How Much More Can We Take?

A few days before writing this commentary my husband went into town on a quick errand. When he didn’t return for a longer time than expected, my first thought when I began to worry was this: Could there have been an act of gun violence?

While waiting nervously for him to come home I learned that two days earlier an 18-year-old part-time junior police officer armed with a gun and with inadequate training had fired his weapon next to a school which fortunately was closed, and into a house where a bullet landed in a bedroom wall.  Luckily, no one was injured. 

What might easily have been a tragedy in my small, sleepy, rural town was deeply disturbing. It was also unimaginable, which is what we all think when our sense of immunity in the face of growing gun violence kicks in.

In a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, I wrote, “How is it possible that an 18--old person not long out of high school is permitted to serve on a police force, part-time, with a firearm, with limited if any training when research reveals that it isn’t until the age of at least 24 that the human brain is sufficiently mature to have developed impulse control and sound decision-making? Why is a junior, part-time cop in a small Vermont town allowed to carry a gun, especially without adequate training?”

Why, for that matter, is anyone allowed to readily purchase or gain access to guns – and in some states to open carry them, especially long, lethal guns designed for military use specifically to kill someone?

It is notable that numerous research studies published in recent years have addressed the issue of brain development and its relation to impulsivity and poor decision-making in adolescents. The studies are highly relevant to the issue of young people, including junior cops, who are males between 20 and 30, having access to guns. They show that “poor cognitive control and the tendency toward impulsive behavior influence the ability to make reasonable choices in daily-life situations during adolescence. In fact, many risky behaviors … are closely related to impulsivity in adolescence ….”

Put colloquially, “Neuroscientists are confirming what car rental places already figured out — the brain doesn't fully mature until age 25. Up until this age …the part of the brain that helps curb impulsive behavior is not yet fully developed. Some scientists say this could illuminate a potential factor behind a recent spate of acts of mass violence.”

The many questions flooding my mind and the mind of so many others in the aftermath of the Uvalde massacre are questions that have loomed ever larger since the slaughter in Newtown, let alone all the other school killings and fatal shootings in malls, movies, markets, clubs, churches, and other venues. They are questions that contribute nonstop to rage, grief, sadness and fear, all of which have grown exponentially until these feelings begin to inhabit our bodies in alarmingly somatic ways that illustrate the mind-body connection many of us now experience.

Some questions regarding gun violence are rhetorical, while others are frustrating beyond measure.  Why, for example, after Newtown, have legislators on one side of the Congressional aisle – the side that wants to protect fetuses but continually prioritizes guns over babies or child welfare, still be able to remain in office? Why expect more guns to resolve the epidemic of mass shootings, or think that teachers with guns are the solution, if teachers would take up arms when trained cops are afraid to use them in the face of military weaponry that rips bodies apart in seconds?  Why are we the only country in the developed world with this growing, egregious, tragic problem even though other countries have mentally ill citizens too?

Those are big questions for all of us to ponder, but like other moms, wives, family members, friends, and others, my personal questions haunt me to the point of neurosis because of the horror of continuing gun violence: Why haven’t the kids texted or called back? When will they phone to say they’ve arrived home safely?  Is it safe for me to enter this bank or that restaurant, the grocery store, a performance venue? Should I walk  here? How can I not be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Would I survive unspeakable loss?

In searching for a relevant end to this rumination I read copious anecdotal and empirical works about situational anxiety and depression, written or spoken by notable as well as lay people, before guns and violence became so much a part of our lives. They all sounded like tired cliches, superficial sound bites in this time. Now the urgency of what I read about anxiety and depression related to gun violence is markedly different. It is a collective, clarion call pleading for an end to what has become our country’s new, hideous, destructive normal.

 I am reminded of something Martin Luther King, Jr. once said in a different context: “If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl, but by all means, keep moving.”  If that’s the most a governing body can offer its citizens, what does it say about who we have become, and where we are headed?

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Elayne Clift writes about politics, social issues, and current events from Vermont.

Actions Have Consequences: The Supreme Court Should Know That

It was like standing alone on a nuclear landscape. Like being in the center of a dystopian nightmare. Like being on a sinking ship without a life vest. At least that’s how it felt to me as the Supreme Court’s decisions were handed down, one after the other in their recent session.

Stunned and frightened like so many others were, I wondered whether the faux Christian, conservative justices on the Court had any idea what the consequences of their hideous decisions would be as they ended a term in which civil rights in America were systematically ended. Did they willfully ignore what would happen because of their Draconian decisions, did they not have a clue, or did they simply not care?

Was this the legacy they wanted to leave their children and grandchildren, let alone the rest of us? Did they have any sense of the consequences, intended or otherwise, for American citizens, and the planet? Do they grasp the context of our Constitution, or the concept of democracy? Do they really hate women and others unlike them this much?

As these questions roiled in my head, I thought about some of the consequences the justices’ rightwing agenda presented, beginning with what would befall women and girls who no longer have agency over their bodies and lives, or access to reproductive health care.

Among them is a ten-year old child pregnant by paternal rape being denied an abortion in Ohio,  women with pre-eclampsia – high blood pressure that can be fatal to mother and baby when not treated urgently, women with gestational diabetes, a condition that can be harmful to mother and baby, women with ectopic pregnancies in which a fertilized egg attaches to the Fallopian tube instead of the uterus, an emergency situation requiring immediate care to prevent a fatal rupture, women whose lives are at risk because of  drastic fetal anomalies.

 Now women with these urgent or other reproductive healthcare needs are too frightened to seek timely reproductive care while providers are increasingly unwilling to offer it, both for fear of being prosecuted. These examples offer a small glimpse into what will happen to women and girls because of the Court’s decision to end Roe v. Wade, but this much we know: Many of them will die. So will women who elect to have an illegal or self-induced abortion for any reason.

I also thought about the death knell being sounded for the fragile, struggling planet on which we live due to environmental degradation and the global warming crisis. Just these staggering statistics are enough to send chills down my spine: “Every hour, 1,692 acres of productive dry land become desert. We are using up 50 more natural resources than the Earth can provide.” What’s more, “We have a garbage island floating in our ocean, mostly comprised of plastics - the size of India, Europe and Mexico combined!” 

Further, “The effects of human-caused global warming are happening now, are irreversible on the timescale of people alive today, and will worsen in the decades to come,” according to NASA. “Glaciers have shrunk, ice on rivers and lakes is breaking up earlier, plant and animal ranges have shifted, and trees are flowering sooner,” while “effects that scientists had predicted in the past would result from global climate change are now occurring: loss of sea ice, accelerated sea level rise and longer, more intense heat waves.”

Against these chilling facts, six Supreme Court justices saw to it that the Environmental Protection Agency would now have limited ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants “making it nearly impossible to cut greenhouse as emissions any time soon.” In their dissenting opinion three justices said the majority had stripped the E.P.A. of “the power to respond to the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.”

When it comes to separation of church and state the conservative majority outdid themselves. Recent decisions included a ruling in favor of a Christian group’s plea to allow a flag with a cross on it to fly over Boston’s city hall. Another decision allowed for taxpayer money to cover tuition for students attending religious high schools, while the six Supremes decided in favor of a high school football coach who led Christian prayers on the playing field  after games.

Then there’s states’ rights. Again, the Scotus-6 opined against New York State's concealed carry law requiring state residents to have a permit to carry a gun in public.  That law’s requirements for a permit were specific and in the public interest but when two guys who wanted to carry guns publicly were denied permits, they appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled the state law violated the 14th and Second Amendments. The decision proffered that the Second Amendment protects the public carry of firearms and set up a new test for courts to determine whether a law violates the Second Amendment.  New York's law was struck down, and other laws like New York's are likely to be struck down now.

Is it any wonder these frightening, tip-of-the-iceberg rulings made me feel like we’re approaching nuclear winter?  Bundle up. The Supreme Court is just getting started.

Another Day, Another Newtown: The Obscenity of Gun Violence

When news of another school slaughter broke, this time again in Texas, the bile that rose in my throat was as bitter as the memory of Columbine, Newtown, Parkland – and the other grievous incidents of gun violence in schools – all 554 of them since Columbine, as NPR has reported.

From the Carolinas to California, 27 school shootings are among the 200 mass shootings this year alone in America, and it’s only May.   But this is not a time for numbers. It is a time for unprecedented action borne of rage about what is happening in our country. It is also time to answer burning questions: why is it happening, and what are we going to do about it? It is a time to shout our disgust and dismay, to demand gun legislation now, and to take action to end the slaughter of innocent children.

Here is what I believe must happen NOW. All living presidents (with the exception of Donald Trump) should stand together before Congress and declare that we are done with thoughts and prayers. We are done with the platitudes that surround grief and loss. We are done with inaction, and with turning the other way because political power is more important than loving our babies, especially among those who champion fetuses but ignore the needs of living children.

Go on strike because that is what it will take – teachers, clergy, workers, moms, women and men alike. Call for and participate in a national strike against violence and the insanity of mass murder. Bring down the economy as well as the evil that prevails on Capital Hill if that’s what it takes to stop the killing.

Call it what it is: a public health epidemic, not a gun violence or mental health issue.  We can and must learn the lessons of pioneering health communication campaigns, including, against all odds, the successful fight against the tobacco industry, which saved the lives of hundreds of thousands and demonstrated that people are capable of change.

It is vital for Americans to vote, this year and in 2024, with all the energy a soul can muster.  Stand in line for days if that’s what it takes to be counted among the family of humankind, and the families who must now endure unimaginable and unending sadness.

Most importantly, Americans who want the massacres of innocents to stop must demand an end to the filibuster and lobby for killing the Second Amendment -- the only way to halt the madness we’ve grown used to. Forget appeasing the irresponsible, vicious right wing with calls for limited legislation; go for the one thing that can stop gun violence faster and more conclusively than anything else -- an end to an irrelevant and antiquated amendment written before bullets and rifles that tear bodies apart in seconds were invented.

I believe that what lies at the heart of the tragic problem that is ours alone among developed countries is this: We are a nation wedded to violence and we always have been.

From the time white men first set foot on American soil guns have been used in genocides to eliminate non-white Native American peoples. During slavery guns were a way (along with physical punishment) to ensure forced labor and to instill terror among human beings who were bought and sold. Throughout our entire history guns have been part of our increasingly lethal war arsenals and today the sale of weapons in the U.S. is higher than it has ever been, while the people least likely to be killed by a bullet are made exceedingly rich.

Killing, it appears, is in our DNA. Mass murder has come to define us, whether through war, incarceration, racist law enforcement, the consequences of ignoring poverty while clamoring for personal and financial power, and random gun violence. All of it results in deep-seated human pain in a nation that is “exceptional” in all the wrong ways. We must end our killing fields if we are ever to have pride in a country that asks us to pledge our allegiance.

We have become a country in which the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, appears at NRA’s convention, held in Texas, three days after 19 children were brutally shot to death there, a country where a former president who tried to overthrow an election, and a Senator from Texas who thinks we need more guns, join the governor. It is a country that exposes the personification of evil and reminds us how often scum rises to the top.

So I say this to Governor Abbott: Have you, at long last, no decency? And to Ted Cruz I say: You are not sorry. You are guilty. You have colluded with mass murderers. May the words spoken to me by a 4-year old child ring in your adult ears for all eternity: “Sometimes sorry is not good enough.”  As for Donald Trump, there are no words.

To all the others akin to these monsters, I say only this: We condemn your evil. We will inscribe your names and your deeds and your selfishness in the world’s history books, and we will celebrate the end of your cruelty for all our days.

Pathologizing Grief: How Long Can You Be Sad?

Here we go again. The so-called experts in psychiatry charged with updating the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), the less than empirical “bible of psychiatry” that clinicians rely on for reimbursable diagnoses, have decided that six months, maybe a year if they’re generous, is sufficient time to recover from a life-shattering loss.

This pathologizing of “prolonged” grief is yet another example of the arbitrary labeling of human feelings that is present in every version of the DSM, and a reflection of the culture of pathology we have fallen prey to. Big Pharma couldn’t be more pleased as its chemists race to their labs in search of new psychotropic pills. I couldn’t be more concerned about the price women will pay.

Consider this comment by the psychiatrist who chaired the steering committee overseeing revisions to the DSM-5. While being interviewed for a story in the New York Times in  March he said, “They were the widows who wore black for the rest of their lives. They were the parents who never got over it, and that was how we talked about them. Colloquially, we would say they never got over the loss of that child.”

The absence of context in that statement is stunning.  The widows who wore black were likely not grieving forever; they were more likely observing a cultural norm. And can anyone who has not lost a child begin to understand the emotional agony of that experience? The insensitivity, judgmental language, assumptions, and lack of empathy and context among diagnosticians like that is nothing short of staggering. How can one practice psychiatry devoid of the emotional intelligence necessary to accompany someone on the long, sad journey of grief?

There are psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers who share this view. They are openly critical, arguing that pathologizing a fundamental aspect of the human experience is not only morally wrong, it’s dangerous, warning that being told you have a mental illness when you are emerging from a period of deep grief can add to despair and a debilitating sense of vulnerability.

The backlash against re-defining depression to include grief has been ongoing for at least a decade or more, along with longer term concerns about arbitrary labeling, lack of evidence-based diagnoses, overmedication of patients, and the lack of context in diagnosis, especially for women, who are all too often subjected to meaningless labels like “borderline personality disorder” and “premenstrual dysphoric disorder.”

Women are significantly more likely than men to be diagnosed with a range of psychiatric illnesses. They are also more likely than men to be prescribed psychotropic medication, given electroconvulsive therapy and hospitalized for psychiatric illness.

 One of the leading critics of the DSM was the late Dr. Paula Caplan, a pioneering feminist psychologist who resigned from the DSM-4 committee because she recognized that over-diagnosing and overmedication were occurring on the basis of unscientific labeling and diagnosing, especially for women. In a piece she wrote in 2012 in the Washington Post she said, “Since the1980s, I have heard from hundreds of people who have been arbitrarily slapped with a psychiatric label and are struggling because of it.”   She noted that “About half of all Americans get a psychiatric diagnosis in their lifetimes which can cost anyone their health insurance, job, custody of their children, or right to make their own medical and legal decisions.”

Others in relevant professions have similar, significant concerns about the DSM. Their concerns include oversimplification “of the vast continuum of human behavior,” misdiagnosis and over-diagnosis “simply because [the patient’s] behavior does not always not always line up with the current ideal,” labeling and stigmatization. The American Psychological Association, the American Counseling Association, and the society for Humanistic Psychology are among the professional organizations who have publicly shared their concerns about the DSM.

Psychiatric care and psychological counseling, of course, have their place in mental health. But practitioners, especially those charged with oversight of the troubling DSM, a reference book some professionals argue should be abandoned, as well as those who seek reimbursement for services, do clinical studies that require funding, and especially those who ignore context or lack sufficient empathy, must recognize their moral obligation to “do no harm.” That includes avoiding judgmental diagnoses, false assumptions, heavy reliance on medication, unhelpful labeling, and inherent sexism.

Paula Caplan had it right when she said “In our increasingly psychiatrized world, the first course is often to classify anything but routine happiness as a mental disorder, assume it is based on a broken brain or a chemical imbalance, and prescribe drugs or hospitalization…. These days you would think there is no such thing as normal.”

Perhaps the next DSM revision should include a new disorder: “Prolonged insensitivity to suffering.” It would be easily diagnosed by an absence of compassion and the overuse of meaningless labels upon meeting new people. Surely no one would argue with that.

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Elayne Clift is a health communications specialist and former Program Director for the National Women’s Health Network. She writes from Vermont. 

An Artist, A Mission and a Meaningful Moment

There are occasions in life that gift us serendipitously. Often they move us. Such was my experience when I met Russian born Alexey Neyman, an 83-year old Jewish artist whose work was sold at the Creative Connections Gallery in Ashburnham, Massachusetts recently in support of Ukraine.

 Neyman ‘s exhibition, “The Habitual Light of Memory,” was mounted to raise funds for Ukraine.  The works raised over $4,600 on the first day of the exhibit and the funds were immediately sent to the International Rescue Committee’s Ukrainian relief effort.

That’s because Neyman, who was born in Moscow and frequently visited Ukraine, lost his grandparents, one of whom was a rabbi, to Nazi cruelty in Ukraine during WWII. He still has family and friends in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and Poland. He and his daughter, son, and Polish son-in-law are actively supporting refugees and will soon bring family to the U.S.

But there is more to the artist’s story which involves his philosophy of art. “In this time of crisis in Ukraine,” the gentle artist with twinkling eyes and a ready smile says. “Artists can contribute to the efforts of humanitarian aid, which is why we are donating proceeds from the art show to help Ukraine. It’s also why I went to protest the war in Times Square right after the war broke out.”

Formally trained as an architect, Neyman still designs Russian Orthodox churches and supervises their construction. He also studied the art of painting with Valdimir Weisberg, a renowned Russian painter and art theorist, for ten years. He is dedicated to “the philosophy of art,” which is contemplative and includes understanding how colors work in various mediums. He believes as well that “color has a life of its own,” as Weisberg and Cezanne did. The result is subtle, evocative, soft works that draw the viewer into paintings that are often inspired by people Neyman knows and places he has lived or visited. “I like to immerse the viewer in a visual experience they might not get elsewhere because the qualities and properties in works of art require an awareness of the color as an instrument.”

 One painting that conveys that idea is a portrait of the artist’s long-time partner who is from Ukraine. In her portrait she wears the colors of the Ukrainian flag. “My heart is with the people of Ukraine, and with the people of Russia who are protesting the war, Neyman says. “Everyone will pay a price that is too high. Being genuine and straightforward in my work is the one thing I can do in response to all war crimes.”

Listening to the quietly powerful words Neyman spoke, which closely align with his artistic sensibilities, moved me mightily.  They were the words not only of an artist, but of a humanist, an activist, and a man of deep character. They were also wise words spoken softly by someone who helped me believe that there was still hope for the world.

There is another reason I was moved to know Alexey Neyman.  I too am Jewish, and my grandparents and parents were born in Ukraine.  They fled the Russian pogroms of the early 20th century and in doing so, unlike some of the artist’s family, survived the atrocities.  Another connection we share is that we both engage with the world creatively, me as writer and Neyman as artist, both addressing human rights and social justice. That too was part of our serendipitous meeting.

Painting for nearly sixty years, Neyman’s work has been widely exhibited in the US, Russia, and Europe,  as well as in private and state art collections including the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. But perhaps his greatest gift to others is his gentle, human words: “Ukraine can’t be explained by human language. Art helps.”

Neyman’s art has indeed helped, not only esthetically but practically. His work of expression and remembrance continues. So, too, does our friendship.

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Elayne Clift writes about art, politics, women and social justice.

The Act of Resistance Through Art

Goya did it in 1814 with his powerful painting “Third of May” which depicted the horror of war in the face of a screaming soldier being shot to death. So did Picasso in his iconic 1937 painting “Guernica,” a stunning indictment against the suffering of innocent people during the Spanish Civil War. Diego Rivera did it in his famous 1920s mural renderings in Mexico that attacked the ruling class, the church and capitalism.

Resistance art is a longstanding tradition that has grown larger over time as a form of political protest grounded in the mobilization and activism of people who wish to resist nonviolently. It has come to represent popular power and strength by offering activists something to rally behind, as art historian and critic Ruth Millington has pointed out. “Protest artwork can question, disturb, and even change the status quo,” she says, citing AIDS awareness campaigns in the 1980s and the more recent Guerilla Girls, a group of anonymous feminist advocates who got their start pushing for gallery representation of female artists. Now they protest, speak and perform, their identities concealed since they are working artists. Their humorous in-your-face posters, flyers, billboards and books are widely recognized and revered.

For all of history brave and creative people have fought oppression, injustice and inequality through various forms of art. They have stood for and led those who are without voice, marginalized because of their class, gender, age, disability, race, or social status. They have been the embodiment of the slogan “Power to the People” as they lead the way in acts of defiance that inspire connection and conviction.

Today protest art is even more important and possible thanks to the prolific possibilities of social media. It also takes numerous forms beyond paintings and poetry. But all of it, whether literature, drama, dance, puppetry, posters, or strobe lights on public buildings, it speaks volumes, encouraging public gatherings and passive resistance.

Music can also move people to action. Think Arlo Guthrie, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan.  Or YoYo Ma playing the Ukrainian national anthem on his cello in front of the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. Or just think of the beauty of the little girl with the golden voice who sang from a bunker in Ukraine and went viral.  Watch the Ukrainians singing their national anthem in front of Russian tanks.

Photography can also be social reform art.  The work of 1960s photographer Diane Arbus revealed the pain of poverty and otherness, while the work of Margaret Lange, whose “Migrant Mother” moved millions during the Depression and Dust Bowl days.  Social reformers like Jacob Riis used their social reform photography to bring evidence of their claims of injustice to viewers, conveying potent messages that engaged others. They communicate ideas that resonate across time, place, and context.

Such ideas are shared in the simple act of witnessing. Who would not be moved by the overwhelming crowds of protesters all over the world moving silently along the boulevards of their cities, placards in hand, as Ukrainians suffer? Who could not be mesmerized by the courageous woman fleeting across a live Russian state TV program with a placard that said simply, “Stop the War!” Who is not motivated to act in whatever why they can when we witness bombed babies and birthing mothers on Facebook and Twitter?

Whether it’s a universal image of a closed fist on a poster, a bit of graffiti on a building or bridge, an outrageous visual by the Guerilla Girls, or a simple rendition of the Ukrainian flag, powerful images like those of Iranian artist Shirin Neeshat, who advocates for women in Iran, call us to action because, as she says, “Art is our weapon.”

It is also a common thread among those of us who wish to be counted in the struggle against cruelty, injustice, and violence, and to those of us who want to bring about positive societal change. In light of all that this fragile world is confronting in these times, I am grateful for all forms of art that humanize and galvanize us, as they move us to resist when resistance is needed.

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River, Vt. 

Fanning the Flames of Poverty

A child plays with a lighter in a three-story apartment building in Philadelphia resulting in a fire that kills twelve people, mostly children. A malfunctioning hallway door in a Bronx high-rise apartment building leads to the death of seventeen people, including eight children – all within one week. Both tragedies housed low-income people. Both speak to the need for compliance with coded housing safety measures.

In the case of the Bronx high-rise building a self-closing door malfunctioned, filling a staircase with rapidly spreading suffocating smoke. The building had no fire escapes and residents reported that the building had door problems for years. They also reported persistent heat and fire safety issues, including fire alarms that no one actually paid attention to because “they rang at all hours of the day.”

In 2018 a fire in a residential building in the Bronx killed another dozen people. At the time, Rep. Richie Torres (D-NY) was a Bronx City Council member. He co-sponsored a bill that mandated all residential buildings in the Bronx have self-closing doors by the middle of last year. Now he has announced a federal, state, and local task force to examine residential building fire safety hazards. “We have to ensure that the housing stock is brought to the 21st century when it comes to fire safety, and the Bronx is no stranger to deadly fire,” he told the local press.

According to the press report, the Bronx building, built in 1972 under New York’s affordable housing program, only had sprinklers in the basement because, as a spokesperson for the owners of the building said, “its ceilings and floors are poured concrete and its fire doors are sufficient to make the building qualify as “non-combustible.” It’s worth noting that the current building owners include the son of a for-profit affordable housing developer.

Safe, affordable housing is a critical issue that gets little attention until there is a tragedy. Profit over people is usually the name of the game among developers and building owners, and politicians often look the other way or just don’t find time to address the urgent problems inherent in housing for low-income residents. Those problems often create health as well as safety issues, yet they remain ignored or skirted around because they are part of a complex, failing infrastructure too long denied, not only because of the expense of ensuring safety, but because building tenants at risk are not a high priority group for many building owners or politicians.

Sometimes it’s a matter of benign neglect on the part of landlords, but more often than not in large cities like New York, corruption fuels code breaking. And no landlords are more corrupt than so-called “slum landlords” whose neglect is criminal.

Take, for example, Jared Kushner, whose abuse of tenants was documented in a film by Alex Gibney called “Dirty Money,” in which one person interviewed called Kushner a “tier one predator.” According to the documentary, Kushner’s properties “have received hundreds of health code violations, including the presence of lead paint, lung carcinogens, and fire safety hazards.” In many documented cases, “the New York City Housing authority had issued violations but never followed up on collecting fine payments” nor had they checked to see if Kushner’s company actually fixed any dangerous living conditions.

Not all landlords rise to the level of Kushner’s abuse, but there are enough bad players that one guy’s mission in life is to keep landlords out of trouble. He calls himself “the real estate solutions guy” on his website which warns building owners about twelve common code enforcement violations. They include missing or inoperable smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, plumbing, heating, and electrical deficiencies, insufficient ventilation and rodents and infestations. Some cities, he adds, separate priority and non-priority violations. On his list of non-priorities? Missing or non-functioning smoke detectors.

Jessie Singer, in her forthcoming book There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise in Injury and Disaster – Who Profits and Who Pays the Price, points out that “the term ‘accident’ itself protects those in power and leaves the most vulnerable in harm’s way, preventing investigations, pushing off debts, blaming the victims, diluting anger, and even sparking empathy for the perpetrators,” her publisher, Simon and Schuster, says, adding “As the rate of [all] accidental death skyrockets in America, the poor and people of color end up bearing the brunt of the violence and blame, while the powerful use the excuse of the ‘accident’ to avoid consequences for their actions.”

That insight gets to the heart of the matter when it comes not only to building codes and fire safety but to the fundamental human right to safe, adequate shelter, as expressed in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, Article 25, which begins with these words: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing …”

As Jessie Singer said on an Instagram post following the Bronx tragedy, “Seventeen people in the Bronx died in a fire for the same reason that many Americans die in a house fire in 2022, because the only housing accessible to them is housing that is unsafe.”

In 2022, that is not only a human tragedy. It is a national disgrace.

A View of the World Through a Gendered Lens

As a feminist writer I often refer to “the lens of gender,” a term that refers to looking at the world through metaphorical spectacles that allow one to view people and events via a special filter. That filter exposes women’s experiences, needs, and perceptions while revealing the realities, needs and perceptions of men in new ways too.  Our vision becomes refined, more acute, and more humane when we don these spectacles, allowing us to see things more clearly and compassionately. By becoming aware of context, we find new meaning in our own and others’ experiences. 

Looking at the world through the lens of gender allowed Jean Kilbourne, for example, to shine light on the world of advertising in a way that no one had done before her. She demonstrated through her writing and classic video series that women were being objectified and sexualized by advertising that seemed clever, until the gender lens revealed advertising’s alarming or violent subtext.

Another kind of gender lens was more literal as photographers Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Diane Arbus and others revealed. Lange and Bourke-White were social realists whose visionary work revealed what Henry James referred to in literature as an “air of reality.”  Like James their work valued accurate representations of the psychological and material realities of life.

Lange achieved this reality by capturing historically important events, including the Dust Bowl and Depression-era days.  Committed to revealing the hardships visited upon poor migrants, she afforded her subjects dignity and respect, and by offering a literal gender lens, she also revealed what it looked like to be frightened, unbearably fatigued and marginalized.  Lange's images, like the iconic “Migrant Mother,” were often confrontational calls to conscience exposing the need to defend against a lack of interest or skepticism, especially among policymakers.

Margaret Bourke-White offered something new with her imagery of industrial America, 1930s Russia, and the horrors of World War II as no one else had. She also proved adept at capturing human moments in the lives of both the powerful and the poor in a body of work that ranged from the uncompromising to the personal. Women were often among the people she photographed to tie picture essays to real lives and individual experiences in a human way.

Diane Arbus once noted, “There are things nobody would see if [we] didn’t photograph them.”  Thankfully, she and other women photographers did view their work through a gender lens, for without that lens we would never have known so much of the world or the historical events that challenged everyone, including women and children. 

Martha Gellhorn was an intrepid journalist who covered several wars through a literary lens of gender. Leaving the news of bombs, battleships and martyred soldiers to the male press corps, she used her reporting to show the world what civilian women and children were suffering in war torn places By telling their stories she put a human face on the dreadful effects of conflict.

These innovative photographers and reporters, along with others, paved the way for women writers and photojournalists who were compelled to address social justice issues. Marion Palfi, for example, combined her art form with social research which resulted in her iconic images, including the 1940s photo “Wife of a Lynch Victim.” Social documentarian Mary Ellen Mark’s work explored homelessness, addiction, mental illness and teenage pregnancy, as seen from the inside.  (In 1976 she spent 36 days in the women’s maximum- security section of an Oregon mental institution.)

I can’t help thinking now about women like these as we contemplate the suffering occurring in the world in our own time. What might we learn in larger social justice terms if unflinching photographs of the vacant stares and skeletal bones of children starving in Yemen, Afghanistan and parts of Africa were in our minds, or we heard the stories of grieving mothers, themselves hungry and frail? Would we see the face of famine differently?

Would we more fully empathize with the pain of incarceration, wrongful or otherwise, or the unending grief of parents who bury their children because of gun violence? Would we view addiction or mental illness differently? Would we be less judgmental about those who live in family structures unlike our own? Would we understand more deeply what it is like to lose everything in a natural disaster, or to grow old alone?

If we saw the faces of hopelessness, terror, marginalization, solitude, and profound sadness might we be inspired to show up at the polls to vote for change, to advocate vociferously, to press for more humane legislation?

As feminists know, context is everything. When the world is viewed through the lens of gender, social change becomes a political imperative. Stories of real people who live punishing lives for various reasons become compelling through a visual medium that offers powerful testimony to the reality of lives lived outside our own spheres. 

In short, seeing is knowing. And knowing, we can no longer look away.

The Supreme Court Takes Aim at Women

 In her memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence Rebecca Solnit writes, “To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways.” Nothing proves her point more powerfully than the debacle of the Supreme Court as it debated the likely demise of legal abortion in this country.

With stunning ignorance of and disregard for women’s lives, five men and one woman in black robes pontificated and danced around the real issue before them -- women’s bodily integrity, agency, and personhood.  Instead, they reprised the overwhelming oppression of females that has existed for millennia in fear of women’s autonomy, thereby joining the generations of (mostly) men who view women as nothing more than state-owned semen vessels.

The argument before the Court aimed at gutting 50 years of precedent in the matter of abortion reminded many women of the medieval practice of disappearing women into convents and monasteries and later into asylums where they were diminished, demoralized, and drugged into passivity.  

Imagine this: You are a woman with three children living in poverty when you have a contraceptive failure and are forced to carry the pregnancy to term.  You are a woman 19 weeks pregnant with a much-wanted child when you learn that anomalies render the fetus unviable and continuing the pregnancy could endanger your own life, but you are denied an abortion. You are a college student who has been awarded a scholarship for advanced study when you realize you are pregnant.  Denied a safe abortion, you schedule a clandestine, illegal one. You are a 13-year-old child who has been raped by her stepfather and is now told she must bear her rapist’s child.

Try to imagine living with the crippling fear these scenarios engender.

And yet the Supreme Court is trying mightily to hold women hostage because macho-male powerbrokers are so threatened by the idea of female agency that they must control women at all costs and condemn them for believing they are entitled to fully lived lives grounded in equality and human rights.

There is, of course, one woman among the six justices chomping at the bit to effect the demise of legally sanctioned abortion. She should have been able to relate to issues relevant to pregnancy, for she too has borne children, felt them wiggle in her belly, done the hard labor of delivering them into the world and loving them when they arrived. Yet she argued that women don’t need abortions because they can easily dump their newborn babies into adoption or foster care like so much detritus, while her male colleagues grappled with numbers, the vagaries of viability, and the rights of fetuses over living women.

The reckless and dangerous disregard for women’s lives and lived reality during the justices’ discourse was nothing short of staggering as it showcased America’s Taliban.

It was also shocking to hear Scott Stewart, lawyer for the state of Mississippi which seeks to limit abortion to 15 weeks as a gateway to overturing of Roe v. Wade. His responses to questions from the justices were befuddled, obfuscating, superficial, and just plain ridiculous. This is the man Donald Trump put in charge of immigrant detention centers without any qualifications for the job.  Still, he was kept busy keeping monthly updated logs of females’ menstrual cycles during their incarceration to prevent legal abortions from happening.

How draconian can you get?

The foundation of entrenched, continuing misogyny women face yet again is what women like Emmeline Pankhurst and Alice Paul fought for when they risked their lives for women’s’ suffrage, what Margaret Sanger sacrificed in her fight for contraception and sex education, what Second Wave feminists fought for when they marched in every country in the world before, during and after the UN Decade for Women.  It is what women like Virginia Woolf, Tillie Olson, Betty Friedan, Carol Gilligan, Carolyn Heilbrunn, Audrey Lorde, and the multitudes who preceded or followed them wrote about: The trivialization, objectification, marginalization and silencing of over half the population in this country and elsewhere.

None of us who have been in the trenches for years fighting for equality, autonomy, economic justice, reproductive health care (which includes abortion), privacy, choices, and other basic human rights – all of which are at risk with this Supreme Court -- thought we’d find ourselves back to Square One in this moment, living in fear, facing limited opportunities and the denial of our chosen paths. Never did we imagine that in the 21st century we would again live with the oppression of patriarchal power, such that sexism, racism, and violence prevail.

When Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked this question during the SCOTUS debate, “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” she was asking a question so vital that it could have an impact on the outcome of the case being considered.

That question also invoked the patriarchy and misogyny that once again prevails as a dominating force in women’s lives. Sadly, especially for our daughters and granddaughters, the stench of annihilation is likely to be with us far into the future.

The Arming of America

The verdict is in. The vigilantes are celebrating. Kyle Rittenhouse is free.  The postmortem predictions of what it will mean for us as a society begin, as does the fear for our future as we face a freefall into more violence while our country descends into the depths of depravity acted out on the streets.

It is now possible to kill someone in the name of self-defense and literally get away with murder. It’s a field day for open carry laws that make going to a public event or riding the subway or simply walking down the wrong street at the wrong time a determining factor in whether you live or die. It is a dark day in America.

Gun violence was bad enough before Kyle Rittenhouse killed two people and walked away a free man. But as a recent New York Times piece about the proliferation of “ghost guns” – untraceable guns that can be assembled from online purchases of components – has made clear, America’s gun problem has reached epidemic proportions. These lethal weapons are within easy reach of people legally barred from buying or owning guns which, as the Times article revealed, “helps explain why since 2016 about  25,000 privately made firearms have been confiscated by local federal law enforcement agencies nationwide.”

Earlier this year the Children’s Defense Fund issued a report about the epidemic of gun violence affecting children. It revealed, among other statistics, that gun violence has killed more than 200,000 children and teens since the 1960s. “That’s more than the number of soldiers killed in Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, and Iraq combined,” with black children suffering the highest gun death rates. In 2019, according to the report, they accounted for 43 percent of child and teen deaths even though they constituted just 14 percent of all children and teens that year.

Women are also among those most vulnerable to gun violence. According to the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence, “nearly 92 percent of all women killed by guns in high-income countries were American women, [who are] 21 times more likely to be shot and killed than women in other high-income countries.”  https://efsgv.org/ Further, “around one in four women in the United States have been threatened with a gun and nearly 1 million women have been shot or shot at by an intimate partner. Over half of all intimate partner homicides are committed with guns and a woman is five times more likely to be murdered when her abuser has access to a gun.”

According to www.everytownresearch.org, every month an average of 57 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner. Black, American Indian, and Hispanic women are disproportionately affected by gun violence, along with members of the LGBTQ community and people with disabilities. That’s why Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Ca.) has introduced a number of relevant bills including H.R. 1441, the No Guns for Abusers Act, designed to help states enforce existing laws against people who try to purchase firearms without the legal right to do so.

The epidemic gun violence affecting women and children are part of the entire fabric of gun violence in this country, a phenomenon that other “developed” countries simply cannot fathom. They, ghost guns, and now the exoneration of Kyle Rittenhouse are connected like the parts of a quilt, similar to those that have woven into them pieces of history.

One of the pieces of our history is the outdated Second Amendment, meant to arm militias in the 18th century. It’s an amendment no longer relevant, and a shield behind which gun enthusiasts hide. It’s an amendment that fuels the likes of open carry advocates, eager vigilantes, and people comfortable with and prone to violence all too eager to claim self-defense, often a defense rooted in racism. It’s an amendment that allowed Kyle Rittenhouse to be exonerated.

So far, according to a September CNN report, “2021 is likely to be the worst year for gun violence in decades.” What’s more, in October The New York Times revealed that a significant number of travelers have been stopped at U.S. airports trying to board planes with loaded guns.  Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers report stopping nearly 5,000 passengers from carrying firearms onto flights by October this year.https://www.tsa.gov/

Now comes the conservative Supreme Court which recently heard a gun rights case in which the majority could make it easier for people to carry firearms in public. According to Time Magazine, “justices could loosen or strike down a century-old provision in New York that requires people to prove they have a special need for self-protection if they want to carry a concealed handgun outside of their home. The challengers in the suit—backed by the NRA-affiliated New York State Rifle & Pistol Association—argue that the restriction violates the Second Amendment.”

As we await the SCOTUS decision, the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict has already added immeasurably to America’s growing gun violence epidemic. It has effectively declared open season on the gunning down of America. It fuels an unchecked impetus toward violence and vigilantes and increased an escape valve when gun violence occurs.

God help us all. 

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The Hands That Rock the Cradle Need Help

After MSNBC anchor Katy Tur gave birth to her first child in 2019 she devoted her come back show to the need for a Family Leave policy that matches that of other developed countries. Her plea was personal.  She had undergone an unplanned C-section to deliver her son and had struggled with breastfeeding her small baby who needed to nurse frequently. She also got a post-op infection which slowed down her surgical recovery. All of this made her feel exhausted to the point of hallucinations, and she feared being home alone with her newborn after her supportive husband returned to work. It’s not an atypical story, especially for first-time parents.

“Mothers and fathers need time with their babies and they need support,” she said then. “Lawmakers talk about family leave but nothing gets done. It’s shameful.” She might have made the exact same plea after the birth of her daughter earlier this year.

Tur was one of the lucky ones. Her employer had an excellent, supportive family leave policy. Most women – and men – are not so fortunate. Many women must return to work within a couple of weeks of giving birth because they can’t afford unpaid leave. Seventy percent of men must return to work within ten days or less after becoming a father.

An estimated 80 percent of U.S. employers do not have paid parental leave or have miserably inadequate plans, often following the federal government which gives most federal workers just twelve weeks of paid parental leave. That’s a pittance compared to other countries.

A 2019 study of 41 countries conducted by the Pew Research Center revealed the dismal U.S. situation. Countries like Estonia, which topped the list at 86 weeks of paid leave, Japan, Norway, Luxembourg, Malta, Korea and others had impressive leave policies. The U.S. ranked last.

Clearly, another Labor Day, a day on which we honor the country’s workers, has come and gone and still we fail to support women’s ongoing labor - in the workplace, at home, and essentially after childbirth.

While we have yet to enact a national mandate for paid family leave, some states do have paid leave policies in place. They report a measurable reduction in the number of women leaving their jobs in the first year after giving birth and up to a 50 percent reduction after five years, according to a 2019 study conducted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Paid leave is gaining more traction as an issue in need of legislation. In addition to an increasing number of national models that shame our own, more U.S. women are in the workforce and more families have two working parents. And paid leave isn’t needed just for new moms and dads. It may be necessary to recover from an illness or to care for a sick or disabled family member or elderly relative.

That’s why The Family and Medical Leave Insurance (FAMILY) Act was introduced by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D – CT) yet again in 2019.  The Act, modeled after successful state programs, uses a social insurance system to provide workers with comprehensive paid family and medical leave. Comparable models have been passed in four states and the District of Columbia.

This year the two legislators have tried again to get Congress to pass a permanent paid leave policy nationally, arguing in language that male and conservative legislators like; The FAMILY Act, they said, would spur economic recovery and growth.

The Act would ensure that every worker, no matter the size of their employer, self-employed status, or part-time work would have access to twelve weeks of paid leave equal to up to 66 percent of wage replacement for every serious medical event every time it’s needed.

In defending the Act, Sen. Gillibrand noted that the Covid pandemic seriously impacted women in the workforce and hit middle class families hard. “Women have been forced to make the impossible decision between caring for their families or earning a paycheck.”

Rep. DeLauro added, “Long before this crisis there has been a desperate need for paid family and medical leave. This problem must be addressed in a permanent way.”

“It’s a national disgrace that our federal government doesn’t guarantee paid family and medical leave for the American people,” activist Melanie Campbell, CEO of The National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, says.

Activists like her and others aren’t mincing words. “They know what it means to go back to work three weeks after giving birth. They know the extraordinary cost of having to start from scratch because of lost income while caring for a loved one with a disability,” Sade Moonsammy of Family Values @ Work said in support of the FAMILY Act, which has been endorsed by more than 85 national organizations.

It’s an Act that is long overdue, as Katy Tur and other new moms and dads know. It’s time to join the list of countries that get it, and care enough to do something meaningful in support of American workers and their families. The hand that rocks the cradle has long needed a hug and a little help. Surely that’s not asking too much.

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

Staring at America's Dystopian Future

In 1940, Alice Duer Miller wrote a beautiful epic poem called “The White Cliffs.” An American who had married a British man just prior to World War I, she soon lost her husband serving a country that wasn’t hers. As she penned the poem, she faced the possibility of losing her son to World War II, again for a country not her own.  Yet, her last poetic lines are these: “I am American bred. I have seen much to hate here – much to forgive. But in a world where England is finished and dead, I do not wish to live.”

Imagine loving a country that is not your own so much.  Then consider not loving your own country anymore because it has dragged you into a very dark place, a place of fear and disillusion, a place growing more dystopian by the day.

In the space of just a few days, we have watched a Congressperson promise to shut down media organizations if they complied with legal subpoenas, we saw a state pass draconian laws that inhibit voting rights in dramatic, disturbing and undemocratic ways, and then we watched as that same state ignored the constitutional right to abortion granted to women in 1973. On top of that, the state, Texas, granted vigilante rights with financial incentives to any citizen who didn’t want to grant women that right.   

Just let the idea of private bounty hunters sink in. They might be husbands or boyfriends, angry neighbors, relatives, friends, pastors, people who think pregnancy by rape or incest is not so bad, folks who hate the idea of abortion but especially like the thought of a $10,000 reward. Some may be devout, but they are all devious and despicable. Over what ideologies might other states consider employing them?

Then came the most stunning blow of all in the form of the unbelievable and terrifying silence of an overwhelmingly conservative and politicized Supreme Court in the face of Texas’s deeply dangerous, and replicable law; a law so hideously and overtly fascist, a law wreaking with the stench of secret police in autocracies and dictatorships like those of Italy’s Mussolini, Romania’s Ceausescu, and today’s Vickor Orban in Hungary. How can any American not be sickened by that level of betrayal?

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of four dissenting justices, unleashed her fury and spoke for many of us in her minority opinion: “The court’s order is stunning,” she wrote. “Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand. The court has rewarded the state’s effort to delay federal review of a plainly unconstitutional statute, enacted in disregard of the court’s precedents, through procedural entanglements of the state’s own creation. The court should not be so content to ignore its constitutional obligations to protect not only the rights of women, but also the sanctity of its precedents and of the rule  of law.”

How, one must ask, does the court overrule fifty years of precedent – a value deeply held by conservatives - in its race to allow the invasion of women’s lives, a question former Representative Claire McCaskill asked in rage when commenting on MSNBC. How quickly will states rush to replicate this precedent?

In a statement that could have been more strongly supportive of women’s right to privacy and agency, President Biden warned that the nearly complete ban on abortion in Texas will cause “unconstitutional chaos.” It also begs the question, how will the Supreme Court rule on other cases that seek to curb abortion rights nationally?

While civil rights advocates sound alarm bells about worrisome implications for future laws, social justice and human rights opinion leaders like Michael Moore and others suggest the situation has reached crisis proportions such that terms like “conservative” and “evangelical” in reference to right wing radicals are no longer appropriate because they normalize groups that have essentially become America’s Taliban.

That term may be offensive to some, but in the face of an ever-growing political climate of oppression, exclusion and violence, and a Congress or Supreme Court that increasingly embraces ideas antithetical to democracy and proceeds to exercise the power to curb it, surely the time has come to recognize the imminent and very real threat before us.  That threat is nothing short of an undemocratic and dystopian future in which we join in the despair of so many others around the globe.

It’s a world in which we may still have a choice: To deny what is happening with frightening speed, or to ignore what is bearing down upon us, only to find ourselves back in Plato’s allegorical cave, in which we all sit staring at a blank wall, our backs to the light, believing that is simply the way we must live.

As Alice Duer Miller might have said, in such a world, where freedom and hope are finished and dead, I do not wish to live.

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River, Vt. 

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.

What is Title 42 and Why Should It Be Rescinded?

“A lot of girls cry. They have thoughts of cutting themselves,” a 14-year old Guatemalan girl told a Reuters reporter in June.  “I feel asphyxiated having so many people around me. There’s no one here I can talk to about my case, or when I’m feeling sad. I just talk to God and cry,” said another teenage girl from Honduras who was held in the Dallas convention center with 2600 other kids.

 It gets worse when you read press reports written over the summer. Kids in custody reported spoiled food, no clean clothes, sleeping on cots under glaring lights, drinking spoiled milk when there isn’t water. According to The New York Times a military base in El Paso detained youth who said they’d gone days without showering while in Erie, Pa, lice were rampant. In June roughly 4,000 unaccompanied children were being held by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), a step up from ICE detention, but still in facilities where press is not permitted.

 No one denies that growing numbers of immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S. present a difficult problem. The Biden administration understands and has worked to alleviate the suffering.  Still, the incarceration of children is inhumane. As Leecia Welch, a lawyer at the National Center for Youth Law, told The New York Times in June, “Thousands of traumatized children are lingering in massive detention sites on military bases or convention centers, many relegated to unsafe, unsanitary conditions.”

 That’s why there is growing outrage about the continuation of Title 42 as a deportation mechanism, used to keep immigrants out of the country by Donald Trump. President Biden promised to end it but is now allowing it to remain in place indefinitely.

  In a letter to the White House over 100 groups urged the president to rescind Title 42 expulsions charging that it violates U.S. refuge law and treaties and endangers people seeking protection at the U.S.- Mexican border  According to Border Report in Texas, the expulsions are not based on science and expose people being held to violence in Mexico.  

 Title 42 is one of 50 titles within the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations established in 1944 to move quarantine authority to the public health sector, but it was sometimes used to control immigration using public health as a rationale. Well before the Covid pandemic, Donald Trump’s advisor, Stephen Miller, suggested applying the Code to close the border to asylum seekers despite being told by lawyers they lacked the legal authority. Human Rights Watch (HRW) argues that “the expulsion policy is illegal and violates human rights,” and adds that “U.S. law gives asylum seekers the right to seek asylum upon arrival in the United States, even if seekers arrive without inspection prior authorization. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is legally required to conduct screenings to ensure they do not expel people who need protection.”

 Yet since March 2020, CBP has carried out almost 643,000 expulsions using Title 42, without conducting required screenings, thus committing illegal “turnbacks”. In November a federal district court blocked use of Title 42 in the case of unaccompanied minors, but by the time the Biden administration vowed to end it over 13,000 kids had been expelled.

 Here’s the rub. These kids aren’t entering the U.S. with Covid.  They get it once they are held in detention because of overcrowding and unhygienic conditions in HHS and CBP facilities. Some children have died in detention.

 Along with children, pregnant women, some in labor, have been expelled along with LGBT people, who are particularly vulnerable to violence, even since President Biden took office, according to Human Rights Watch.

 HRW also states that “The Convention against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which the U.S. is a party, prohibit expulsions or returns in circumstances where people would face a substantial risk of torture or exposure to other ill-treatment. Also, under U.S. law and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refuges, to which the U.S. is party, the United States may not return asylum seekers to face threats to their lives or freedom without affording them an opportunity to apply for asylum and conducting a full and fair examination of that claim.” Nevertheless, by February this year CBP had carried out more than 520,000 expulsions, according to the American Immigration Council.

 Let’s be clear. No one risks their lives or suffers the unimaginable hardships of migration without compelling reasons that include crushing poverty, criminal gangs that kill people and abduct their children, devastating violence, hopelessness and more. (If you want to know what the journey is really like, read Disquiet by Zulfu Livaneli, or The Mediterranean Wall by Louis-Philippe Dalembert.)

 The United Nations holds that asylum-seeking children should never be detained. And still they come by the hundreds of thousands. That’s why the ACLU is moving forward with a lawsuit that seeks to lift the public health order for migrant families and unaccompanied children. As Lee Gelernt, ACLU’s lead lawyer says, “Time is up” for dealing with this human rights catastrophe.

 The kids cutting themselves as they weep couldn’t agree more.

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

Broken Courts Mean Battered Lives

She is a 76-year old woman, a cancer survivor, and caretaker for her 94-year old mother. She spent 16 years in prison for distributing heroin before being released to house arrest last year. Her name is Gwen Levi, and she was doing well – until she didn’t answer a phone call from her parole officer because she was in a computer class she hoped would lead to employment. Now she’s back in jail because she didn’t take the call, considered a violation of parole by the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Brett Jones was 15 when he fatally stabbed his grandfather during an argument in 2004. He was sentenced to life without parole. Jones recently argued before the Supreme Court that on the basis of two prior Supreme Court decisions, the sentencing judge in his case should have found that he was incapable of rehabilitation before imposing life without parole. But in April, the Supreme Court, with Justice Kavanaugh writing the majority opinion, ruled 6-3 that a defendant can be sentenced to life without parole for a homicide committed as a juvenile without a separate finding of permanent incorrigibility.

There are more than 2,000 child offenders serving life without parole sentences in U.S. prisons for crimes committed before the age of 18, and a few kids are on death row. We are one of only a few countries in the world that permit children who commit crimes to be sentenced to prison forever, without any possibility of release.

 Robert DuBoise is among the lucky few who are finally released on the basis of DNA evidence. He served 37 years for a rape and murder that he did not commit. Many others like him spend years of their lives behind bars and on  death row.

According to the ACLU more than 3200 people are serving serious time for nonviolent offenses like stealing a jacket or serving as middleman in the sale of $10 of marijuana. An estimated 65% of them are Black. Many of them struggled with mental illness, drug dependency or financial desperation when committing their crimes. Others languish in jail, unindicted, for lack of bail money.

From the lowest courts to federal courts to the Supreme Court, the legal system and its courts seem to be more criminal than just when it comes to “criminal justice,” a system allegedly designed to deliver “justice for all.” The system encompasses law enforcement, courts, and corrections, including the juvenile justice system. But that system is clearly broken, and a huge number of lives are affected by flaws in the system in profound and disturbing ways.

The justice system can’t be reformed without understanding that this is a political as well as an institutional problem. For starters, during the Trump presidency, three conservative justices were seated on the Supreme Court. The senators who confirmed them represented less than half of the national electorate, and let us remember, the president who appointed them was impeached twice. Over the last four-plus decades Democrats held the presidency for half that time during which they appointed four justices to SCOTUS. Republicans have held the presidency for slightly longer and have appointed 11 justices.

This isn’t just about our judiciary systems and their flaws. It’s about a real crisis that threatens our democracy. It’s not the first time we’ve faced that existential threat. Scholars point out that as early as the 1790s and into the 19th century as well as the 20th, fears about the demise of our democracy led to political action, for better or worse, as Thomas Keck wrote in the Washington  Post.

Now the Supreme Court’s new Voting Rights Act “could gut civil rights protections,” Keck said, pointing out that “throughout U.S. history…the court itself has been perceived as a barrier to democratic preservation and renewal.”  That is clear now given the gerrymandering, voter suppression, and filibuster arguments we face.

Among state legislatures posing threats to our democracy, none is more egregious than Arizona, which made it harder for minorities to vote, weakening the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The worst of it is that the conservative Supreme Court upheld the Arizona law, causing Justice Elena Kagan to write, “What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute designed to bring about ‘the end of discrimination in voting’”.

Thankfully, President Biden has appointed a presidential commission on Supreme Court reform. It will consider calls for term limits, expanding the number of justices on the court, and removing some issues from the court’s purview.

A commission report regarding the Supreme Court won’t cure all the injustices in our legal systems, but we can hope they will signal a start to meaningful reform.  Otherwise, the blindfolded lady with the scales of justice on her shoulders might as well step off her pedestal. The rest of us can do little more than advocate, educate and vote smart in hopes that we can right the wrongs of a so-called “criminal justice system’. It’s the least we can do for incarcerated children and innocents on death row.

The Urgency of Saving Roe v. Wade

She is sixteen years old and pregnant. Still in school and devoid of job skills, she would not qualify to adopt a child, yet she could be forced to carry the fetus to term.

 She is a mother who wants another child, but in the third term of her pregnancy she learns her fetus has severe organ anomalies and will die soon after birth, but she is denied a late term abortion.

 She is a victim of rape who suffers post-traumatic stress that renders her unable to work, but she will be forced to give birth.

 She has been sexually abused by her uncle for years and is now pregnant by him, but she cannot have an abortion.

 Each of these women represent many others. They are the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about as the United States moves ever closer to draconian restrictions on abortion, and ultimately the death of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution protects a woman's liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. 

 Ever since the Supreme Court’s decision a growing number of states have worked hard to promulgate laws and regulations that limit whether and when a woman can obtain an abortion. Restrictions aimed at reducing abortions are designed to challenge to Roe v. Wade in the hope it will be reversed.  They include such measures as mandating unnecessary physician and hospital requirements, setting gestational limits, preventing so-called “partial birth” (late term) abortion, promulgating funding restrictions, and insisting on state-mandated counseling, waiting periods, and parental involvement.

 But never have we seen abortion restrictions like those that now exist in 45 states, making 2021 a “year that is well on its way to being defined as the worst one in abortion rights history,” as the Guttmacher Institute notes.

 Various state laws from Arizona to Arkansas are a Handmaid’s Tale nightmare, but none are as staggering as the laws in Texas. Beginning in January this year, patients are required to receive state-directed counseling including information designed to discourage abortion, coupled with mandated wait times. There are constraints on various insurance policies including those included in the Affordable Care Act. Parental consent is required, and patients must undergo an ultrasound at least 24 hours before obtaining an abortion while the provide shows and describes the fetal image to the patient.  

 Further, in May, Texas governor Greg Abbott signed a fetal heartbeat abortion bill that bans abortion as early as six weeks, well before most women know they’re pregnant. That bill is scheduled to go into effect in September, although it and many other proposed laws are being challenged in the courts.

 No wonder Texan Paxton Smith, graduating valedictorian of her high school class, found her graduation speech going viral.  With enormous courage, she ‘aborted’ her approved speech and spoke eloquently, noting at the start that the six-week “Heartbeat Act” had just been introduced.

 “I cannot give up this platform to promote complacency and peace when there is a war on my body and on my rights. A war on the rights of your mothers, a war on the rights of your sisters, a war on the rights of your daughters. We cannot stay silent,” she told the crowd, noting that medical authorities have said the fetal heartbeat argument is misleading.

 Shortly after Smith gave her speech, a Spokane, WA newspaper revealed that several months earlier a woman who suffered a miscarriage in a Spokane hotel had been investigated by police who found it suspicious that she did not meet them at the hospital as they had instructed. A search warrant followed because the cops thought she might be guilty of criminal mistreatment of a child. Ultimately the investigation was closed.  But women are actually in jail here and in other countries, charged with feticide following a miscarriage. 

 It doesn’t have to be this way.  There are many models we can look to in which women’s right to exercise control over their bodies is not in the hands of the state. The Netherlands is one such country. Abortion is free on demand there and yet they have the lowest abortion rate in the world, while complications and deaths from abortion are rare. Contraception is widely available and free, and abortion is covered by the national health insurance plan. Sex education starts early, and Dutch teenagers have less frequent sex starting at an older age than American teens; their pregnancy rate is six times lower than ours.

 Why, then, but for Paxton Smith, do we never hear media reports about the critical issue of abortion, which male powerbrokers embrace with the force of institutionalized misogyny? Why does the current administration remain silent on an issue of this import when three quarters of Americans want Roe v. Wade to remain in place, citing it as a key issue affecting who will get their vote? Why is the American public so ready to give up on a fundamental human right that can touch all of us?

 Why, Ms. Smith might well ask, do we stay silent?

History as Prologue: The Shadow of a Continuing Crisis

It will come as no surprise that Liz Cheney is not on my short list of politicians I admire or wish to see in Congress. But she has done the right thing in calling out the “big lie” and promising to do all she can to keep Donald Trump away from the White House, literally or in terms of his influence over a terribly broken party. She is a canary in the coal mine. Would that others had the courage to follow suite.  

Most sentient beings on the planet breathed a huge sigh of relief last November when Joe Biden won the presidential election. We were even happier when he and his administration immediately began acting robustly on myriad issues. First came the well-chosen appointments, the flurry of executive orders reversing Trump’s perversities, then the big bills aimed at healthcare, infrastructure, economic recovery, climate change, income inequality, childcare, and more – all of which made Republicans in Congress and their Q-anon conspiracists cringe – and jump into action. 

A majority of states immediately flew into action to bring back Jim Crow with hideous voting rights restrictions. Protesters began to be arrested. Gun violence and hate crimes grew by startling percentages while white supremacist cops kept killing blacks. Arizona decided to hold yet another recount of the election results there, barring journalists from the hanger where counters tried mightily to spot bamboo in the ballots. (Proof that the party has gone crazy.) 

Republicans in Congress began their urgent campaign, articulated by Mitch McConnell, to stop any legislation proposed by the White House or Democrats in the House of Representatives. Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, Josh Hawley, and other deranged congressmen went on various rants grounded in lies and nonsense. Rand Paul accosted public health expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, accusing him of funding dangerous research in China (more proof of crazy). Vaccine conspiracies and anti-masking activists got really crazy.

All of this occurred post-January 6th when the unimaginable happened and an insurrection at the Capital that day sent America a clear message:  This country is not out of danger.

The fact is the real and growing possibility of living through the destruction of American democracy is not going away, it is growing. Donald Trump is now viewed as the head of the Republican party as he holds the feet of elected officials to the fire with his fierce, alarming grip on their futures. A significant number of regular Republicans continue to embrace the lies, mantras, and inconceivable theories spewed out daily by Fox News. Insurrectionists crawl out from under their rocks in droves. The Supreme Court is now a quasi-political body with a 6-3 conservative majority.

All this is terrifying in its implications. Like many others now, I grow more and more anxious by the day – so much so that I actually inquired about getting a British passport, which my husband and children hold.  I know that what happened in countries like Turkey, Egypt, Poland, Hungary, and others can happen here.

We are not immune from autocrats and dictatorship and we are not protected by our Constitution if it no long holds meaning for those in power. Our future is riding on the midterm elections next year, and the 2024 presidential election.

If you think I am needlessly hyperventilating, consider this: In 1923 Hitler mounted a failed coup. When he failed, his effort was treated leniently. A decade later he was Germany’s dictator. In 2021 Donald Trump inspired a failed coup. It too has been treated leniently by those who say we “need to move on.” Will he, or his appointed alter ego, be our dictator in less than a decade?

Ece Temelkuran, a noted Turkish journalist, wrote a book in 2019 in which she explains how Turkey’s President Erdogan came to rule that country. The book is called How to Lose a Country: Seven Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship. In the first chapter she writes, “Watching a disaster occur has a sedating effect. As our sense of helplessness grows along with the calamity, [we begin to feel that] there is no longer anything you can do. … global news channels jump in [for] the denouement It has been a long and exhausting [time], unbearably painful. It began with a populist coming to town. … A bleak dawn breaks.”

She goes on to draw comparisons between Turkey and what’s happening in the U.S. and elsewhere that are chilling: “It doesn’t matter if Trump or Erdogan or [the UK’s] Nigel Farage is brought down. Millions of people are fired up by their message and will be ready to act upon the orders of a similar figure. … These minions will find you, even in your own personal space, armed with their own set of values and ready to hunt down anyone who doesn’t resemble themselves.”

Temelkuran points out that this is not something imposed top down or by “the Kremlin. It also arises from the grassroot,” and she says wisely, “it is time to recognize that what is occurring affects us all.”

It is time, indeed, for America to realize what is occurring – and that it will affect us all.

How Much Longer Before We End the Massacre of Innocents?

As I watched the flag-draped coffin of the late Billy Evans, the second Capital Police officer to lie in state, descend from the Capital steps, I wept – and wondered how much longer we would find ourselves living in a country that has become so violent.

As I saw the photograph of the deceased Duane Wright holding his one-year old child and heard the wails of his aggrieved aunt, I also wondered how much longer we will go on living in such a violent country.

As I heard witness after witness in the trial of Derek Chauvin, charged with killing George Floyd, I asked myself again:  How much longer must we live with the massacre of black people, mostly men, by aggressive, out of control, incipiently violent police?  

And when I read David Gray’s stunning Facebook post I wondered again how much longer such hideous racist behavior would prevail?

Gray’s post was about his day, one in which he would take all manner of precautions to ensure that he, his wife and his child would make it through another day without being shot by police.  He would, he said, not take public transport. He would not hang an air freshener in his car, and he would double check his car registration status. He would be sure his license plates were visible, he would carefully follow all traffic rules, keep the radio down, forgo stopping at a fast food restaurant, forego prayer, and simply hope to God that his car didn’t break down.

His wife would take another set of precautions when she picked their young child up from daycare. They would not play in a park or go for an ice cream. Once the child was in bed, neither of his parents would leave the house to run errands or jog. “We will just sit and try not to breathe and not to sleep,” Gray wrote. And in everything he and his wife would do or not do, there was a name attached: Lt. Caron Nazario, Philandro Castro, Sandra Bland, Rev. Clementa Pickney, Elijah McCain, Tamir Rice, Ahmaud Argery, Breonna Taylor, and many more because of what had happened to each one of them.

But it isn’t only police violence that makes the burning question linger in my brain and bruise my heart. How much longer, I ask myself over and over again, must we live with so much violence that results in the massacre of the innocents?

Several days before I wrote this commentary a woman in Virginia was killed by a stray bullet. The same day eight people were also wounded by gunfire in a separate shooting, and a mother of six was fatally wounded in North Carolina while on an anniversary trip with her husband, shot in the head in a drive-by shooting in an act of road rage.

How can it be that we live in a country so barbaric that you take your chances just going grocery shopping, attending school, showing up at work, being on vacation, having a night out for drinks or dinner, or standing in your own backyard? How much longer can we live like that?

How did we become a banana republic in which our own house of parliament could be stormed by insurrectionists calling for the death of elected officials and a state congresswoman could get arrested for gently knocking on the governor’s door as he welcomed Jim Crow home? How did we reach the point where Asian Americans are beaten on the streets of America and trans kids are denied health care?  

Gun violence is not only a physical threat. It’s a public health emergency that threatens our emotional well-being and fills us with anxiety. Some of us get emotionally crazy. I actually ask my adult children to text me when they get home from being on the road, walking in the dark, jogging in the park, or working late at night.

According to the Gun Violence Archive as reported by the Washington Post, in 2020, gun violence killed nearly 20,000 Americans, more than any other year in at least two decades. The U.S. experienced the highest one-year increase in homicides since it began keeping records last year, and large cities saw a 30 percent spike in gun violence. Gunshot injuries also rose dramatically, to nearly 40,000.

This year, following the January 6th attack on the Capital, over two million guns were sold in January alone. That’s an 80 percent increase in gun sales and the third highest monthly total on record. All of this while the outdated Second Amendment is invoked in the 21st century, hundreds of years since muskets went out fashion and military weapons became vogue.

Writer Mary McCarthy once said, “In violence, we forget who we are.”  America, it seems to me, need not remember who we are so much; that would reveal the “400 year lie” that current writers admonish us to remember. Instead, America desperately needs to think about what we have become. Only then can the country heal, reinvent itself, and emerge from the darkness that is rapidly enveloping us.  Let us begin with a question: How do we stop the massacre of the innocents?

A Mea Culpa to Women Artists

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts dedicates a floor to women’s art. An entire wing of the Brooklyn Museum exhibits feminist art only. At the Baltimore Museum of Art, a year-long program of exhibitions, programs, and acquisitions by female-identified artists is mounted. New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) showcases printmaker and found artist Betye Saar’s 1969 autobiographical work, “Black Girl’s Window.”

These are just a few museums in the U.S. committed to correcting past omissions in terms of acquiring, exhibiting, and honoring women artists. Each was opened last year and each fell victim to anticipated large scale viewing because of shut downs in the face of Covid-19.

They were joined by other excited institutions, galleries, and university-based arts venues across the country who worked collaboratively with the Feminist Art Coalition, a grassroots organization, to present a series of concurrent events including exhibitions, performances, and lectures to ensure that women are recognized at the museum level.

Internationally, museums including Madrid’s Prado, were also slated to be recognized as they commemorated women’s achievement in art. The historical inequality pervasive in the male-dominated art world was obvious for years at the Prado, but for its 200th anniversary the museum featured two overlooked 16th century female painters. Elsewhere in Europe, last year saw major exhibits of women’s art.

All that activity reflected progress, but there are still issues to be addressed when it comes to women in the arts. Just two years ago 96 percent of artwork sold at auction was by male artists and only 30 percent of artists represented by commercial galleries in the U.S. were women. A survey of permanent collections in 18 major art museums in America conducted at the same time found that out of over 10,000 artists, 87 percent were male and 85 percent were white. Only 27 women out of 318 artists are represented in the 9th edition of Janson’s Basic History of Western Art, up from zero in the 1980s.

Against that backdrop, the work of the Boston Museums of Fine Art (MFA) in recognizing women’s overlooked place in art, and its public mea culpa, was significant. Its extensive third-floor exhibition of women’s art, “Women Take the Floor,” offered a stellar showcase of women’s art that sought to “acknowledge and remedy the systemic gender discrimination found in museums, galleries, the academy and the marketplace, including the MFA’s inconsistent history in supporting women’s art.”

The various exhibit spaces included paintings, sculpture, prints, photography, jewelry, textiles, ceramics and furniture, all created by women artists, some recognized and others whose work has been obscured.  Exhibits themes ranged from Women Depicting Women, Women on the Move: Art and Design, Beyond the Loom: Fiber as Sculpture, Women Publish Women: The Print Boom, and Women of Action.

“Our goal was to celebrate the strength and diversity of work by women artists while also shining a light on the ongoing struggle that many continue to face today. This is a first step,” Nonie Gadsden, a senior curator who led a cross-departmental team of curators in organizing “Women Take the Floor,” said.

Also noteworthy was the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) exhibitions, programs and acquisitions by female-identifying artists that took place throughout 2020 in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in America. “2020 Vision” encompassed 16 solo exhibitions and seven thematic shows. The “2020 Vision” project was part of the museum’s ongoing commitment to addressing race and gender diversity gaps within the museum field, and to represent fully and deeply the spectrum of individuals that have shaped the trajectory of art. 

The recognition of women artists didn’t take place in a vacuum.  Advocates, activists and feminist art critics worked for decades to make it happen. None is more respected than the late Linda Nochlin whose pioneering essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Female Artists?” published in 1971 was groundbreaking.

Then there are the Guerilla Girls, a group of feminist activist artists who wear gorilla masks and remain anonymous as they work internationally mounting street projects, postering and stickering wherever they find discrimination, gender and ethnic bias, and corruption.  Last year, with help from Art in Ad Places, they placed a poster on a phone booth in front of MoMA in New York calling out the museum for its ties to sex offender the late Jeffrey Epstein and other big donors. They’ve also reframed Linda Nochlin’s critical question. “Why haven’t more women been considered great artists throughout western history?”

Susan Fisher Sterling, director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, DC, founded more than 30 years ago, may have the answer. “Museums, in general, mirror the power structures in our society, structures that in the arts privilege the history of white men’s accomplishments.” NMWA is the only major museum in the world solely dedicated to celebrating the achievements of women in the visual, performing, and literary arts. The museum honors women artists of the past, promotes women artists in the present, and assures the place of women artists in the future.

Let’s hope that these important exhibitions can be viewed and appreciated post pandemic. Surely, women artists have been invisible far too long to be brought down by a nasty virus.

Why Are Powerful Women So Frightening?

For First Lady Hillary Clinton it was wearing hairbands. Michelle Obama bared her arms, which (white) First ladies had done before her. First Lady Jill Biden, who earned two Masters degrees and a Ph.D. in Education was condemned by a Wall Street Journal writer whose sole academic achievement is an online Bachelor’s degree. He thought Dr. Biden presumptuous for being addressed as Dr. Biden, calling her “kiddo” and “Dr. Jill” instead.

As each of these women gained political legitimacy the insults escalated.  Clinton was called “messy, explosive, and politically clumsy” early in her political career by a pundit who conceded she was “formidable.” By the time she told the Chinese government that women’s rights were human rights at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, she’d been labeled “unlikeable” at home. Still, she proved herself an effective Senator and Secretary of State before winning the popular vote for president in 2016.

Michelle Obama, now arguably the most popular woman in America, suffered not only misogynist attacks, but racist ones as well. “Women endure these cuts in so many ways that we don’t even notice we’re cut,” she told an audience of young women after leaving office. “We are living with small, tiny cuts, and we are bleeding every single day. The shards that cut me the deepest were the ones that intended to cut,” she said, including being referred to as an ape.

Now comes Vice President Kamala Harris, the first black and South Asian woman to be one breath away from the presidency. Called “too ambitious,” for demonstrating self-confidence in the ability to lead, she “rebukes news stories that treat her successes as evidence against her elevation,” as Megan Garber pointed out recently in The Atlantic. Harris has also been called “not loyal and very opportunistic,” “too charismatic,” “dominant,” and someone who “can rub people the wrong way.”

As a 2019 Huffington Post story noted, “Half the Men in the U.S. Are Uncomfortable with Female Political Leaders.” 

It’s not only in political spheres that women who exert their intelligence, agency, aspirations and innate power are trivialized, mocked and pilloried. A cursory look at women’s history reveals how endemic the fear of women has always been.

A fascinating theory of why women became objects of fear looks to an early agrarian time when men were warriors and women were gatherers and growers.  Their respective roles were honored equally.  But unlike men, women could bleed and not die. They could bring forth life. It was a mystery that became frightening as life became nomadic and men fought for land and commodities. One of those commodities was women, who were strangely powerful.

During the Industrial Revolution, as women became workers, began earning money, and sought to have fewer children, they started asserting themselves, leading to the historic question, “What are we going to do about the women?”

History is rife with examples of misogyny whenever men felt threatened by women. The popularity of midwives in the 19th century became threatening to the male medical establishment when doctors realized there was money to be made if they treated childbirth as a disease. The result was dramatically higher maternal mortality.  Nurses were recruited as lesser beings as an 1890s British manual reveals. “The best nursing girl is one who is tall, strong, and has a suppleness of movement. One who plays lawn-tennis, who can ride, skate and row, makes the best material. If she can dance, it is a great advantage …” A 1901 AMA statement added, “Nurses are often conceited and unconscious of the due subordination owed to the medical profession, of which she is a useful parasite.”

The male literary world’s fear of writing women was abetted by Freud who labeled their work a hysterical preoccupation with memory, thus a disease. A reviewer reacted to Vera Britton's wartime autobiography with this: "An autobiography! But I shouldn't have thought anything in your life worth recording!' And writer Gerald Manley Hopkins claimed that the pen was “a kind of male gift."

Then there were Rosie the Riveters in WWII. Provided with childcare and earning their own money, they were denied both when Johnny came marching home again.

Examples like these abound, Twenty-first century psychology articles still claim that pursuing power, especially in politics, “may signal an aggressive and selfish woman” who foregoes “prescribed feminine values of communality.”  In other words, a woman’s job is to stay home, stay quiet, and volunteer.

Geraldine Ferraro was onto this schtick when she ran for Vice President and was called “too bitchy” by George H.W. Bush’s press secretary. So are women like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who was called a “fucking bitch” by a House colleague on the Capital steps. “Our culture is so predicated on diminishing women and preying on our self-esteem, it’s a radical act to love yourself,” she proclaimed.

Women like Vice President Harris aren’t having it. After her nomination, she told a group of teenage girls to be ambitious without apology. The reaction of one of them was captured by Megan Garber in The Atlantic. Men “don’t fear Senator Harris for her ambitions,” she said. “They fear her because of a generation of Black girls who are watching and who will follow her example to pursue excellence.”

That’s one smart girl, and likely future politician.

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Elayne Clift is a writer in Saxtons River, Vt. She has taught Women’s and Gender Studies at various colleges in the US and abroad.  www.elayne-clift.com