Where is Abigail Adams in Today''s Political Discourse?

In all the talk about encroaching autocracy in America and elsewhere, politicians, pundits, media personalities and others need to remember the words and wisdom of the revolutionary first First Lady, Abigail Adams, who admonished her husband to “remember the ladies.”

Another First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, echoed her predecessor in a recent CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour when she called out the absence of misogyny in various analyses of forces at work when countries descend into autocracies and dictatorships.

She was right to do that. In the growing discourse about various factors that prevail when democracies slide into autocracy, white supremacy, race, class and caste quickly rise to the surface as identifiable and frightening factors.  But not a word is uttered about the systemic oppression of women, which has been part of dictatorial regimes and cultures throughout history. 

Examples abound from ancient times to now, with women being treated like second class citizens in almost every country and culture. In ancient Greece women were thought to hinder democracy as the weaker sex. Considered property, they lived in seclusion without rights, valued only as the bearers of male progeny. In medieval times religious institutions kept women quiet and voiceless while the idea of women as property prevailed into more modern times as women were “owned” by their fathers and husbands by virtue of economic indenture and lack of agency in male dominated societies.

Fast forward to the 20th and 21st centuries and consider the fact that women were denied the vote in America until 1920, and dictators like Hitler and Ceausescu mandated childbearing, rendering women nothing more than semen vessels and property of the state, something we are seeing emerge in our own country. Women continue to have limited access to leadership positions, economic parity, and agency over their own lives – largely legislatively ignored and increasingly court ordered.

The question is why.  The answer? It is intentional, overtly or unconsciously, because in a world dominated largely by (white) men terrified of losing patriarchal power, woman are immensely threatening.  The fact is powerful men know that women have different priorities than they do, and that those priorities are grounded in a profound commitment to human rights and social justice, not in greed, moral and financial corruption, massive profits, or overwhelming power. They also know that women are deeply intelligent, strategic, capable people and that they are organizing as never before.

One has only to look at the brave women of Iran who are willing to face torture, rape and murder for “Women, Life, Freedom”, or to consider the courage of Kurdish women who fought on the battleground and Rohingya women standing up to their oppressors.  Or to remember the abuelas of Latin America who never gave up the fight to find their missing children, the women of Liberia and India whose work saved lives and changed policy, the French and Ghetto resistance movement women who helped win a war. Then there were the women who shared their personal stories about rape and sexual abuse at global conferences and with local newspapers, the million women who marched in Washington, DC the day after Donald Trump became president, the women artists, writers, musicians, photographers, organizers, the mothers demanding gun legislation, the lawyers who raised an army of volunteer lawyers overnight to litigate on behalf of immigrants at airports or helped a ten year old raped child escape forced childbearing.  The examples go on and on and on.

That is why male retaliation against women in Iran is so violent, why rape is increasingly a war crime, why the Supreme Court of the United States has rendered women property of the state, why domestic abuse and gun violence against women are on the rise, why books by and about women are banned in such high numbers, , why women are going to jail for having a miscarriage and more broadly why teachers can no long teach history or talk about gay marriage or use certain words, or encourage girls to play sports or to dream of becoming president and so much more.

It all paints a portrait of misogyny at its most extreme because powerful men simply cannot abide a world in which women too are powerful whether in their homes, communities, states, or countries. The very thought of sharing the podium or the parliament or a pay scale with females is completely abhorrent because deep down powerful men know that women bring skills and experience to bear on pressing issues of our time, so they resort o to further and deeper methods of domination, exclusion, and abuse.

And that is why we must include misogyny in the public and private discourse surrounding our deep concerns and increasing acknowledgement that our democracy, and democracy elsewhere, are indeed in a precarious and perishable place. It is why women are choosing, and working hard, to revolt against the evils of autocracy that could well render them “a leaf blowing in the whirlwind,” a destiny that political philosopher Hannah Arendt warned us all against.

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Maternal Mortality, Abortion, and Race: A Dangerous Trifecta

Much has been written in the literature of public health about America’s shocking maternal mortality rate. Occasionally media reports the alarming rate when there is a hook. Advocates concerned with women and health illuminate the problem in reports and at conferences. But in light of the SCOTUS Dobbs decision on abortion, new urgency arose in addressing U.S. maternal mortality and its causes because of the link between reproductive rights and the persistence of inherent racial issues in women’s healthcare.

It is disturbing and illuminating to note the World Health Organization's maternal mortality rate rankings.  The U.S. is 55th in the list of industrialized nations at nearly 24 deaths per 100,000 live births. A 2022 study found that women in this country face the highest rates of preventable problems and mortality when compared with women in 10 other wealthy nations, and that rate continues to go up. The race disparity in maternal mortality is additionally alarming. Black women die at a rate of 55.3 deaths per 100,000 live births, more than 50 percent higher than white women.

That’s one reason Rep. Alma Adams (D-NC) and several colleagues in the House introduced a bill earlier this year to specifically address the high rate of stillbirths, which Black women and other women of color are twice as likely to experience as white women. Targeted legislative like that is critical to changing the public health landscape when it comes to pregnancy outcomes and the health of women and children.

So are campaigns like the “Hear Her” initiative at the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), designed to address the fact that women are often not heard, believed, or viewed as reliable when they present relevant histories or symptoms. That problem is worse for Black women too. Research shows that women of color are more likely to be described negatively in notes and reports and recent studies reveal that doctors are most likely to use “stigmatizing language” in their notes about patients of color, referring to them as “noncompliant, challenging or resisting,” as research at the University of  Chicago revealed.

That’s why the all-out attempt to end abortion nationally, ignoring 50 years of precedent regarding a woman’s right to privacy, reproductive healthcare and choice was such a travesty, exacerbating the already shameful maternal morbidity and mortality data which serves as an indicator of continuing racism in this country.   

Black women and their sisters of color are likely to suffer enormously from the consequences of state-ordered pregnancy in the states that cling to misogynistic, racist policies, and not only in terms of their health or possible survival. They will also be affected economically in dramatic ways. A Forbes report suggests they will be deprived of education that can lift them out of poverty, and they will be targets of aggressive invasions of privacy through data searches that enable the over-policing of their reproductive habits and practices. Depending on where they live, they may be subject to fertility and period-tracking apps used by police according to their zip code because they are deemed to reside in high .abortion areas.

In her monumental work resulting in the 1619 Project documenting the history of broad-reaching racism in this country, Nicole Hannah-Jones provides a historical perspective essential to understanding the confluence of maternal mortality, the abortion crisis we now face, and unrelenting racism. Her book provides vital context regarding the connection between those three issues.

The title of both the project and book derives from the origins of slavery in America, dating back to 1619 with much of the book’s relevance focusing on the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War, when a key question arose. What would white America do with black people post slavery? Where would formerly enslaved people fit in a paid workforce? How would former slaves be treated if they were free Americans? What would be done about their education or healthcare?

Southern Democrats resisted these considerations mightily, especially when reformers like Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first black woman doctor in America, laid bare the burdens of being black in a country unwilling to facilitate freedom for former slaves.

Because of that resistance, the National Medical Association formed by black doctors in 1895 called for a national health care system - which went nowhere until the idea became a states’ rights issue during WWII when President Truman called for an expanded hospital system that predictably led to segregation and the denial of healthcare for black people. Later, insurance-based healthcare presented a further hurdle, while medical schools excluded black physicians and medicine became a for-profit, unregulated system. All of this has led to present-day lack of equitable, affordable, accessible healthcare if you are black or poor.

In the midterm election, five states had abortion on the ballot and in all five, voters supported the right to choose. Three of them guaranteed the right to abortion in their constitutions.   That is a huge relief to women in the five states, but it remains to be seen how women of color will fare. 

In Nicole Hannah-Jones’ words, “…arguments about socialized medicine, equity and human rights…echo down to the present day.”  Her book reveals the connections that make women of color exceptionally vulnerable even in this moment, and reminds us that there is still work to be done.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health, and social issues from Brattelboro, Vt.

What the Supreme Court Has Done to Women

“My friend and I drew up to a drab brown brick building.  An older man, shrunken and slouched, opened the door furtively. We climbed a flight of stairs in a putrid green escape well and emerged into a hallway, then entered a dark apartment.  I imagined fleeing down the stairs but then considered the consequences.

“’Wait here,’ the man commanded.  After a few minutes he reemerged from another room and asked me some questions. I tried to stay calm.  I felt as if I were sinking into a huge hole from which I might never emerge. ‘Come with me,’ he said, leading me into what must have been a kitchen.  It had a table in the center of the room, at the foot of which, between stirrups, was a lamp on a stand, and a stool. The table was covered with a sheet of white paper with a thin pillow on it.  Next to it was a tray bearing silver instruments and a large jar. The man told me to take off everything from the waist down. There was no privacy screen. I asked him for something to cover myself. ‘You won’t need that,’ he said.  ‘Just get on the table.’

“He put my feet into the cold stirrups. I’d never been exposed like that. I felt dirty, naked into my soul. I shivered uncontrollably. He handed me a towel, but no blanket.  I wondered if he would wash his hands or put on gloves.  I stared at the ceiling, tears dripping from my eyes.  Why wasn’t there a nurse, I wondered?  He came toward me with a wad of gauze in his hand. ’Breathe,’ he said, forcing the gauze down on my mouth. I thought I would suffocate. 

“Then I woke up still on the table, legs straight, a sheet over me. Pain burned between my legs. I felt as if my stomach had been pulled out of me.  The man fiddled with instruments.  I heard a whimper and realized it came from me.  I passed out. When I woke the man said, ‘You need to get up and leave. Get dressed.’ He handed me a sanitary pad.  I rose slowly waiting for the dizziness to stop. The pad I had shoved between my legs felt saturated already. I hoped I wouldn’t die.”

That did not, in fact, happen to me. I imagined it for a novel I was writing.  My character was one of the lucky ones who did not die from a back-alley abortion, and I was lucky too because despite a few scares I never needed an abortion. But I knew lots of women who did. I covered for a friend who had to flee the U.S. to get one, and because I worked in women’s health I knew where to refer my friends, single and married, for safe abortions.

Now here we are again, having just passed the 49th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, which gave women agency over their bodies and their lives. It is inconceivable for those of us who remember life before legal abortion and who fought hard for reproductive control to find ourselves back in the trenches fighting for the sovereignty of self as the Supreme Court drags us backwards, starting with the Court’s support of Draconian laws launched in Texas, soon to be followed by as many as two dozen other states, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

The Court’s shocking position and lack of knowledge about, or regard for, women’s lives and the role that reproductive autonomy plays in those lives is staggering. It is a Court that views abortion as easy birth control instead of a deeply difficult choice, and adoption as an good way out of parental responsibility. It’s a court that has no concept of pregnancy confirmation, fetal viability or the lifelong trauma of rape and incest.

Neither does the Court have a clue or a care that without safe abortion there will still be unsafe abortion resulting in death, irreparable psychological harm, and possible suicides among women of childbearing age. Many other women will be deprived of economic security, quality of life aspirations, or the fulfillment of life goals.

“The erosion of reproductive rights is a result of raw, bare-knuckled politics, of a minority exercising their power over a majority,” Cecile Richards, past president of Planned Parenthood, wrote in a New York Times essay after the Court’s latest decision regarding SB8, the Texas law that limits abortion. “The millions of Americans who are watching, horrified, as the Supreme Court prepares to roll back a right they have had for nearly half a century need to be just as dogged and determined. But it’s going to take unprecedented levels of political activism to fight back.”

Perhaps it is Justice Sonia Sotomayor whose words ring out. "This case is a disaster for the rule of law," Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion.  " It allows the State yet again to extend the deprivation of the federal constitutional rights of its citizens through procedural manipulation. The Court may look the other way,  but I cannot.”

Nor can women who will pay the price of a cruel procedural manipulation.

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Women Athletes Are Making Their Mark in Ways That Matter

I grew up never thinking about, observing, or participating in sports. I hated gym class, couldn’t play tennis, never imagined skiing, and didn’t learn to swim until I was an adult. Such activities were never fostered in my immigrant Jewish culture. Academics were the only thing that required excellence.

Consequently, I’ve never paid much attention to athletes or the Olympics. But this year, along came Naomi Osaka, Simone Biles, Suni Lee, Yusra Mardini, and the women who traded in their required G-strings for shorts or long leotards. That caught my feminist attention.

This year’s female athletes join tennis firsts Serena Williams and Billie Jean King, track and field Olympic champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and the great Babe Didrikson-Zaharias who excelled in golf, basketball, baseball, track and field, winning a gold in the 1932 Olympics. These women didn’t just demonstrate what women athletes could achieve. Each in their own way stood up to pressure, sexism, and misogyny just as today’s stellar female athletes are doing.

Naomi Osaka, who dropped out of the French Open tennis tournament earlier this year, explained why, in a recent TIME Magazine article. Anxious about press events she said, “It’s okay to not be okay, and it’s okay to talk about it. I wanted to skip press conferences to exercise self-care and preservation of my mental health. I stand by that. Athletes are human.”

For that decision, she was fined $15,000 for not doing media events, affecting the profit margins of companies that supported her.

Simone Biles, four-time gold medalist in the 2016 Olympics, caused a lot of sponsors and fans to become hysterical and verbally abusive over her decision to withdraw from several events this year. With 19 gold medals to her credit, the expectations had become unbearable for the 24-year old athlete, who along with other Olympic gymnasts, was sexually assaulted by Larry Nassar, the doctor for the American gymnastic team now serving a life sentence for sexual abuse.

As tensions mounted, Biles dramatically difficult routine became dangerous, so she decided to withdraw. She was then accused of being weak, unable to take the pressure, and more by would-be jocks who likely found it difficult to bend over to tie their shoes. Biles also ended her sponsorship with Nike this year to go with a smaller, less demanding and more supportive brand. “It wasn’t about my achievements, it’s what I stood for and how they would help me use my voice for females and kids,” she said.

Biles’s withdrawal opened the way for 18-year old Suni Lee, the first Hmong-American Olympian to win the gold and two other medals this year, a feat she accomplished after being out of action for two months last year due to injuries, the death of two relatives from Covid, and the accident that paralyzed her father in an accident. Stunned by her magnificent win, she said proudly, “I'm super proud of myself for sticking with it and believing in myself.”

Yusra Mardini is not as well known as Biles or Lee, but her story is equally compelling. She fled the Syrian war as a teenager, swam for three hours in the sea while steering her sinking boat to safety, and saved every passenger onboard. Then she walked from Greece to Germany. This year, she competed in the 100-meter Butterfly swim at the Olympics, revealing that even without winning a medal, women like these athletes are strong, self-respecting, and determined.

They were joined by Olympic women who refused to accept the sexualization in gymnastics by rejecting bikini cut underwear that likely induced the world’s worst wedgie with the required “close fit and cut on an upward angle toward the top of the leg.” Punishment time again: Team Germany earned their $1500 Euro fine from the International Handball Association for wearing shorts, which men’s teams wear.

The blogosphere went viral as women protested that kind of misogynistic nonsense. As one of them posted, “Biles set aside her dreams in order to do the right thing for her teammates and her country. I see a lot of dudes who look like they’d break a sweat opening a bag of Doritos mocking Biles for being ‘weak’. She could crack their spines with her calves and do a full floor routine afterwards [but] she’s too good a person to challenge them to a fight.”

Another said, “It’s hard to not feel feminist. It’s hard not to be angry and disgusted. Society refuses to acknowledge a woman’s worth. The system continues to fail women, even ones as outstanding as these. It’s time to get mad.”

Even if the women in this year’s Olympics never compete or win another medal again, they will remain gold star champions to every woman who has ever cleared her own hurdles and landed on her feet, hands in the air, the smile of achievement on her face. No longer will competent, strong women give their bodies to male titillation and sexual fantasy, or to corporations who view them as simply commodities, or to imposed pregnancies. Along with women who have aspired us anew, sisters in sport, we are reclaiming our power and our legitimacy in every arena. 

That makes every one of these astounding athletes, and all women, winners.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, politics and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt.

Women and War: A Memorial Day Tribute

They were nurses, soldiers, code-breakers, factory workers, resistance fighters, POWs, victims. We should remember them on Memorial Day.

 Women have been warriors throughout history. During the Civil War, they assumed male aliases, wore men’s uniforms, and charged into battle on both sides. Harriet Tubman was a spy then and the first woman to lead a battalion into battle.

 Marge Piercy’s 1980 novel, Gone to Soldiers, revealed many tasks undertaken by women during WWII. Some ferried planes for the Air Force. Others, symbolized by Rosie the Riveter, worked in factories producing war goods. Women served as intelligence officers in Europe and others were social workers helping returning soldiers and their families.

 Nearly 800 women were sent to European warehouses to sort mail addressed to U.S. servicemen.  Major Fannie Griffin McClendon, who joined the Army’s only all black, female WWII battalion, the Six Triple Eight, was one of them, helping to boost morale among service members. She was honored at the Library of Congress in 2019 at the age of 99 when she was featured in the documentary “Six Triple Eight.”

 Many French women, courageous resistance fighters, were sent to concentration camps if caught. One, a young musician, played her violin outside a Nazi camp to sooth captured friends.Some were couriers or took food to Jews in hiding. Others blew up German trains and troops.

 In her book Code Girls, Liza Mundy tells the story of America’s women cryptographers who cracked difficult communication systems. More than 10,000 women were selected for this work. After Pearl Harbor, the military built its intelligence operation by bringing women college graduates in math and science to Washington, D.C. for training. They went on to break codes from merchant ships in the Pacific supplying Japanese troops so the Navy could sink them, and they gave Germans false information about where the Allied landing on D-Day would happen.

 Minnie Vautrin was an American missionary in China during the infamous 1937 Rape of Nanking, when an estimated 80,000 women were brutally violated by Japanese soldiers.  Minnie saved hundreds of girls and women, facing down bayonets at the college she headed. After helping women find their husbands and sons at the war’s end, she returned home where she committed suicide in 1941.

 So called “comfort women,” most of whom were Korean women and girls, were taken as sexual slaves by the Japanese. The horror was an early use of what we now acknowledge as a war crime and it affected 200,000 women and girls.

 In Europe, as Hitler’s “final solution” gained momentum, there were many women who deserve to be memorialized. Among them was Etty Hillesum, often called the mature Anne Frank. Like Anne, she was born in Holland, a Jew and a diarist. She went to Auschwitz because she volunteered to accompany arrested Jews in 1943. She threw a postcard from the train that read “We left the [holding] camp singing.” She died three months later at age 27.

 Back in Asia, Japanese invasions accelerated as people struggled to survive. Among them was Helen Colijn, author of Song of Survival: Women Interned, which became the film Paradise Road. She and other European women trying to get home became prisoners of war on Sumatra. Most of the women died before liberation, including Margaret Dryburgh, who formed the prison choir that kept morale up despite starvation, disease and brutality.

 Another group of amazing women prisoners in the Pacific were 99 Army and Navy nurses later known as “the angels of Bataan and Corregidor.” They were the first unit of American women sent into battle and the only group of American women imprisoned by an enemy. They’d helped build and staff hospitals and pioneer triage nursing in a stifling jungle. At the end of their three-year incarceration, they survived by eating weeds cooked in coldcream. Their story is told in We Band of Angels.  Sadly, they were not fully recognized by the military until 1986.

 The nurses in Vietnam were another “band of angels.” All volunteers, they too were not fully recognized when they came home. One of them, Lily Jean Adams, was 22 when she volunteered.  An ICU nurse, she remembered comforting dying soldiers. “They would say ‘don’t leave me,’ and I wouldn’t.  I sensed it was just as important as taking care of the living.”

 Women in the Gulags of Siberia also struggled to survive as political prisoners during the Soviet Stalinist Era post WWII. Some received 25-year sentences in unbearable conditions. Their stories are told in the book Dressed for A Dance in the Snow.

 Women war journalists have been equally brave and important.  Vera Brittain, Nellie Bly, Margaret Bourke-White and Martha Gellhorn were among them.  They wrote about the trauma of war, especially for women and children, rather than tactical questions and policy disputes, as male journalists did. Theirs were stories of ordinary civilians desperate to survive.

 Today women comprise about 20 percent of America’s military. They are graduating in increasing numbers from our military academies. As Frank Moore wrote in 1866, “The story of the war will never be fully written or understood if the achievements and contributions of women are unrecognized.”

 How right he was.