home abortion remedies.
Tensions arose around that time, and persist today, between midwives, many of whom were trained in traditional healing practices, and formally educated and/or state-licensed physicians, nurses, and other medical practitioners. The conflict was partly between an authoritarian and patriarchal medical establishment and the women giving birth and the midwives they trusted to assist them.
Women of color, poor women, and women with disabilities typically had and have fewer choices about where and how to give birth and who may attend them when they do. Reproductive justice advocates seek to eliminate these disparities and ensure that all women can give birth safely, comfortably, in the company of their chosen attendants, and in the setting and manner of their choosing.
Reproductive justice in schools
A key aspect of reproductive justice in schools is comprehensive sex education, which can help students prevent unintended pregnancies and increase their odds of graduating.
Teenagers who are given partial or no medically accurate information about how to prevent pregnancy and/or STIs and explicitly or implicitly taught to be ashamed of their bodies and sexuality are likelier to become pregnant or cause a pregnancy—a circumstance which interrupts their educations more often than not. Students who are pregnant or parenting should not have to choose between raising children and completing their educations. They deserve time to recover after giving birth, permission to make up missed work, child care, transportation, counseling, health care, personalized graduation plans, flexible schedules, and freedom from stigma. As the novelist Toni Morrison said in a 1989 Time interview in response to a leading question ("You don't feel that these girls will never know whether they could have been teachers, or whatever?”) about teen moms, “They can be teachers. They can be brain surgeons. We have to help them become brain surgeons…That's the attitude you have to have about human life. But we don't want to pay for it. I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black—or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money.” The U.S. will not achieve reproductive justice until it is willing to invest the necessary resources in all of its children.
Reproductive justice in workplaces
In 2014, then Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois), a woman of color and a veteran of the Iraq war who lost both legs in a 2004 helicopter crash, was 46, pregnant, and in her third trimester. Because her doctor had advised her not to travel at that stage of her pregnancy, she appealed to her fellow Democrats to make a one-time exception to the Democratic caucus’s ban on proxy voting so she could participate in House Democratic caucus leadership and committee member elections.
Nancy Pelosi and other House Democratic leaders denied her request. Far more disturbing than what happened to Duckworth, who went on to become a U.S. senator, is what happens to women in retail and service industry jobs on a regular basis. Employers routinely deny pregnant workers basic accommodations like access to bottled water, the ability to sit down, and extra bathroom breaks. In 2014 Bene’t Holmes, a 25-year-old single mother and Walmart employee who was then four months pregnant, asked her manager for the less physically demanding job duties her doctor had recommended. Her request was denied. The next day she had a miscarriage at work.
Reproductive justice means supporting whatever choices women make about their reproductive lives, not forcing them to choose between supporting their families and following a doctor’s advice. It means fighting to ensure both that every woman who wants to end a pregnancy can do so and that every woman who wants to continue one can do so safely and with dignity. And it means that employers and governments must support workers while they are becoming and once they have become mothers. During World War II President Franklin Roosevelt used funds from a wartime infrastructure bill to establish a national network of child care centers for women who took factory jobs to support the war effort. Despite the best efforts of mothers, social welfare groups, unions, early childhood educators, and social workers to keep them open after the war, President Harry Truman shut them down as soon as Japan surrendered. It shouldn’t take a world war for governments to meet people’s needs.
Reproductive justice in prisons
Women in many countries, including the United States, have been arrested and incarcerated for ending or attempting to end unwanted pregnancies and/or endangering fetuses, which is particularly ironic given how the state often treats incarcerated mothers. It is cruel and illogical to imprison pregnant women for possibly jeopardizing a nonexistent baby by, for example, using drugs while pregnant and to separate mothers convicted of crimes from the living children who need them. The treatment of pregnant and nursing women and/or mothers in prisons and jails, including for pregnancy-related crimes, is clearly connected to poverty, xenophobia, and racism.
In 2017, a U.S. government official denied an abortion to a teenaged immigrant detainee who was pregnant as a result of rape and said she would rather harm herself than continue the pregnancy. In 2014 a Pennsylvania woman named Jennifer Whalen was charged with a felony and three misdemeanors, including endangering the welfare of a child, and sentenced to prison after helping her 16-year-old daughter end an unwanted pregnancy by ordering the abortion pill online. Whelan, a single parent who worked as a nursing home aide, said her daughter did not have health insurance and could not afford a hospital abortion.
In 1989, officials in Charleston, South Carolina, began arresting pregnant women whose prenatal tests showed they were smoking crack. In some cases, Dorothy Roberts wrote in her 1997 book, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, RACE, REPRODUCTION, AND THE MEANING OF LIBERTY a team of police officers tracked down expectant mothers in their neighborhoods. In others, officers appeared at hospital maternity wards to haul away women in handcuffs and leg irons hours after giving birth. According to Roberts, one Charleston woman spent the final weeks of her pregnancy in a dingy cell in the Charleston County Jail. When she went into labor, she was taken to the hospital in chains, where she remained shackled to the bed throughout the entire delivery. All but one of the 48 women arrested for prenatal crimes in Charleston that year were Black. And in 1978—five weeks into a 40-year sentence, with no painkillers or sterilized medical equipment of any kind—22-year-old Debbie Sims Africa gave birth to her son Mike in a Pennsylvania prison cell. She cut the baby’s umbilical cord with her teeth, hid him under a sheet, and relied on her fellow incarcerated women to hide the noise by singing or coughing when he cried. She couldn’t keep her baby with her under jail rules and knew it would be difficult to conceal his existence for long. After three days, she told the authorities, who promptly took him away.
Reproductive justice demands that all women terminating or carrying a pregnancy, giving birth, and/or raising a child be treated like human beings in life-altering circumstances. Then President Trump signed a law banning the shackling of pregnant women in 2018. Far more remains to be done to guarantee reproductive justice for incarcerated people.
Who invented intersectional feminism?
Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw is often credited with having coined the term in 1989, when she published a paper entitled, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” In Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, a collection of interviews with pioneering Black feminists, Demita Frazier, one of Taylor’s interviewees, questions that narrative. “I have to talk to the young woman—Kimberlé Crenshaw…who says that she coined the term intersectionality,” Frazier says. “I always laugh when I read that because I remember the day we were sitting at the women’s center in Cambridge, drafting our probably third or fourth draft of the [Combahee River Collective] statement, I said, ‘You know, we stand at the intersection where our identities are indivisible.’ There is no separation. We are as Black women truly and completely intact in our paradox, and there’s nothing paradoxical about oppression [laugh]” (How We Get Free, Haymarket Books, p. 123).
In the 1970s, Frazier and her fellow Black socialist feminists conceptualized identity politics as the idea that Black liberation, feminism, and the fight for economic justice didn’t have to and shouldn’t be disparate and conflicting movements; it was only by coming together to fight all forms of oppression that organizers could truly free all people. In 1977 the Collective issued a statement which proclaimed, among other things, that “work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work…and not for the profit of the bosses,” but added, “We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.”
Many of the core concepts of intersectionality can be traced back to nineteenth century figures like the abolitionist and women’s rights crusader Sojourner Truth, who wanted to be recognized for and freed from the specific indignities she had suffered as a Black woman in the United States. Truth is said to have challenged attendees of the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, to include women like her in their conception of women’s rights: “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”
Reproductive Justice Around the World
Defending the rights and dignity of all women often means confronting state power, as Irish women did when they took to the streets to demand the repeal of Ireland’s abortion ban in 2017 and Polish and Mexican women did when they protested their countries’ abortion laws en masse in 2020. Women in Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, and other Latin American countries followed suit in 2021. In the last decade and a half Marea Verde (Green Wave), a Latin American women’s movement, has waged “aggressive campaigns” and led mass popular protests “organized around legal action and legislative demands that center broadly on women’s autonomy and rights” that have helped liberalize abortions laws throughout the region, as reproductive rights litigation expert Ximena Casas recently explained in The New York Times.
Reproductive justice in the United States
Abortion is, for now, legal in the U.S. but heavily restricted. Women, many of whom are poor, immigrants, and/or women of color, have been prosecuted for ending pregnancies and having miscarriages. United Nations human rights monitors harshly criticized the state of Texas for a particularly draconian 2021 anti-abortion law which, they said, violated international law by endangering women’s lives and denying them the basic right to control their bodies. Melissa Upreti, a human rights lawyer tasked by the United Nations Human Rights Council with fighting to end discrimination against women and girls, characterized the law as “sex and gender-based discrimination at its worst,” adding that it has “not only taken Texas backward, but in the eyes of the international community, it has taken the entire country backward.”
The U.S. has the highest maternal death rate among developed nations. In 2018, there were 17 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births in the U.S., which is more than double the ratio of most other high-income countries. It has far more OB/GYNS than midwives and an overall shortage of maternal health care providers of any kind relative to births. The U.S. is the only developed country that does not guarantee access to provider home visits or paid parental leave to women who have just given birth.
Government officials have sterilized thousands of U.S. women without their full knowledge or consent and required many more to have fewer children than they wanted in exchange for desperately needed financial support. These policies have disproportionately affected Native Americans, Black people, Latinas, low-income people, and people with intellectual disabilities. From 1950 to 1966, Black women in North Carolina were sterilized at over three times the rate of white women and over 12 times the rate of white men.
Reproductive justice in Canada
Inducing an abortion was a crime in Canada until 1988, when the country’s Supreme Court determined its abortion law was unconstitutional and struck it down. Abortion has since been legal at any stage in a woman’s pregnancy and is covered as a publicly funded medical procedure under the Canada Health Act, but provinces such as New Brunswick place limits on these funds. In New Brunswick only hospital abortions are covered by insurance; abortions at private clinics are not insured. As in the United States, access to abortion varies widely throughout the country. Inhabitants of many rural provinces and territories have access to only one or two providers. Canadian officials have a long and ugly history of sterilizing Indigenous women without their knowledge or consent.
Reproductive justice in India
India allows abortion during the first trimester with approval by a medical practitioner and under specific conditions, including when the pregnancy is the result of a rape and when a patient’s life or health is at risk. In cases involving severe fetal anomaly, a three-person medical board composed of a gynecologist, a pediatrician, and a radiologist must confirm the diagnosis in order for a pregnant person to access care, a requirement that is particularly difficult to fulfill outside of major cities.
Activists in India have been seeking to reform the country’s abortion laws for over a decade. In March 2020, a new set of amendments to the 1971 Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act were introduced in parliament. Critics have suggested the proposed amendments were inadequate and not framed “within a rights-based context for a person seeking abortion.”
Reproductive justice in Poland
Poland has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe. The government instituted a near-total ban on abortion in October 2020, triggering the country’s largest protests since the fall of communism. In September 2021 a 30-year-old woman named Izabela died of septic shock after doctors refused to perform a life-saving abortion. “The baby weighs 485 grams. For now, thanks to the abortion law, I have to lie down. And there is nothing they can do,” she wrote in a text message to her mother shortly before her death. “They'll wait until it dies or something begins, and if not, I can expect sepsis.”
Draconian abortion laws notwithstanding, Poland has one of the world’s lowest maternal mortality rates. Its National Health Fund, for which the vast majority of Polish residents are eligible, covers most of the costs associated with giving birth in a hospital. The government also covers uninsured women during pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period. Low-income parents receive a government allowance for their first child, and parents of two or more children get around $130 per month per child. Every woman, regardless of insurance status, gets a home visit from a midwife within days of giving birth. The Health Ministry guarantees a woman's right to choose the place and method of birth, decide who is in the delivery room, and be with her newborn for at least two hours after giving birth.
Reproductive justice in El Salvador
Latin American women, particularly in El Salvador, have served decades-long prison sentences for having miscarriages the authorities claimed were self-induced. El Salvador is one of four countries in Latin America with no-exceptions abortion bans. In 2021, the authorities freed three Salvadoran women who were sentenced to 30 years in prison for what the authorities claimed were self-induced abortions. A fourth woman was released in 2022. In 2021, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found El Salvador responsible for the death of a Salvadoran woman sentenced to 30 years in prison for aggravated homicide after losing a pregnancy in 2008. The woman, who had two children, died of cancer in prison two years later, partly as a result of inadequate medical care. Among other reforms, the Court ordered El Salvador to tighten regulations governing doctor-patient confidentiality and, in a ruling that applies to countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, ruled that health care providers can no longer report women seeking abortion care and other reproductive services to law enforcement.
Reproductive justice in Ghana
In 2022, Ghana’s national health insurance program expanded to include free long-term contraception with the goal of sparing millions of women already covered by the country’s national health insurance program from paying out-of-pocket costs for effective long-term contraception. Ghana has high maternal mortality rates—its maternal mortality ratio is 308 per 100,000 live births—high rates of sexually transmitted infections, and low levels of contraceptive use. Women in rural communities have a particularly hard time accessing birth control and other reproductive health care services. Abortion is still a criminal offense in Ghana, with exceptions in cases of rape, incest, serious fetal anomaly, and/or risk to the woman's health. Around 22–30 percent of maternal deaths in Ghana are thought to be the result of unsafe abortions.
A few last words on reproductive justice
In the last 25 years, reproductive justice advocates have worked to broaden the view of an occasionally myopic pro-choice movement overly focused on electing Democrats and pressuring sympathetic administrations to appoint liberal justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. Having a Democrat in the White House and a more liberal Supreme Court does make it likelier that American women will retain certain rights. But it would profoundly improve the lives of all U.S. women, and women and people capable of giving birth around the world, if governments treated control over one’s reproductive and family life as a fundamental human right, rather than a privilege reserved for those with the means to obtain needed services.
“Every child a wanted child” has long been a credo of the pro-choice movement. Reproductive justice seeks to take this laudable goal several steps further by challenging us to build a world in which every child is not only “wanted” by its parents at birth, but well provided for. It offers a path to creating societies that truly honor life by treating all who are capable of creating it, and every person born, as worthy of love, respect, and care—and investing our collective resources accordingly.
[post_title] => A beginner's guide to reproductive justice
[post_excerpt] => Reproductive justice combines tenets of human rights, social justice, and reproductive rights.
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Menstrual inequity is not unique to developing nations. It affects all low-income girls and women.
What if someone’s circumstances forced them to experience their period without access to sanitary napkins or tampons? Would they go to school or to work worrying every minute about blood soaking through their underwear, whether the makeshift pad they made with a fistful of toilet paper, a dirty rag, or even cow dung or leaves stayed in place, whether it increased their risk of bacterial infection?
Would you?
Millions of young girls and women experience their monthly periods under these undignified and unhygienic circumstances. They miss school, they miss work, and as a result their earning potential and opportunities for social and financial advancement in their lives are irrevocably affected. In some extreme situations, young women even exchange sex for money to buy menstrual supplies. This is referred to as period poverty.
Period poverty creates poverty
“Imagine not being able to sit through class,” says Jessica Williams, Chief Communications Officer for Days for Girls, a U.S.-based non-profit organization that aims to improve educational and livelihood outcomes for women and girls by “turning periods into pathways.”
“You can’t work, you end up staying home, all these missed opportunities to contribute and make money. Period poverty literally creates poverty.”
The World Bank estimates 500 million women and girls globally lack access to adequate facilities for menstrual hygiene management. That means access to basic needs like sanitary napkins, tampons, toilet paper, separate bathrooms with a door that can safely close behind them and running water to wash their hands and underwear. Half the world’s population in developing and poor countries lacks the fundamental necessities a woman needs to deal safely and with dignity with a bodily function that recurs monthly for 40 years of their lives.
Operating in over 144 countries in six continents, Days for Girls creates washable and reusable menstrual health products and kits that include carry pouches, underwear, soap and washcloths, and a menstrual cup alternative. These products are manufactured and sold locally by women, providing them with a dependable stream of revenue.
Period inequity is our problem, too
While menstrual inequity is far more pervasive in developing nations, it is not unique to far-away countries. Low-income girls and women, women in Indigenous communities, and women experiencing homelessness in western countries—where supermarket and pharmacy aisles are brimming with all brands, colours, sizes, and shapes of sanitary products—are still not able to afford basic menstrual products.
Many countries are now having long-overdue conversations about making sanitary products free or at the very least tax-free and affordable—finally seeing them as medical necessities women don’t have a choice about purchasing. Scotland was the first country in the world to make period products free. It’s perhaps no accident the bill was first introduced by a woman and passed by a government that has a woman at the helm. Countries like Canada and Australia have removed the GST from period products, New Zealand and a handful of U.S. States have already mandated free period products in schools. Recent U.S. studies have shown that about a quarter of menstruating students struggle to access period products, with both anxiety, stigma, and educational barriers cited as the direct result.
Breaking the stigma
Period poverty goes beyond a lack of access to period products. It also refers to taboos attached to menstruation.
“In some cultures, women on their period are considered unclean,” says Williams. “Our job is to help people overcome this, educate them on the subject, teach young boys, their brothers, fathers, husbands, about female bodies so they can be more understanding and supportive of what is essentially a basic human right.”
Nepali schoolgirls holding bags of washable menstrual products.
In Nepal, one of the countries Days for Girls operates in, menstruating women are considered bad luck. The stigma forces them into isolated menstruating huts every month, which makes them vulnerable to rape, animal attacks, and bad weather. Many young girls have died while alone. Aside from the physical dangers involved in forced isolation, superstitions like these also degrade women and position them as inferior in a society that should see them as equals.
The scent of solidarity
Barb Stegemann, founder and CEO of The 7 Virtues, a perfume company, decided to help the Nepali women who are shunted into menstruating huts.
On March 8, International Women’s Day, she’s launching Lotus Pear, a scent that uses sustainably sourced geranium from Egypt, with part of the proceeds helping to advance menstrual equity for 700 young women in Nepal.
“It’s about women and power, the loss of it, and getting it back,” Stegemann says. “Each of us is a potential agent of change.” The entrepreneur says she prefers empowerment over charity because it creates self-sufficiency and confidence in one’s abilities. As a young teenager, she saw first-hand how poverty can undermine one’s potential and self-esteem.
“We fell on hard times when I was a young,” she says. “My mom started having health issues and all of sudden… record scratch. We’re living in a trailer on welfare and mom is in the hospital all the time.”
Stegemann says she knows what period poverty feels like.
“Not to get gross,” she says, “but we were poor, I would often use toilet paper.”
Period kits that Day for Girls distributes.
Women lifting other women
Women helping empower other women is a running theme through Stegemann’s career and overall philosophy. When she launched her business 12 years ago, she worked out of her garage and bankrolled the venture with her credit card. She aspired to support families in war-torn nations by flexing women’s buying power to reverse issues of war and poverty.
Her fragrance collection is made with natural essential oils purchased and often manufactured in countries rebuilding after war or strife, from Haiti to Afghanistan and Rwanda, what Stegemann refers to as “retail activism.”
Impact partners like her are essential to the work non-profits like Days for Girls do.
“Without impact partners like The 7 Virtues, we wouldn’t be able to do our work because they essentially fund the work that we do,” says Williams.
Like Stegemann, the founder of Days for Girls is also a woman whose actions have been shaped by difficult personal experiences.
Celeste Mergens was born in Oklahoma, to a family that faced poverty, spent time living in a car and often went without food. At the age of seven she was raped. When she heard that some North American men were travelling to poor countries with suitcases full of menstrual products these women needed just so they could sexually assault them, she knew she had to do something. Since 2008, her organization’s two-pronged approach to period poverty—the sale and manufacture of menstrual pads and the education to eliminate taboos—has changed countless of lives.
“I was told over 400 women immediately came forward for the program in Nepal,” says Stegemann. “The organization has invested for so long in the community there’s now trust, and I think that’s what’s so exciting, it’s a movement.”
The invisible problem
The global pandemic has only exacerbated the challenges women and girls face. A recent report indicates almost 10 million children worldwide might never return to school. It predicts girls will have a harder time than boys, because many will be forced into early marriage or the labor market as families struggle with extreme poverty. With these obstacles in mind, efforts to tackle period poverty and the limitations it imposes on women worldwide can only be encouraged.
“I think the issue of period poverty should be part of everyone’s political platform,” says Stegemann. “It would be refreshing to hear a candidate say, ‘These are the things that advance a community,’ and find a way for companies to provide them for free.”
Stegemann says she was shocked to learn that a lack of sanitary products in the north of Canada, where a box of tampons can run from $16 to more than $45, remains a huge problem among Indigenous communities.
“Was I living around a rock?” she asks. “Why don’t more people know about these things?”
[post_title] => Why period poverty is everyone's problem
[post_excerpt] => The World Bank estimates 500 million women and girls globally lack access to adequate facilities for menstrual hygiene management. That means access to basic needs like sanitary napkins, tampons, toilet paper, separate bathrooms with a door that can safely close behind them and running water to wash their hands and underwear.
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Fired from their jobs, their bank accounts frozen, facing death threats, the country's 270 female judges are in exile or in hiding.
Only six months ago Tayeba Parsa, 34, a female judge in Afghanistan, was determined to keep advancing women’s rights despite threats that Kabul would soon fall to the Taliban.
“There were times when I was really scared, but I always went to work,” Parsa tells me by phone from Warsaw. She has been living there with her elderly father and husband since last August, when the Taliban took over Kabul, waiting for news of a student visa from a country willing to take her in. “It was my profession, I loved my job, I studied for years to become a judge. I didn’t want to give it up.”
In the six months since the Taliban took over, the rights of women in Afghanistan have been all but eliminated. Girls older than 12 have few opportunities to obtain an education, while women fighting to hold on to any progress made over the last two decades face threats, prison, and often death. In this reality, women who not only have a higher education than most, but also practiced law in a position of authority over men, run the risk of execution without trial. In January 2021, unknown assailants on a motorcycle gunned down two Afghan women judges who were on their way to work.
When Parsa fled Afghanistan she gave up not only her career, but her entire life as she knew it.
“I was at home for three days when we heard news that the Taliban were at all checkpoints,” she says. “I collected all my documents and started destroying case notes to hide my identity.”
A former judge in the commercial division of the appeals court of Kabul province, Parsa is a member of the International Association of Women Judges (IAWJ) and volunteered to act as communications officer for the local branch. This association automatically placed her at higher risk.
“The Taliban consider every Afghan who collaborates with foreigners an infidel, a traitor,” she says. “When I was a judge, I was receiving constant anonymous death threats.” To avoid being targeted by the Taliban, Parsa and her fellow judges hid their identities when going to work and avoided riding in officially marked cars. She says she knew the dangers and accepted them.
“You never knew if you were going to come home,” she said.
In Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, all women and girls are at risk. But no one is more in danger than women lawyers, judges, journalists, and police officers. Women in key positions of power were especially targeted by this regressive militant group, which seeks to enforce an extremist interpretation of Islam. As soon as the Taliban took over, the women lost their jobs and saw their bank accounts frozen. They knew their lives were in imminent danger.
Afghan women judges were instrumental in challenging their deeply patriarchal society by demonstrating that violence against women and girls is not only wrong, but a punishable criminal offence. Putting aside fears for their own safety, they convicted and sentenced the men who stood trial in their courtrooms for rape, kidnapping, murder, forced marriage, or preventing women from going to school.
The new Taliban government has released criminals whom Parsa, and approximately 270 other female judges, had sentenced to prison after they were convicted of crimes. With these men now free to take revenge, the women were in grave danger.
Nabila, who requested that her last name be withheld, was a family court judge who granted divorce petitions to many women.
“Afghan law stipulates that a wife can request a divorce if her husband has been jailed for more than five years,” she tells me. “Some of these men were dangerous criminals who had committed serious crimes like murder and kidnapping. I granted these divorces according to the rule of law, but when the Taliban arrived, they released many of these criminals who came looking for me. I was no longer safe.”
Nabila is one of 26 female Afghan judges and lawyers who, along with their families, arrived in Athens from Afghanistan via Georgia this past September. While she, her husband, and their three children were eligible for evacuation, their immediate families remain behind. They fear reprisals against them and worry about their day-to-day living conditions, with a worsening humanitarian crisis on the ground.
“We’re always calling them, always checking up on them,” she said, adding that her relatives have had to change homes frequently for their safety.
International sisterhood
The International Association of Women Judges, which represents more than 6,500 judges in over 100 countries, has been instrumental in helping their Afghan colleagues get out of the country and in amplifying their message.
Mona Lynch, a Supreme Court judge in Nova Scotia and regional director of the International Association of Women, emphasized the urgency of getting those women out of Afghanistan.
“We have been trying to assist them in any way we can over the past few months,” she says. “These brave women have contributed for 20 years to maintaining the rule of law and stable governance in Afghanistan.”
“None of them wanted to leave their country, they simply had no choice,” said Judge Lynch. “And the ones still left behind are getting more and more desperate as the circumstances deteriorate. They need help and we need to be their voice.”
Education is everything
While waiting in Poland, Parsa has been using her free time to improve her English. After applying for scholarships at German, French, and American universities she obtained a visa for the UK, which she accepted—but at a cost.
“I’m happy because it’s an English-speaking country, and I can’t imagine the additional hurdle of learning another language right now, but the visas are only for me and my husband. I would have to leave my father behind. I don’t know what to do.”
She hopes to return to Afghanistan one day and help rebuild the country, but right now it’s only a vague dream, fueled by cautious optimism.
“The situation as it is right now won’t stand,” she says. “It’s intolerable, there’s no rule of law. Trials are being conducted by illiterate people. I want to be the voice of all Afghan women judges, those who are still there, still in hiding, still in danger, and those who have been evacuated but haven’t been offered visas,” she said, making a plea for the international community to help extricate the women still in hiding in Afghanistan, and to help settle permanently the women who got out but are still waiting for visas.
Nabila’s husband Asadullah, who is a construction engineer, has been translating parts of the conversation in his fluent English. In answer to the interviewer’s question, he described Afghanistan’s immediate future as “dark,” adding that this was the case “especially for women."
“I believe in women’s rights, they’re half of society,” he says. “I have three daughters and I saw a dark future for them there. My girls would not have been able to attend school. The Taliban may have promised that they can go, but I don’t believe them.”
Life in Limbo in Athens
Some 200 female Afghan judges, Nabila among them, are hoping Canada will fast-track their arrival, since they qualify under a resettlement program for Afghan refugees in danger for having held leadership or human-rights positions.
Greece has welcomed more women fleeing Afghanistan than any other country so far. Amed Khan, an American philanthropist who was instrumental in helping many Afghan judges find a temporary home in Greece, said in an article for The Greek Reporter that it reflected an openness he saw from smaller governments that was missing from the world’s biggest economic powers.
“The only political leadership I’ve seen is from smaller countries like Greece, Albania, Qatar, North Macedonia; it’s not the G7,” said Khan. “A lot of countries made a lot of money in Afghanistan and now they want to wash their hands and look for the next opportunity.”
Despite her gratitude, Nabila wants to put down permanent roots and is waiting eagerly for news of permanent resettlement. She is worried about the children being unable to attend school in Greece, because they are in the country on temporary visas.
A painfully slow process
Few countries have provided easy pathways for these women. They are scattered with their families in more than 17 countries around the world, and only a small number have been resettled permanently in their final destinations.
The American Bar Association has created the Afghanistan Response Project and the International Association of Women Judges has launched a fundraising campaign, but these efforts rely more on individual goodwill than government assistance.
The Canadian government has expanded its special immigration program to include women leaders and human rights defenders, as well as persecuted minorities, but advocates say the process is too slow. Immigration Minister Sean Fraser recently suggested that it could take up to two years for the government to meet its promise of resettling 40,000 Afghan refugees. Fewer than 7,000 have arrived in Canada so far.
And so these women wait, stuck in limbo. They can’t dream or plant roots in a temporary home. They worry about their future.
“These are professional, talented, brave women,” Parsa tells me. “They fought for the rule of law in Afghanistan. They stood strong against threats and political pressure. They’re educated and driven, they deserve to be offered scholarships and a new life, they are the future of Afghanistan.”
[post_title] => Afghanistan's female judges lost everything when the Taliban took over
[post_excerpt] => In Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, all women and girls are at risk. But no one is more in danger than women lawyers, judges, journalists, and police officers. Women in key positions of power were especially targeted.
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Ajo, a traditional microsavings system based on trust, allowed women in the informal economy to survive the pandemic lockdown.
The outdoor markets of Lagos are a noisy clutter of shops and makeshift stalls. The traders are mostly women who call out their wares loudly, with customers clustering in front of the stalls to haggle while the business owner multitasks and chats with them all. The stall owners are friendly but competitive, bantering with one another all day.
In this familiar chaos, the women form sisterhoods and support systems. One of these systems is called “ajo” (or “esusu” in eastern Nigeria). It is an ancient informal cooperative savings culture passed down for generations, with the women contributing a portion of their earnings on a weekly or monthly basis and each receiving the full amount, in turn, to invest in her business.
This is a typical example of how an ajo works:
In a 12-unit rotation for 12,000 naira ($29.01) monthly, each member contributes 1,000 naira ($2.42) per month, choosing a number or month when they would like to receive their due. They give their money to a thrift collector, who is responsible for disbursing the collected money at the end of each agreed-upon period, and for keeping the women’s savings. At the end of the rotation, a member can cancel her contribution or start again. But a unit of 12 does not mean 12 people. It could also mean 12 “hands,” or contributions. Some members might decide to contribute two hands, or double the amount (2,000 naira), to collect double (24,000 naira).
The foundational principles of ajo are trust, familiarity, and an uninterrupted cycle of donation. These might not seem like concrete measures for financial security, but they are remarkably successful—most of the time. The restrictions and privations of the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted this usually reliable traditional micro-savings system. Women make up half of Nigeria’s informal labor force, which is unregulated and often exploited. Whether they are traders, farmers, or domestic workers, these women are often the family’s secret breadwinners (in this conservative patriarchal culture, the man must always be seen as the financial head of the family). The pandemic lockdowns, with income drastically cut due to restrictions that for several months kept market hours reduced to four from the usual 60 per week, made ajo more important than ever.
Surviving the pandemic, despite the prevalence of disinformation
In December 2021 I visited Addo market in Lagos to speak with some of these women. Ify, a single mother in her mid-thirties who sells dried fish, told me she panicked when the government announced a lockdown in March 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. For several months hardly any customers visited the market; the few who came to shop were limited to one at a time. According to the women, if stallholders neglected to wear masks, the police forced them to buy one from them at exorbitant prices, or even kicked them out of the market. I could not independently verify this, but have no reason to doubt the women given the Nigerian police's well-documented corruption. To save on the expense of buying a new disposable mask to wear each day, Ify bought a reusable face shield.
Ify said she was not worried about catching the virus. She gets her information on COVID-19 from mainstream news outlets, but her opinions reflect the disinformation that circulates on social media. She said that one woman in the area died after she was vaccinated, although she acknowledged never having met her. Ify said she never met anyone who had caught the virus, nor did she believe she would catch it, which is why she did not plan to be vaccinated. She asked why the government was mandating vaccines when they had not done the same for HIV tests or antiretrovirals.
The government is, in fact, not mandating vaccines. As in other countries, vaccine passports are required to enter certain public spaces and in order to travel.
Ronke, a 21-year-old college student who helps at her mother’s vegetable stall during semester breaks, could only sell fresh produce to neighbors for their meals during the lockdown. “I saw no dead bodies or sick people in Nigeria even on social media, me and my family believe COVID-19 is fake and we will not be taking the vaccine,” she said.
Nigeria’s first phase of the vaccine rollout was in March–April 2021; it was limited to essential workers and the elderly, which excluded most of the women who work at the market. Before the lockdown, these women, some of whom have little or no formal education, received health information from the local radio, community workers, and primary healthcare centers. But the pandemic exposed them to unverified sources and misinformation on WhatsApp and Facebook.
Family and friends innocently share viral messages via WhatSapp groups; the messages, in pidgin English and various local languages, recommend homemade cures for the virus, like herbal steaming. Or they contain disinformation, like the claim that Covid vaccines inject magnetic chips into the body. According to this conspiracy theory, the chips attract metals, like spoons, which stick to the skin. According to another conspiracy theory the virus is fake and the pandemic restrictions are just another government ploy to steal public funds. Since people receive these messages from those they trust, like their faith leaders or educated members of their families, they believe they are credible.
How COVID affected the ajo system
Because they made so little money during the lockdowns and were struggling to feed their families on their reduced earnings, neither Ify nor Ronke could keep up their ajo contributions, nor could many other women in their groups. With contributions reduced by 70 percent, their ajo unit could not stay afloat. Contributions stopped, pending the lifting of the lockdown and the full re-opening of the markets. Ronke refers to the semblance of normalcy that followed the 2020 lockdown as the “end of Corona,” a sentiment shared by most women in the market. If they may trade, then “corona” must be over, they say, associating the virus with the period of restrictions and nothing more. These women go about their business without face masks or social distancing. The police no longer compel them to abide by any pandemic restrictions.
A study of the impact of COVID-19 on women’s savings groups carried out by a collaboration of think tanks and researchers, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Africa Center for Systematic Reviews, and Makerere University, found that households with women who are in informal savings groups were less likely to experience food insecurity and more likely to have savings, which was critical in getting through the pandemic. Women’s savings groups showed more potential for resilience and provided women with a platform for leadership and community responsiveness.
Ajo, however, still carries risk. The women in Addo market lost their savings during the pandemic lockdown to a thrift collector who suddenly “disappeared with everything.” In case of death or serious illnesses, no one is liable for the loss. Sometimes, bad loans accumulate from members who misappropriate funds. That is why researchers recommend that financial institutions and governments offer further support for ajo.
Beatrice Joseph is a thrift collector and restaurateur in Yola, Adamawa State, in northeast Nigeria, an area that has been plagued by terrorists and bandits. She manages the contributions of women across five markets in the state, engaging them in financial literacy training, bookkeeping, and loan repayment. During the lockdown, Beatrice lost all her investments when her restaurant was vandalized. She managed to keep her business and that of her members thanks to a partnership with Riby, a digital financial services (DFS) platform that supports financial cooperatives and trade groups in Nigeria. These services act as the central collector while simplifying the banking process by accepting social credit as collateral (the group stands as guarantor), using USSD codes and text messages instead of complicated apps, and securing their savings. This reduces the risk associated with ajo, while providing financial independence for the women by converting their savings to investments.
Ekundayo Kiyesi, general manager of Riby, describes the thrift collector as an individual microfinance bank that provides accountability, accessibility, and security to the ajo for a monthly service charge that is commonly around 25 cents. Platforms like Riby are formalizing the ajo system for larger collectives in markets and cottage industries like the unit Beatrice manages, but among smaller, homogenous groups some believe ajo should remain communal and independent.
Joy Ehonwa, a freelance writer and book editor in Lagos who runs a small ajo group for employed middle-class women, is one of them. Joy created a system of accountability for her group, a record and digitization process that involves registering a next of kin—which, she laughingly assured me, she had never had a reason to use.
Financial insecurity is just as much of an issue for women working in formal business employment, as it is for those whose income is derived from the informal economy. According to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), approximately half the Nigerian working population earns less than 700 naira ($1.70) per day, even in formal employment; in cases where income is determined by gender (e.g. in the case of office assistants), women earn even less. With such low income and no collateral, they can neither save money nor afford to take a loan. This is where ajo comes in; it is a saving and interest-free loan system that they can depend on.
Nigerian women have more financial agency today than ever before, but societal and cultural norms are still very conservative. Husbands thus control the family finances due to the widely held belief that a man whose wife is financially independent is emasculated. A lack of education, religious and gender bias, and low trust in financial service providers are also reasons for financial dependence. But when women are empowered to earn and invest, they drive innovation, invest in health and child development and increase productivity and economic growth. The economic strength of a country is directly proportional to the economic strength of its women. Despite the digitization of ajo, it will remain a fluid system driven by community, trust and independence. With some financial education, Nigeria’s hardworking, innovative women will save their country’s declining economy.
[post_title] => How a traditional microsavings system enabled Nigerian women to save their businesses during the pandemic
[post_excerpt] => Ajo, a traditional microsavings system based on trust, allowed women in the informal economy to survive the pandemic lockdown.
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[post_content] => Forced sterilizations on detained migrant women is in line with the US's long, sordid history of eugenics.
Last month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) briefed House Democrats on allegations concerning several gynecological procedures, including hysterectomies, that a physician performed on migrant women in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody at the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia—allegedly without their informed consent. The incidents became public knowledge in September 2020, after a consortium of human rights groups filed an explosive report on behalf of Nurse Dawn Wooten, a whistleblower who worked at the detention center.
In a December 3 letter signed by the chairmen of the House Committees on Homeland Security and Oversight and Reform, legislators wrote: “We are concerned that Dr. [Mahendra] Amin may have been performing unnecessary surgical procedures to defraud DHS and the Federal government without consequences.” The letter, which is addressed to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, also requested information on the steps the Department has taken to review treatment Dr. Amin provided and ensure migrants receive proper medical care in the future.
The Conversationalist confirmed a December 15 DHS briefing with two committee staffers, both of whom declined to share additional details about the information presented. A staffer from the Committee on Homeland Security clarified that this was a DHS review of the Irwin County Detention Center and not a general review of migrant detention facilities, although Congress requested the Department to brief them on the matter months ago.
The December 3 letter says, “the Committee on Homeland Security requested a briefing on August 10, 2021, on DHS’s efforts to review the suitability of detention facilities. To date, DHS has not fulfilled this request. We ask that you ensure the Committees receive this briefing without further delay.”
On January 3, the DHS released a report that found “the facility’s chronic care, continuity of care, and medical policies and procedures to be inadequate” but did not find that unnecessary or unwanted hysterectomies had been performed. The report does, however, quote an ICE employee who alleges that there is a systemic issue in the ICE leadership that makes the agency “unwilling to listen to concerns or complaints about detention facilities.”
Nurse Dawn Wooten worked at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) for three years. She says that Dr. Amin, who was referred to as the “uterus collector,” had performed hysterectomies on at least 20 women without their consent. Many of these women did not speak English well enough to consent to the procedures or understand what had been done to them. Thirty-five women are now suing ICE over Dr. Amin’s abuse.ICDC, run by a for-profit prison company called LaSalle Corrections, also came under harsh scrutiny for their botched COVID-19 response, which sparked hunger strikes and protests among detainees early in the pandemic.
The Georgia-based advocacy group Project South filed the complaint, which describes a filthy, insect-infested facility with inadequate COVID-19 safety precautions, where staff refused to test symptomatic detainees and fabricated medical records. Detainees who protested the conditions were punished with beatings, pepper spray, and solitary confinement. Nurse Wooten told The Intercept that she was demoted after raising concerns with her supervisors.
“It is deeply concerning that neither DHS nor the private prison company running Irwin have yet to face accountability for the medical abuse that migrant women faced at Irwin,” Azadeh Shahshahani, the Legal and Advocacy Director with Project South said in an email statement to The Conversationalist. “This is setting an awful precedent. Congress and the Biden Administration must act now.”
The joint committee investigation subpoenaed LaSalle Corrections in November 2020 after the company refused to turn over medical records on the procedures Dr. Amin performed. Dr. Tony Ogburn, Department Chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, reviewed those records. He concluded that Dr. Amin’s care “did not meet acceptable standards.”
“My concern is that he was not competent and simply did the same evaluation and treatment on most patients because that is what he knew how to do, and/or he did tests and treatments that generated a significant amount of reimbursement without benefitting most patients,” Dr. Ogburn concluded in a November 2021 letter to the Georgia Medical Board.
Following pressure from lawmakers, activists, and advocacy groups, DHS Secretary Mayorkas announced he would sever ties with LaSalle Corrections in May 2021, though migrants were not removed from the facilities until September 2021—a full year after Project South filed Nurse Wooten’s whistleblower complaint with the ICE administration.
While these abuses came to light during the Trump presidency the lack of accountability continues under the Biden Administration, with migrant arrests now at a 21-year high. The current administration has ramped up deportations under a Trump-era health policy that allows the government to expedite the process without giving migrants the opportunity to apply for asylum. The government claims the rushed deportations are a COVID-19 safety precaution.
Under Title 42, the Trump Administration expelled 444,000 migrants. Under Biden, this number has already reached 690,000. COVID-19 still runs rampant in migrant detention centers and in prisons such as New York City’s Rikers Island, where more than one-fifth of the incarcerated population has tested positive.
Immigration advocateshave beendisappointed with the new administration. Since taking office, Biden has filed 296 executive orders on immigration, 89 of which have reversed actions taken by the Trump administration such as the travel ban on Muslim majority nations and construction of the border wall.
When Dawn Wooten stepped forward to make a whistleblower complaint about the medical abuses at ICDC, international headlines about “mass hysterectomies” sparked outrage and comparisons to Nazi Germany. Others placed the story within a long history of American eugenics that targeted Black, brown, disabled, and indigenous women.
“People with Spanish surnames were disproportionately sterilized during the period of peak eugenics in the 1920s through the 1950s,” says Heather Dron, a Research Fellow at the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab at the University of Michigan.
During the twentieth century, U.S. states subjected over 60,000 people to sterilization without consent, with over 30 states establishing eugenics boards. State governments targeted minorities, the disabled, and others who did not fit into “social norms” for forced sterilization.
From 1929 to 1974 North Carolina ordered as many as 7,600 women sterilized— a majority of whom were Black women from low-income backgrounds. Margaret Sanger and Dr. Gregory Pincus exploited government birth control centers in Puerto Rico to subject one-third of the female population to sterilization procedures, often without their consent, purportedly to address “overpopulation” and poverty on the island. Under the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970 physicians sterilized an estimated 25 percent of Native American women of childbearing age in a six-year period.
Adolf Hitler writes admiringly in Mein Kampf of eugenics policies practiced in the U.S. “There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but [the United States], in which an effort is made to consult reason at least partially. By refusing immigrants on principle to elements in poor health, by simply excluding certain races from naturalization, it professes in slow beginnings a view that is peculiar to the People's State.”
Heather Dron’s research focuses on eugenic sterilization in California, where roughly 20,000, or one-third, of U.S. sterilizations were performed starting from 1909.
“There was a law on the books between 1909 and 1979 that allowed for the sterilization of institutionalized people housed in psychiatric hospitals, or in homes for what was then called the ‘feeble-minded,’” Dron says. “Sterilization was seen as a solution to all these other social problems. They saw it as a way to keep these people out of institutions.”
While eugenics laws in California have been repealed, sterilizations have continued. A 2013 investigation by Mother Jones revealed that 148 women in two California prisons were sterilized from 2006 to 2010.
“You get a similar dynamic there,” says Dron, referring to the recent ICE cases. “There were a few people who were performing a lot of procedures who seemed like they didn’t have a great ethical practice in general.”
There is no evidence to suggest that Dr. Mahendra Amin was motivated to perform these surgeries for anything other than financial compensation. Last month's letter from House Democrats expressing concerns that Dr. Amin performed these surgeries to “defraud the government” further supports this theory.
“It sounds like there’s some sort of incentive to perform surgical interventions because you’re paid per intervention and some people took advantage of that,” Dron says of Dr. Amin’s case. “But you have to read that with a little bit of skepticism because often we point to these bad actors and say it’s just them as opposed to a system that systematically thinks that people who are incarcerated shouldn’t have kids.”
The breaking news of hysterectomies performed on migrant women in ICE custody barely made it through one news cycle before news of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death broke just days later. Her death was followed by a swift Republican push to nominate a third Supreme Court Justice under Trump just weeks ahead of the 2020 election.
The media might choose to remember the hysterectomies performed at the Georgia ICE facility as a particularly egregious act that happened under a uniquely evil administration. That would be a huge mistake.
According to a December 2021 article in TheTexas Tribune, the number of immigrants held in ICE detention centers has increased by more than 50 percent since Biden took office. Moreover, the investigation into Dr. Amin’s medical practice has been conducted on Biden’s watch.
Detentions have been accompanied by a spike in border crossings in 2021. Biden has downplayed this as a seasonal phenomenon while Republicans have pointed to plans to offer 11 million migrants a path to citizenship as cause for the surge. Others say the migrants are motivated by growing instability in their home countries. With less attention on the issue of migration, Biden has gotten away with his continuation of the “remain in Mexico” policy by pointing to Title 42, which has been extended twice by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as a matter of public health.
Under the Biden Administration, we no longer hear overtly fascist rhetoric from the White House aimed at migrants, but detainees at ICE facilities continue to suffer from extreme medical neglect and abuse as COVID-19 cases soar.
In order to prevent us from reliving the past, we need to understand the circumstances that led us to where we are today. Ending Trump’s remain in Mexico policies, fulfilling a campaign promise to offer migrants a path to citizenship, and holding Dr. Amin and LaSalle Corrections responsible for their medical abuses would be a great place to start.
[post_title] => The 'uterus collector': the surgeon who performed coerced hysterectomies on detained migrant women
[post_excerpt] => The forced sterilizations are in line with the U.S.'s long, sordid, racist history of eugenics.
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[post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02
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