Six on History: Women's History is Every Month
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From Misty Copeland, the first Black woman to be promoted to Principal Dancer in the American Ballet Theatre’s 75-year history, to DJ Perly, the first woman ever to win the US National DJ championship, these trailblazers have recorded their unique at-home videos to impart life-affirming stories of heritage, convey their personal challenges and triumphs, and showcase their incredible accomplishments as they seek to inspire future generations of groundbreaking young women."
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"March is Woman’s History Month and achievements by women need to be recognized and celebrated. In social studies classes, there needs to be recognition of frequently overlooked achievements by women, but if women’s complex role in history is going to be fully understood, there also needs to be recognition of the negative roles some women have played in the past and present. In 1991, Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for her stand in favor of democracy, but since 2017 she has defended Myanmar governments against charges that the country is committing genocide against a Muslim Rohingya minority. Indira Gandhi was a highly praised prime minister of India until she assumed emergency dictatorial powers after she was charged with election law violations. Margaret Thatcher was the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century. To enhance her public support, she led the United Kingdom into an unnecessary war with Argentina and she later refused to join international condemnation of apartheid in South Africa.
Monday’s blog introduced women who should be recognized for their achievements. Today’s blog focuses in on a group of women who defied feminine stereotypes by the role they played in Nazi Germany.
In 2016, a major component of Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy for President was her belief that strong electoral support from American women would secure her the election. One reason Clinton was unsuccessful was that Donald Trump won at least a plurality, and possibly even a majority, of the votes of white women. Voter support is often difficult to predict as people choose candidates for different reasons. According to exit polls, in the 2020 election, Joseph Biden defeated Donald Trump despite the fact that white woman actually increased their support for Trump. A Virginia exit poll showed 75% of white women voting for Republican candidates.
In 2020, seventy-three million Americans voted for Donald Trump despite evident incompetence and open disdain for the people he was supposed to represent. In what will hopefully be a post-Trump era, it is crucial to understand why. A look at German women who supported Adolf Hitler’s raise to power in Germany gives some clues.
The Cizik School of Nursing at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston created an award-winning 56-minute documentary, Caring Corrupted: the Killing Nurses of the Third Reich, about nurses in Nazi Germany who participated in the Holocaust. Despite being health professionals, they participate in the murder of the handicapped and people who were mentally ill or infirm.
An article in the online journal The Conversation by three Florida State University researchers that was reposted in History News Network analyzed essays written by thirty German women in 1934 where they explained, “Why I became a Nazi.” The original essays, written in German, are located in the archives of the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. The Hoover Archives digitalized more than 3,700 pages of autobiographical sketches written by members of the Nazi Party.
Strong support for Adolf Hitler is often considered a largely male phenomenon. A “cult of personality” developed in Germany based on the belief that Hitler was the strong leader the country needed to end crises precipitated by defeat in World War I and the Great Depression. The authors of the article discovered a different thread in the women’s essays. They were more attracted by proposed solutions than Nazi ideology and often described Hitler with religious fervor and imagery.
Helene Radtke was a 38-year-old wife of a German soldier. In her essay she wrote about her “divine duty to forget about all my household chores and to perform my service to my homeland.” Agnes Molster-Surm was a housewife and private tutor. Molster-Surm called Hitler her “God-given Führer and savior, Adolf Hitler, for Germany’s honor, Germany’s fortune and Germany’s freedom!”
In the article, the Florida State team included an extended quote from an essay written by Margarethe Schrimpff, a 54-year-old woman who lived just outside of Berlin. Schrimpff described her experience as the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany in an essay laced with anti-Semitism.
“I attended the meetings of all … parties, from the communists to the nationalists; at one of the democratic meetings in Friedenau [Berlin], where the former Colonial Minister, a Jew by the name of Dernburg, was speaking, I experienced the following: this Jew had the audacity to say, among other things: ‘What are the Germans actually capable of; maybe breeding rabbits.’
"Dear readers, do not think that the heavily represented stronger sex jumped up and told this Jew where to go. Far from it. Not one man made a sound, they stayed dead quiet. However, a miserable, frail little woman from the so-called ‘weaker sex’ raised her hand and forcefully rejected the Jew’s brazen remarks; he had in the meantime allegedly disappeared to attend another meeting.”
I am not comparing Trump supporters to Nazis and that definitely was not the intent of the article. The lesson I draw from the article on German women who supported Adolf Hitler and the video is that as the United States continues to confronts the Coronavirus pandemic, economic dislocation, inflation and unemployment, ethnic, class, and regional inequality, and national malaise, political leaders cannot assume support from any group. As Hillary Clinton learned in 2016, people often vote in surprising ways."
Follow Alan Singer on twitter at https://twitter.com/AlanJSinger1.
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"In one of the darkest moments of America’s industrial history, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City burns down, killing 146 workers, on March 25, 1911. The tragedy led to the development of a series of laws and regulations that better protected the safety of factory workers.
The Triangle factory, owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, was located in the top three floors of the 10-story Asch Building in downtown Manhattan. It was a sweatshop in every sense of the word: a cramped space lined with work stations and packed with poor immigrant workers, mostly teenaged women who did not speak English. At the time of the fire, there were four elevators with access to the factory floors, but only one was fully operational and it could hold only 12 people at a time. There were two stairways down to the street, but one was locked from the outside to prevent theft by the workers and the other opened inward only. The fire escape, as all would come to see, was shoddily constructed, and could not support the weight of more than a few women at a time.
Blanck and Harris already had a suspicious history of factory fires. The Triangle factory was twice scorched in 1902, while their Diamond Waist Company factory burned twice, in 1907 and in 1910. It seems that Blanck and Harris deliberately torched their workplaces before business hours in order to collect on the large fire-insurance policies they purchased, a not uncommon practice in the early 20th century. While this was not the cause of the 1911 fire, it contributed to the tragedy, as Blanck and Harris refused to install sprinkler systems and take other safety measures in case they needed to burn down their shops again.
READ MORE: How the Horrific Tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Led to Workplace Safety Laws
On March 25, a Saturday afternoon, there were 600 workers at the factory when a fire broke out in a rag bin on the eighth floor. The manager turned the fire hose on it, but the hose was rotted and its valve was rusted shut. Panic ensued as the workers fled to every exit. The elevator broke down after only four trips, and women began jumping down the shaft to their deaths. Those who fled down the wrong set of stairs were trapped inside and burned alive. Other women trapped on the eighth floor began jumping out the windows, which created a problem for the firefighters whose hoses were crushed by falling bodies. Also, the firefighters’ ladders stretched only as high as the seventh floor, and their safety nets were not strong enough to catch the women, who were jumping three at a time.
Blanck and Harris were on the building’s top floor with some workers when the fire broke out. They were able to escape by climbing onto the roof and hopping to an adjoining building.
The fire was out within half an hour, but not before over 140 died. The workers’ union organized a march on April 5 to protest the conditions that led to the fire; it was attended by 80,000 people.
Though Blanck and Harris were put on trial for manslaughter, they managed to get off scot-free. Still, the massacre for which they were responsible did finally compel the city to enact reform. In addition to the Sullivan-Hoey Fire Prevention Law passed that October, the New York Democratic set took up the cause of the worker and became known as a reform party."
READ MORE: The Labor Movement: A Timeline
"Janine Jackson: Among many disturbing things about the story of Gabby Petito, the young woman whose disappearance and murder captured widespread attention, was the indication that Utah police had not taken seriously an incident in which Petito’s fiancé was reported slapping and shoving her. The police department says they’re investigating.
The FBI, too, says it’s investigating its actions in the grievous mishandling of the Larry Nassar case, of which the Justice Department has just delivered a damning account. Nassar being the Olympic gymnast team doctor who sexually abused numerous young women, dozens of them after multiple women had reported him to authorities.
The theme is hard to miss. Survivors of sexual assault are dismissed, dehumanized and denied at every turn, not just by individuals but by, as Simone Biles noted, entire systems.
Our next guest works on the frontlines of this set of issues. Jane Manning is director of the Women’s Equal Justice Project, which helps survivors of sexual assault navigate the criminal justice system. She joins us now by phone from the Bronx. Welcome to CounterSpin, Jane Manning.
Jane Manning: Thank you so much, Janine.
New York Times (9/27/21)
JJ: The Larry Nassar case, which you wrote about for the September 27 New York Times, seems emblematic, in that people might think the agency “dragged their feet,” or “didn’t do all they might have.” But it’s not just negligence. And then, also, a decision not to do something is an action, is a choice—and one that seems to get made again and again.
JM: You’re so right about that. I love the way you just put that, Janine, that the decision not to do anything is a choice. That’s right.
I mean, we live in a legal regime, right? So the state has what’s called a monopoly of force, so if you’re raped or battered, you’re not allowed to take a gun and go settle the score for yourself, right? We look to the justice system to provide accountability and justice for survivors, and also to provide protection to the rest of society from future violent offenses.
And so when the justice system refuses to act in cases of gender-based violence—sexual assault, domestic violence, stalking, human trafficking—they are effectively depriving women and other groups that are targeted for gender-based violence, LGBTQ survivors and other marginalized groups, they are effectively depriving us of safety and of the equal protection of the law.
JJ: The fact that mishandling of assault cases and gender-based crime cases so often pairs with mistreatment or demeaning treatment of survivors, that just highlights the depth of the problem in the system.
JM: That’s exactly right. One of the survivors who came to me for help told me that when she went in to be interviewed by a detective after she was raped, the detective’s first question to her was, “How often have you cheated on your husband?”
JJ: Oh my God.
JM: Another survivor said to me that her detective said to her, “Are you really sure you want this guy arrested? Who knows, you could end up dating this guy.” And the survivor said to me, “When I heard him say that, I asked myself, how can I possibly get an unbiased investigation from this detective?” And she was right. The detective went on to do a very shoddy, minimal investigation of her case, and then closed it down while there were a lot of investigative leads still unpursued.
So it’s both of these issues. It’s the demeaning treatment, but it’s also the failure to investigate, the failure to prosecute, the failure to take action. And both of those things really impact survivors.
Washington Post (5/27/21)
JJ: Another part of the Gabby Petito media phenomenon was folks calling out the relative inattention given to disappearances and even killings of Black and brown women, Native American women. In your piece for the Washington Post back in May, you noted how racism and sexism are intertwined here. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what those intersections can mean, can look like, in terms of criminal justice and sexual assault.
