Six on History: Women's History is Every Month
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"When Sarah Hamilton was in high school, Hillary Clinton was running for president, and it made a big impression. Her candidacy made Ms. Hamilton want to become a leader someday too, she said, and maybe even run for office.
“Before Donald Trump won, I had in my head being a woman doesn’t really matter,” she said. “I think it’s really damaging. All of those women have shown you can rise above that stuff, and you can be in those positions and succeed. But I think for a lot of little girls and people like me, they see that and think, ‘If that’s what it takes to achieve that position, I don’t think it’s worth it.’”
This generation of teenagers was raised hearing that girls could be anything they wanted — maybe even president. Many of them say it’s important for leadership to be more inclusive than in the past. But they are also cleareyed about the sexism female leaders face, as are their male peers, according to a new survey of 604 teenagers by Dynata for The New York Times.
Seven in 10 teenage girls and boys said they thought a woman would be elected president in the next decade. But 80 percent of girls and 74 percent of boys said women face sexism when they run, and just half of teenagers thought men and women had an equal chance of being elected, found the survey. It included 327 girls, nearly half of whom were Black, Hispanic, Native American or Asian-American.
Ms. Hamilton was part of a group of young women who were first interviewed as Oregon high schoolers in 2016 (we followed up with them now that they can vote). The last four years, they said, had opened their eyes to systemic sexism and racism. For some, it moved them to activism or leadership. For others, like Ms. Hamilton, it made them search elsewhere for a way to make a difference. All said it emphasized for them the importance of diversity in government.
“As these girls come into voting age, they are going to insist that the spaces that they enter are representative of the people,” said Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, a political scientist at Purdue. “That is going to be remarkable — and it’s going to create some problems for the Democratic Party, in that the party is not going to be moving fast enough for these girls.”
Like the young women from Oregon, who were from a liberal city and a conservative rural town, young people nationally lean left, research shows. Pew Research Center has found that Generation Z, including those who identify as Republican, is more open-minded than older generations about various types of diversity. In the Dynata survey, even though Biden-supporting girls were more likely to stress the importance of female leaders and the challenge of sexism, the majority of Trump-supporting girls did, too.
Recent events have reinforced the conflicting messages young women receive. They have seen record numbers of women enter Congress and the first female vice president. Some exchanged pinkie promises with Elizabeth Warren to remember that she was running because “that’s what girls do.” But they’ve also seen the women who ran for the highest office lose, and a president who has belittled women and critiqued female leaders’ appearance.
The survey showed that young people no longer believe many of the things that have hindered women seeking leadership before. Nine in 10 teenagers, regardless of gender, said that ambition was a good trait in both males and females.
But asked if they were interested in running for office in the future, six in 10 white boys said yes, compared with 44 percent of white girls. Among teenagers of color, 39 percent of boys and 36 percent of girls wanted to run.
One reason for the difference is that most of the leaders children learn about are white men, said Mirya Holman, a political scientist at Tulane. Also, they pick up on the idea that boys — but not girls — should be competitive and aggressive, and that those traits are necessary in politics.
But research has also shown the power of role models, particularly the first time someone from a group becomes a leader. The survey found that girls were most inspired to consider leadership by the many “firsts” of the Biden administration — including the first women, people of color and gay people to serve in some senior roles.
“It was really powerful to see Kamala Harris be able to be in such a high place of power, because she’s an African-American woman and so am I,” said Georgia Wolfe, 19, who is studying to become a dentist and living in her sorority at the University of Oregon. “It widens who I think deserves a say in my life, and it just gives me hope.”
"Between January 2017 and November 2020, 35 states passed 227 laws that restricted a woman’s access to abortion services. Seven states — Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Ohio, and Utah — accounted for more than half of those laws. Abortion opponents are hoping that Donald Trump’s appointment of more than 200 federal judges, as well as three Supreme Court justices — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — will help overturn Roe v. Wade.
Abortion has existed for centuries and will always exist. It is medically safer for women than ever before (especially with the chemical procedure making surgery unnecessary). In fact, the Guttmacher Institute issued a recent report showing 39 percent of women choosing abortions are increasingly relying on the safer abortion pill rather than surgery, up from 29 percent in 2014.
Choosing termination must remain a woman’s decision to be made without duress of any kind. The Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling created the national standard for legal abortions in the United States. Nearly a half-century later, the issue remains contentious, with 43 abortion-related cases having been heard in the last 16 months.
So it is time for lawmakers and the judges who mop up after them when lawsuits are filed in court-clogging numbers to resist the political pressure from all groups — religious or otherwise — to continue to try to dismantle Roe and the safe medical care provided women, as well as the privacy, peace of mind, and personal health decisions it protects.
Nearly half a century has passed since the Roe decision, and countless millennia since the first woman ended a pregnancy on her terms. As part of a woman’s constitutional right to privacy, as the Supreme Court ruled, this most private personal decision must be protected."
"At the onset of the pandemic, analysts feared it would mark a disaster for women. The strain of coronavirus lockdowns would exact a disproportionate toll on the sexes — forcing more women out of the workforce, deepening their load of uncompensated labor, leaving them more vulnerable to domestic violence.
All those concerns proved to be true. But the social damage wrought by what’s been dubbed the “shadow pandemic” may be felt for decades to come. That’s the grim conclusion of an annual report on the global gender gap released this week by the World Economic Forum, which keeps an index on “gender parity” in 156 countries.
“Data from a dozen studies showed that the chances of a stillbirth increased by 28 percent. And the risk of women dying while pregnant or during childbirth increased by more than a third in two countries: Mexico and India,” noted the New York Times.
"As many across the U.S. were gearing up last year to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the nineteenth amendment and the work of the suffrage movement, several historians seized the moment to emphasize Black women’s role in that story as well as their subsequent erasure from it. One of the Black activists whose work has been highlighted by scholars such as Martha S. Jones was the American activist, intellectual, and journalist, Mary Church Terrell. Alison M. Parker’s Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell is the first full-length biography of Terrell and fills a vital gap in our knowledge of nineteenth and twentieth century Black activism.
Although Terrell’s life and work spanned almost a century (1863-1954), her contributions to racial and gender equality in the U.S. and abroad have remained underexplored. Brought to scholarly attention in the 1980s by Black women’s historians such as Deborah Gray White (Too Heavy a load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994), as the first president of the National Association of Colored Women (1896) and one of the founders of the NAACP (1909), Terrell is usually described as a traditional figure of the Black women’s club movement. She has been, at times, discounted as an elitist upper-class woman whose commitment to the politics of respectability meant she was out of touch with the Black working class. Parker, Chair and Richards Professor of American History at the University of Delaware, challenges these interpretations in her exhaustively researched and important study. Throughout the book, Parker shows that Terrell belongs to a long history of Black freedom struggles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and that she stood at the crossroads of most of the major social and reform movements of her lifetime. According to Parker, the book “tells a comprehensive life story of a woman who inhabited many worlds and whose life provides a timeline of civil rights activism from the 1890s through 1954” (2).
Nineteenth-century racist ideas about Black women’s imagined lack of morals led prominent figures of the movement for racial and gender equality to hide their personal lives and adopt a “respectable” public persona, thus obscuring their private lives and health issues, and offering scholars a truncated image of themselves. In Unceasing Militant, in contrast, Parker portrays Terrell as a full individual, rather than merely a public figure. Intimate details of Terrell’s life such as her family history, her courtship and later marriage to Robert Heberton Terrell, and their struggles to start a family take center stage. Her personal struggles informed Terrell’s approach to advocate for Black women’s health, their children, and their families. Similarly, Parker shows that Terrell’s family history shaped her activism. Both of her parents were born to white fathers who had sexually assaulted their enslaved mothers. Terrell never ceased to advocate for the protection of Black women’s bodies against white men’s violence. She also repeatedly called out the hypocrisy of white racists’ fears of “miscegenation” and the false accusations used to justify the lynching of Black men.
Parker’s in-depth archival work in Terrell’s personal papers, speeches, diaries, and correspondence as well as public archives, newspapers, and oral interviews, allows her to draw these key connections between Mrs. Terrell’s personal life and her public-facing work. Parker’s exploration of the Terrells’ intimate life also reveals the stakes of Black elite’s political work during the Progressive Era. The Terrells’ personal correspondence highlights their heightened awareness of the allegiances and compromises needed for their survival in Washington D.C. politics. Despite their elite status and national renown — Robert Heberton Terrell was a prominent Judge in the D.C. municipal court and a national celebrity by the late 1910s — the Terrells struggled financially. Parker demonstrates the fluidity and capaciousness of “Black elite” status at the turn of the century. The work of lecturing and touring the nation was not just an upper-class woman’s distraction for Mrs. Terrell. Her income from the lecture circuit was a necessity, not a byproduct of her activist work. The pressures placed upon Black women to both be public representatives of their race while taking care of their husbands and children were at the forefront of her mind; she constantly navigated the demands of her public status as a journalist, lecturer, and lobbyist, as well as the challenges of motherhood and marital partnership. Just as the public and private were always intertwined in Terrell’s life, so they are in this biography. By bringing Terrell’s personal papers to the fore, alongside her published essays articles and speeches, Parker tells the story of a woman who fought for her own intellectual ambitions, the economic and mental well-being of her family, as well as for the national project of racial and gender equality. ... "
