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.

                                                            # # #

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

What's Missing in the Fight Against Covid-19?

Back in the 1970s, the National Institute of Health (NIH) launched a famously successful campaign designed to reduce heart disease, the nation’s number one cause of death, by convincing the public to stop smoking and start exercising. Employing a variety of media channels through which to promote behaviors shown to support heart health, their message was simple: heart disease is a silent killer, but with some basic lifestyle adjustments, you can significantly reduce your risk of dying from it.

In addition to traditional media outlets, the Institute’s initiative, known as the Stanford Heart Disease Prevention Program, relied on interpersonal communication techniques used by local opinion leaders and public figures to move people from awareness to behavior change. (“Do it for the loved ones in your life.”) Several years later, the number of smokers and smoking-related deaths had decreased dramatically. To this day, the Stanford Program remains a model of Health Communications.

Shortly afterwards, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded an international health communication program aimed at child survival in 12 countries. Known as the HEALTHCOM Project, it used similar strategies as the Stanford Heart Disease Prevention Program—straightforward, evidence-based public messaging—to prevent child deaths from diarrheal dehydration and to promote child immunization. 

In Gambia, a village-level education program reinforced by radio messages, graphic design materials, and trained village volunteers who motivated families to use a simple oral rehydration solution (ORS) through interpersonal support, child survival rates quickly rose. In the Philippines, the project worked creatively with the Ministry of Health and an ad agency to develop engaging mass media messaging at both the national and local levels that promoted both oral rehydration and immunization. And in Honduras, “Dr. Salustiano” delivered radio messages to mothers about immunization and ORS,

So, what has all this got to do with the Covid-19 pandemic?

Today, the disease may be different, but the groundwork for beating Covid-19 through behavioral change has already been laid. Health communications would go a long way towards containment, including targeted media placements tailored for local belief systems and cultural practices. But regardless of geography, just as in the ‘80’s these strategies would share elements of a finely honed, partnership-driven methodology grounded in the use of bottom- up communication that always begins with understanding what people want, what they resist, and why.

History shows us that successful mitigation of health crises is achieved by a multidisciplinary team of specialists including public health professionals, psychologists, media gatekeepers, and instructional design experts. Joining forces with health communication practitioners, together they conduct research, design focus groups, and create regionally appropriate, meaningful communications that not only address the immediate concern, but also become essential to long-term health education.

Back in the not-so-distant pre-Trump administration days, the field of health communications flourished in research settings, while agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had robust health communications departments that designed campaigns to raise awareness and foster behavior change around such crises as HIV/AIDS, Ebola, SARS, and more.

They recognized that carefully chosen public health spokespeople were key partners. When Dr. C. Everett Koop, then U.S. Surgeon General, served as the nation’s trusted messenger for the Stanford Heart Disease Prevention Project, he quickly became a household name and helped change social norms around smoking in dramatic ways that still prevail.

Today, when Dr. Anthony Fauci speaks, most people listen. Yet, Donald Trump chose to rid himself of an expert public health team and to de-staff the health communications arm of the CDC and other relevant agencies. In this wilderness of disinformation, Dr. Fauci alone can’t be expected to shoulder the burden of public education. And while no one would dream of having a pandemic team without epidemiologists, the Trump task force, such as it was, included no communications, social marketing, or media expertise. That is a travesty the Biden task force must remedy.

 Behavior change critical to reducing the spread of Covid-19 is complex. Overcoming mask resistance—and soon, resistance to the new vaccine—is a huge challenge. But simply showing bar charts and graphs, holding talking head updates, and spewing overwhelming numbers will not affect behavior.

Creative epidemiology might.  “Over 1,000 people are dying every day of Covid. That’s equivalent to three jumbo jets crashing every day.”  Revealing a graphic number of jets that went down, metaphorically, every day could raise awareness about one’s responsibility during a catastrophic pandemic. Demonstrating a dialogue in which one person gets another one to accept that masks save lives could provide a learnable moment.

Meanwhile, today’s creative media environment is still waiting for us to take advantage of its offerings. T-shirts, billboards, and social media influencers spreading salient messages based on behavioral and attitudinal research—empower people to change the outcome of a deadly pandemic.

It may be too late to save lives lost unnecessarily to this dangerous virus, but it’s not too late to prevent further tragedy. We must do it for the loved ones in our lives.

                                                                        # # #

Elayne Clift has an M.A. in health communications. As Deputy Director of the HEALTHCOM Project during its initial years she worked in all regions of the world and taught Health Communications at the Yale University School of Public Health.

Escaping the Other Pandemic

The sigh of relief was heard resoundingly worldwide. After almost a week of nail-biting anxiety a majority of Americans elected new leadership that we could trust to pull us back from the brink. Suddenly it no longer felt like the earth had rolled off its axis and was tilting dangerously to the right.

 As people gathered in front of the White House and in streets across the country, dancing, hooting, weeping, it became clear that individually and together we had not quite acknowledged to ourselves the depth of our despair, and our fear. Once the election was called, we realized what had been tamped down for four years. Like the liberation of Europe from a terrifying Nazi regime at the end of WWII, Americans understood that we had barely crawled out from under the boot of our own homegrown mad dictator.

 Sadly, others are not so lucky. Across the globe the earth continues tilting right as autocratic regimes rise. Many people are living in fear and deprivation with little hope. Their futures look bleak as dictators become entrenched or rise anew.

In the Philippines, for example, the maniacal dictator, Duterte, sends a chilling reminder of what total control by a madman looks like. He has established death squads in the name of fighting a drug war and he controls all of public administration leaving no checks and balances in place. The military, judicial and legislative branches of government are fully in his control and he recently shutdown the major media outlet, ABS-CBN, the largest and oldest broadcaster in south-east Asia, just when Filipinos need reliable information about COVID-19.  

Hungary’s dictatorial prime minister Viktor Orban saw the country’s rating downgraded to “partly free” due to “sustained attacks on the country’s democratic institutions,”  as one think tank put it. Over the past decade, the watchdog added, Orban’s party “has used its parliamentary supermajority to impose restrictions on or assert control over the opposition, the media, religious groups, academia, NGOs, the courts, asylum seekers, and the private sector.”

Another Eastern European country, Poland, is also seeing increasing autocratic leadership.  The presidential election in July was decided by a slim margin that split the country in two when incumbent President Andrzej Duda won a narrow victory for the 'Law and Justice' party. Duda is rabidly homophobic and misogynist. His campaign relied on religious animosities between the conservative Catholic Church and more liberal Catholics and secular Poles.  Recently Poland’s abortion laws, already some of the strictest in Europe, were further tightened making abortion virtually unattainable. Polish women made international news when they took to the streets forcing the government to delay implementing the court ruling.

Both Turkey and Egypt have experienced repressive regimes in recent years. Under emergency policies in Turkey promulgated by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, crackdowns on political opposition, academia, media and civil society occur regularly. In Egypt President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s autocratic style is reminiscent of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak. Under Sisi’s leadership security services crack down on all forms of dissent, detaining and torturing political opponents in large numbers. A new House of Representatives was seated in 2016 and promptly passed numerous laws restricting political activity and formalizing government control over protests, media, and certain organizations.

Brazil serves as an example of autocracy in South America. President Jair Bolsonaro has created a totally dystopian society. According to the Globe Post “Since taking office in 2016 he has done everything he can to undermine the Brazilian Republic as he carries out his mission to destroy everything he believes was built by the ‘left.’ He undermines, defunds, or simply closes down any public agency that has been constituted to control civic life and the norms that rule social life.”

Even in India, a longstanding democracy, the government has tried to stifle protests and preventive detention without trial is increasing  The state can now unilaterally declare someone a terrorist and imprison them. Some human rights activists have been incarcerated as terrorists and others have been warned to stop their activities. Muslim rights have been eroded despite a long history of peaceful co-existence with Hindus.

 For people living in countries like these the political pandemic is as dangerous and potentially deadly as the one we are facing in this public health crisis. As in the Covid pandemic, survival is more likely if citizens are educated and take adequate precautions to prevent contamination. In Covid we need to mask. To avoid autocracy we need to vote. 

 How lucky we are that Joe Biden’s victory signaled a new “Morning in America.”  But democracy is always fragile and we clearly have “miles to go before we sleep.”  The challenges before us, the hard work to be done, the healing and re-visioning of a humane and just future, will not be easy. The work will never be altogether finished. We are unlikely to achieve total unity.

 But in the dawning of a new day, we can breathe again. We can weep openly in gratitude, join hands in renewed hope, and be proud once more of who we are, individually and as an imperfect but ever-growing nation. “Oh, what a relief it is!”

Enablers, Collaborators, and a Mussolini Moment

It started with a ride down an escalator. And it’s been escalating ever since. From the first cries of rapists invading our country to dog whistles like “Stand back, stand by” Donald Trump’s dangerous delusions of power and control have brought this country to the brink of collapse, and everyone who has allowed that to happen is an enabler and a collaborator.

From White House cronies who share in Trump’s power fantasies and who are incapable of running a government especially  during a crisis, to his equally evil children, to Republicans in the Senate led by Mitch McConnell, to America’s attorney general, to the doctors at Walter Reed who agreed to lie for the president and to sign non-disclosure agreements thereby violating their Hippocratic oath, to the ICE bullies who separated infants and children from their parents and put them in concentration camps, to the heads of the CDC and FDA who caved after White House pressure, they are all responsible for the rise of autocracy, and increased violence.

They are also responsible for militias that now feel emboldened in their militarism and for bad cops who mercilessly shoot to death Black and Brown men and women. They are responsible for the resurgent KKK and they are responsible for federal courts being packed with ultra-conservative, lifetime judges, as well as for a Supreme Court that is eager to see the original Handmaid added to their ranks. In short, they are responsible for the destruction of democracy.

They are why we are on the edge of a truly great depression, and why America has lost its standing in the world. They are responsible for the disasters in our health, education, and infrastructure systems, for the filth in our water and the comeback of chemicals in our food. And they are responsible for the deaths of over 100,000 Americans who died needlessly because the Super Spreader in Chief just didn’t give a damn.

Indeed, they are responsible for the Mussolini Moment on the balcony of our dictator’s palace, and they, like him, bear some of the guilt for negligent homicide and crimes against humanity.

They are also examples of “the banality of evil” that philosopher Hannah Arendt warned us about when she reported on the trial of Adolph Eichmann after the Holocaust. Eichmann was, he said, simply following orders. 

So were the White House staff, the Secret Service men who vow to give their life for the president, but not in a hermetically sealed vehicle, the employees of government agencies who didn’t speak up or quit their jobs in order to save this country, the business moguls who didn’t end their major donations to a corrupt fraud, Fox News who wouldn’t stand up to a lunatic when he blamed everyone else for our disasters and incited violence. So too are the voters who inexplicably still stand with their man even though everything he does hurts them the most.

Every one of these people is the banality of evil personified. And every one of them became what Arendt called a “leaf blowing in the whirlwind of time.” Now every one of them bears responsibility for what lies ahead for us all.

Of course, some brave souls did stand up to the president. And everyone of them did it knowing that they would be punished mightily.  Think about Col. Vindman, and the others who gave testimony to Congress, the lawyers and doctors who wrote letters and petitions, and the activists who marched and were willing to suffer the consequences, including injury, arrest and jail time. They are our national heroes in this moment, the ones for whom new monuments should be built when this nightmare ends.

As for the rest of us, we must remember and own the fact that a great malignancy metastasized within our national body and many of us let it happen. We watched it ravish us and slowly terrorize us. We let it kill people we knew and loved. We looked the other way, always sure that it couldn’t get worse.

Now we need to understand that the “silence of one good man” can spell disaster for all good people. Each of us who remained passive as our impending disaster continued might have been the one “good man” who didn’t act, didn’t speak out, didn’t resist, while men like Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump insisted that infants be ripped from their mothers’ breasts. Men who didn’t care that innocent people were dying from gun violence, a plague, hunger, and violence, which they fostered. Men who didn’t care about pre-existing conditions or elders who rely on Social Security to survive. Men who didn’t care that women would be catapulted back to the Dark Ages.

Now the question is why didn’t we stop them sooner? Why didn’t we act in bigger, more effective, timely ways? Why did we let them continue for four devastating years, like the blind, chained inhabitants of Plato’s allegorical cave who were unable to escape their isolation because, trapped by ignorance and darkness, they couldn’t know the truth?

Can we now remove our blinders and see clearly the dawning truth in time to break our silence, reject the banality of evil, refuse to be a leaf blowing in the whirlwind of time?

What awaits us if not?

                                                            # # #

Surviving the Fire Within

Some of us have heartburn. Others feel nauseous or sick to their stomach. A few experience a chronic pain in the neck, while sleep escapes us and night terrors abound. We are irritable and angry, sad and scared, quietly terrified, and decidedly depressed. We weep easily and work to keep anxiety at bay. 

These are just a few of the somatic and psychological symptoms our shared stress serves up as we try to survive in an era of Covid isolation, massive political crime and corruption, the unimaginable possibility of living in a dictatorship, and natural and man made disasters, all of which suggest a doomsday future and an atmosphere of lonely despair.

I simply cannot fathom losing one’s home and possessions under an ominous orange sky amid encroaching showers of sparks, on top of our shared calamities.  I can’t imagine living in Beirut, or a refugee camp that disappears overnight, or a detention center defined by inhumane loneliness. It’s hardly bearable to forego seeing one’s children or hugging a friend, or losing one.

Nor can I begin to know what it feels like to be a doctor, nurse, or other healthcare provider, hospital worker, ambulance driver, EMT, “essential worker” putting herself on the front lines day after day after exhausting day. What does it feel like to watch a person die alone, with only your gloved hand to hold? What goes through your head when you drive a refrigerator truck to a funeral home?

Moving stories of courage, creative interventions, and acts of love, even among strangers, abound to counteract these experiences of human suffering.  We need that antidote. That’s why it is important that we share the stories of both those who succumb and those who remain strong, and that we put a human face on this time of trauma and tragedy.

We need to know what the lost child looked like, what the grieving spouse said, what the lover feels. Their lost loved ones are not simply statistics. They were real people with real life stories whose pain in this moment is more than anyone should have to bear.  Like the fallen on 9-11, their lives had meaning, promise, hope. In their memory, we need to offer acts of kindness every day, and to receive such acts with grace. It’s also why we need to share our own emotional suffering with those who can offer us solace and validate the normalcy of our emotions in this oh, so trying time.

It would not be quite so difficult if it were not for the fact that thousands of lives were needlessly lost, if we were not a leaderless nation on the brink of collapse, if there were less hatred and violence in our midst, if the natural world were not screaming for help, if we had reason to believe that current events were a bizarre anomaly, a blip on the screen, a fluke. But sadly, the convergence of events feels like foreshadowing. It’s a clarion call, and if we don’t respond quickly and appropriately, there will be no turning back, no end of suffering, no metaphorical blue skies, no more time.

Still, if we are to defeat the fires, real and symbolic, destroying our world, and overcome the fires burning like brazen acid within our breasts such that they rob us of peace of mind and threaten our remnants of hope, we must carry on, together and alone. Each of us is called upon to rise every morning, to give solace where it is needed, to ask for help when that is needed as well. We must do what we can to save each other from the flames of despair, whether that be carrying water from the well, climbing the mountain of Martin Luther King, Jr, caressing a frightened child, cooking for the homeless, casting our vote no matter the obstacles,  marching and making good trouble in memory of John Lewis, in short, being fully human in a seemingly inhumane and inhospitable world.

Although things have never seemed as bad as they are now in this confluence of tragedies, we have come through hard times before. We have survived them, flawed and tattered, but ultimately and fragilily intact.  Now we are called upon to do more than survive. We are called to rebuild, restore, re-imagine, not just in the space we occupy, but in all the spaces of the world.

We must understand that we are all part of the Family of Humankind, and that it falls to our generations and to each of us to care about that family, to honor and respect it, to join in its hope and possibility, to open doors to our shared future as we close the portals of past pain and degradation.

It starts now, for time is running out, and “if not us, who? If not now, when?”

                                                            # # #

Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River, Vt.  www.elayne-clift.com

Standing Up to Sterilization, Eugenics, and the Abuse of Women

“Keep your hands off my uterus!” That’s an often-repeated placard and plea at women’s marches I’ve attended over the past forty years. In the U.S. and abroad, it’s a common, continuing refrain because government sanctioning of abuse of women’s bodies has been occurring since well before the Second Wave women’s movement exposed it in the 1970s.

I worked in the women’s health movement then alongside Our Bodies, Ourselves and other national organizations. One of the myriad issues we dealt with was the sterilization of poor, black and brown women.  We helped raise awareness of the medical abuse of Puerto Rican women that resulted in a third of women of reproductive age being sterilized for decades at clinics often funded by the U.S. government. In the 1960s women in Puerto Rico were also the subjects of birth control pill trials, without their consent. Those who became pregnant on placebos were offered no help, financial or otherwise, and were forced to carry resulting pregnancies to term.  

Another frequent abuse women of color faced was the lack of real informed consent. It can hardly be considered consent when you are asked to sign a paper in English and your only language is Spanish, or you are asked by the nice doctor if you’d like to stop having babies after you’ve just endured a long, arduous labor.

There is a long, ugly history of abusing and using women’s bodies by way of coercion and for experimentation. Dr. J. Marion Sims, know as the father of gynecology, practiced medicine in Alabama from 1835 to 1849. During that time, he conducted hideous experiments, without any anesthesia, on enslaved women he had purchased in the 1840s. At an annual convention of the American Public Health Association in the late 1970s his portrait was still on display – until enraged women demanded that it be taken down and never shown again.

Affluent white women were often subjected to having their ovaries removed in the second half of the 19th century if they were deemed to be overly sexual. This practice coincided with the belief that if women used their minds too eagerly, their uteruses would atrophy, denying them the God-given role of child bearers.

Medical abuse was further embraced in the early 20th century when eugenics was popular, with the growth of programs that coerced women to be sterilized if they did not willingly consent. As Alexandra Stern, author of Eugenic Nation, points out, sterilization was viewed as part of a “necessary public health intervention aimed at protecting society from deleterious genes…” This mindset prevailed late into the century. My friend’s daughter, who was mentally impaired, was subjected to sterilization in the 1970s as part of her care plan.

Some states, like California, passed laws that resulted in thousands of residents being sterilized for decades (including some men). Even as late as 2010 the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had sterilized 150 women in four years. Richard Nixon, a Californian, significantly increased Medicaid funding for sterilization of poor Americans with an emphasis on people of color.

Let us remember, medical historians remind us, that eugenics policies in the U.S. aimed at those considered too mentally defective to reproduce, are credited with becoming models for Nazi Germany.

One of the saddest stories of a black woman being sterilized during her childbearing years is that of civil rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer. She had a hysterectomy without her consent in 1961 while undergoing minor surgery for removal of a benign tumor. She spoke about her experience as a Black woman who had been subjected to what was known as a “Mississippi appendectomy,” when women were taken to local clinics and sterilized.

Now comes Dawn Wooten, a courageous nurse, who revealed that women in an ICE detention center in Georgia, run by a private prison company, had an outside doctor perform hysterectomies on them when they complained about non-threatening reproductive health issues. Many of the women who experienced major surgery awoke to find that they had had their reproductive organs all or partially removed without their prior knowledge or consent. Most were still of childbearing age and most had no idea why they had undergone the procedure.

Pauline Binam, 30, was one of them. She was being quickly deported by ICE to Cameroon, which she left at age two. Binam, now 30, was on the tarmac when members of Congress including Rep. Shirley Jackson Lee intervened to keep her in the U.S.  Binam's lawyer has said her client thought she was getting a routine procedure last year, but "when she woke up from surgery, the doctor informed her that he had to remove one of her fallopian tubes."

Imagine how hard it will be to find records of the 17 surgeries that have now been reported.  Think about how many abused women will be rushed onto airplanes and deported so they can’t bear witness. Then try to understand what it feels like to have undergone surgery that renders you unable to have a child because you are young, poor, and unwanted.

It boggles the mind, and makes you want to weep.

                                                                        # # #

Elayne Clift writes about women’s health from Saxtons River, Vt.  www.elayne-clift.com

“Keep your hands off my uterus!” That’s an often-repeated placard and plea at women’s marches I’ve attended over the past forty years. In the U.S. and abroad, it’s a common, continuing refrain because government sanctioning of abuse of women’s bodies has been occurring since well before the Second Wave women’s movement exposed it in the 1970s.

I worked in the women’s health movement then alongside Our Bodies, Ourselves and other national organizations. One of the myriad issues we dealt with was the sterilization of poor, black and brown women.  We helped raise awareness of the medical abuse of Puerto Rican women that resulted in a third of women of reproductive age being sterilized for decades at clinics often funded by the U.S. government. In the 1960s women in Puerto Rico were also the subjects of birth control pill trials, without their consent. Those who became pregnant on placebos were offered no help, financial or otherwise, and were forced to carry resulting pregnancies to term.  

Another frequent abuse women of color faced was the lack of real informed consent. It can hardly be considered consent when you are asked to sign a paper in English and your only language is Spanish, or you are asked by the nice doctor if you’d like to stop having babies after you’ve just endured a long, arduous labor.

There is a long, ugly history of abusing and using women’s bodies by way of coercion and for experimentation. Dr. J. Marion Sims, know as the father of gynecology, practiced medicine in Alabama from 1835 to 1849. During that time, he conducted hideous experiments, without any anesthesia, on enslaved women he had purchased in the 1840s. At an annual convention of the American Public Health Association in the late 1970s his portrait was still on display – until enraged women demanded that it be taken down and never shown again.

Affluent white women were often subjected to having their ovaries removed in the second half of the 19th century if they were deemed to be overly sexual. This practice coincided with the belief that if women used their minds too eagerly, their uteruses would atrophy, denying them the God-given role of child bearers.

Medical abuse was further embraced in the early 20th century when eugenics was popular, with the growth of programs that coerced women to be sterilized if they did not willingly consent. As Alexandra Stern, author of Eugenic Nation, points out, sterilization was viewed as part of a “necessary public health intervention aimed at protecting society from deleterious genes…” This mindset prevailed late into the century. My friend’s daughter, who was mentally impaired, was subjected to sterilization in the 1970s as part of her care plan.

Some states, like California, passed laws that resulted in thousands of residents being sterilized for decades (including some men). Even as late as 2010 the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had sterilized 150 women in four years. Richard Nixon, a Californian, significantly increased Medicaid funding for sterilization of poor Americans with an emphasis on people of color.

Let us remember, medical historians remind us, that eugenics policies in the U.S. aimed at those considered too mentally defective to reproduce, are credited with becoming models for Nazi Germany.

One of the saddest stories of a black woman being sterilized during her childbearing years is that of civil rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer. She had a hysterectomy without her consent in 1961 while undergoing minor surgery for removal of a benign tumor. She spoke about her experience as a Black woman who had been subjected to what was known as a “Mississippi appendectomy,” when women were taken to local clinics and sterilized.

Now comes Dawn Wooten, a courageous nurse, who revealed that women in an ICE detention center in Georgia, run by a private prison company, had an outside doctor perform hysterectomies on them when they complained about non-threatening reproductive health issues. Many of the women who experienced major surgery awoke to find that they had had their reproductive organs all or partially removed without their prior knowledge or consent. Most were still of childbearing age and most had no idea why they had undergone the procedure.

Pauline Binam, 30, was one of them. She was being quickly deported by ICE to Cameroon, which she left at age two. Binam, now 30, was on the tarmac when members of Congress including Rep. Shirley Jackson Lee intervened to keep her in the U.S.  Binam's lawyer has said her client thought she was getting a routine procedure last year, but "when she woke up from surgery, the doctor informed her that he had to remove one of her fallopian tubes."

Imagine how hard it will be to find records of the 17 surgeries that have now been reported.  Think about how many abused women will be rushed onto airplanes and deported so they can’t bear witness. Then try to understand what it feels like to have undergone surgery that renders you unable to have a child because you are young, poor, and unwanted.

It boggles the mind, and makes you want to weep.

                                                                        # # #

Elayne Clift writes about women’s health from Saxtons River, Vt. 

"Where is the Poor People's Voice?"

That was a question put to a TV reporter by Rev. William J. Barber II after the Democratic National Convention last month. Barber, founder of the Moral Monday movement and now a notable political activist, is President of Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.  His is a voice and a vision to be reckoned with as he calls for concern grounded in morality for the poor and working poor.

 Why, Rev. Barber asks, are poor and low-income people never targeted in Democratic ads? Why are their issues never talked about, despite the fact that they are clearly a political force by virtue of the fact they represent an estimated 25 percent of people in this country?

 These were questions I also asked after the Democrat’s virtual convention. Why, I wondered, did we need to hear yet again from Bill Clinton, John Kerry and John Kasich?  Where was a real-life person of situational or generational poverty who could speak to the reality of their lives and their families’ struggles?

 Rev. Barber’s answer was that poor people are ignored because they don’t donate money to political campaigns, and they don’t vote. Why should they, Barber explains, when they feel invisible and not cared about? That’s a pretty damning statement about a party that claims to care about everyone, but can’t move beyond talking about the “middle class,” and (mainly) white working folks.

 It’s time for Dems to get it: When a quarter of Americans are poor or low-income workers who can’t make ends meet, can’t access healthcare or a decent education, and can’t make it through a pandemic it’s unacceptable to ignore or exclude them. We need to remember that poverty is not a dirty word. There is no reason to be afraid or ashamed of impoverished people as a constituency, no matter their race or ethnicity, but there is every reason to acknowledge that they exist as an underclass in one of the the world’s richest countries. As human beings they deserve the dignity and attention so readily proffered to other Americans.

 That calls for an increased awareness among political leaders, and the public, of the lives poor and low-income people live.

 Being poor and being in poverty are two different things, as Latonya Walker, a social worker in Detroit points out on her blog. While being poor is an economic state that involves dependency on a system of care, often for generations, poverty is a psychological mindset that derives from the situation one finds themselves in due to a life changing event. Divorce, illness, loss of work, or a death in the family can lead to homelessness, the need for government assistance, or generalized instability. If prolonged beyond one generation, it can be difficult to escape.

 The effects of generational poverty are chronic, resulting in continued low education levels, inadequate childcare, low workplace skills, health issues, high incarceration rates and high infant mortality rates. Homelessness and substance abuse also become chronic. It’s heartbreaking that a quarter of American children are living in low-income families that have at least one working parent who because of low hourly wages and few if any job benefits, like health insurance, paid sick or vacation leave, are unlikely to escape the effects of generational poverty.

 That’s why it’s important for political leaders to take a focused, holistic, and humane approach to well-funded public policies that address in practical and meaningful ways the need for improved, accessible education programs for both children and adults, universal healthcare, living wages, ending mass incarceration, and protecting voting rights. They could be helped in that effort by inviting the voices and the aspirations of poor people and people living in poverty to be heard and understood. In other words, they need to put a human face on the pressing issues of poverty so that they, and all Americans, can see those faces, learn from their experiences, appreciate the challenges of their lives, and act to relieve the constraints that keep them impoverished, afraid, and without hope for a better life. 

 The fact is, the poor and nearly poor are a formidable force and they are organizing to vote in this crucial election. They have the power to flip election results in more than a dozen states. It makes absolutely no sense to ignore them if the Democratic party is serious about economic security. If Democrats truly stand for morality and justice with the force and conviction that Rev. Barber does, they need to listen, and learn, from those who may inherit the earth in biblical terms, but who have precious little to be content with in these troubling times.

 As Rev. Barber says so eloquently, “Our deepest moral traditions point to equal protection under the law, the desire for peace within and among nations, the dignity of all people, and the responsibility to care for our common home.”

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River, Vt.  www.elayne-clift.com

Mothers, Children and a Menacing Virus

During the years when I worked internationally on MCH – Maternal and Child Health – our mission was to save the lives of mothers and children in the so-called developing world through several primary health care practices. The “twin engines” driving child survival were immunization and diarrheal disease control. Family planning was the start point for women’s health.

Today, MCH takes on new meaning: Maternal and Child Hell. Its driving engines are lack of childcare and mothers driven out of the workforce because of it.

The crisis in childcare is not new, but it is exacerbated by the pandemic. Even affluent families who can afford reliable childcare are feeling the effect.

The Child Care Is Essential Act introduced in the Senate in June would help, if Mitch McConnell and Republicans weren’t in the majority. Covid-driven, it provides for $50 billion in appropriations for a Child Care Stabilization Fund to award grants to childcare providers during the public health crisis. Without that Act many facilities will close.

If corporations, universities, and other workplaces don’t offer onsite daycare, who will fill the gap?  It’s a difficult question for people who work freelance or who are unemployed but looking for work, and of course for undocumented workers. 

According to the Department of Labor, 30 million people lost their jobs since Covid-19 appeared. For working moms, already struggling with the work/home balance, this could have long-term negative consequences, including lost opportunities, less upward mobility in the workplace, lower incomes (impacting Social Security and pensions), and difficulty getting back into the job market. 

A recent Wall Street Journal article highlighting how women’s careers could be derailed because of the pandemic noted that “juggling work and family life has never been easy.” For mothers, the pandemic makes coping especially exhausting as traditional gender roles and pay disparities re-emerge as issues. Without childcare, working moms are forfeiting or delaying careers because they are still prime caretakers of families and children.

As Joan Williams, head of the Center for Worklife Law at the University of California Hastings Center said in the WSJ article, “Opening economics without childcare is a recipe for a generational wipeout of mother’s careers.”

Women who try to maintain careers or jobs often face situations like a woman in San Diego did when she was fired because the firm said her young children were interrupting Zoom meetings.  She sued. At Florida State University things didn’t go that far. Following an email to all employees that the university would “return to normal policy and [would] no longer allow employees to care for children while working remotely,” the hue and cry forced FSU to back down and issue an apology.

Last March 2,000 mothers working for Amazon organized an advocacy campaign urging the company to provide a backup child care benefit as other big corporations, like Apple and other corporate giants do.  They are not the only ones to organize like this. In most cases the results are not yet clear.

What’s clear is that the child care system in this country is broken and has been ever since women became educated, rejected confining their role to marriage and motherhood, and joined the ranks of working women at all levels of a society that has never caught up with that sociological change. Nor has it realized its obligation and co-responsibility for raising children while committing to work/home balance for the good of American families.

There is an economic gain to seeing the light, however.  Child care allows parents to work and their working contributes to economic growth. According to the Center for American Progress, American businesses lose more than $12 billion annually because of challenges workers face in seeking childcare and the cost of lost earnings, productivity, and revenue due to the childcare crisis totals an estimated $57 billion each year.

Along with businesses and other employers, states clearly have a role to play in establishing family friendly benefits for every family, but especially for low income families and families of color. Federal action is also needed, and that action is supported by voters across the political landscape.

With half of Americans living in so-called “child care deserts,” long term policy changes are imperative. In addition to including families at all levels of society in the national conversation, government must move beyond relying on disparate organizations to plug the holes. There needs to be a substantial shift in corporate culture such that universal childcare is the norm. Without that the very nature of “family” will be made to shift in the direction of the affluent, as so much of American policy has done already. We need to understand and act on the relationships, or “intersectionality,” of race, gender, and economics, which are all part of the fabric of social justice.

Surely the time to value our children enough that we ensure their safety and healthy development is now. The time to recognize the contributions women make to the workplace and the economy as well as the family is also now. In short, the time to leave the desert is now.

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Will Burkhas Make a Comeback in Afghanistan or Can Women Prevail?

Last May, when militants in Afghanistan killed new mothers and their babies in a Kabul maternity hospital, the world’s women shuddered. Afghan women mourned, wept, and worried.  Women in Afghanistan have borne the brunt of that country’s brutality in ways few people can imagine. Now worries about what comes next in the face of an incomplete, drawn out peace agreement loom large for the females who live there.

 The U.S. and the notorious Taliban signed a preliminary peace agreement in February that aimed at ending two decades of war, but things have not gone smoothly. Insurgent activity added to problems related to power-sharing between the Afghan government and the Taliban, with the Taliban demanding release of thousands of prisoners as part of the deal.

 For women fears of what might happen emanate from memories of what life was like during the Taliban rule, when art, culture, education and women suffered from horrific repression. Now the Taliban is asserting again that girls’ education must end at sixth grade, with one leader stating, according to The New York Times, that “until an Islamic system is established our jihad will continue till doomsday.”

 It wasn’t always like this in Afghanistan. In the 1920s things looked hopeful for women there. The king and his wife worked hard to improve women’s lives, advocating against the veil and for greater freedom for females. Conservatives pushed back but things were relatively good. In 1964 the constitution gave women the right to vote and to enter politics.

 All that came to a halt when the Taliban gained power in 1996, enforcing the brutal oppression of women symbolized by blue burkhas and stoning deaths. While some rights for women were achieved after the Taliban defeat in 2001, Afghan women worry now that the peace talks will bargain away many of those rights, which included girls’ education and women’s right to work. Post-Taliban, a 2015 National Action Plan offered soothing rhetorical assurances that went nowhere given the commitment to “maintain cultural and religious codes.”

 As Guardian reporter Emma Graham-Harrison wrote last year, “A generation of women have grown up in Afghanistan since the Taliban were toppled.  But many of those who have guided the country through profound change . . . are haunted by memories of their brutal, misogynist rule.” Those groundbreaking women included educators, journalists and politicians, many of whom suffered hideous physical and emotional abuse.

 One of the most pressing issues for women leaders in Afghanistan now is that women will not have a legitimate seat at the tables of decision-making, and that only selective women will be half-heartedly consulted. At a conference attended by 700 women in Kabul last year representing 34 provinces, fears were expressed about the Taliban being brought back into government, renewing the oppression of women and girls. Afghan’s first lady Rula Ghani urged the women to express their views publicly, but her husband’s speech didn’t address the issue of women’s rights under a new government.

 According to a report in Pass Blue, a blog offering independent coverage of the United Nations, “the participation of Afghan women without methodical, sustained and substantive engagement in a peace settlement has the potential to harm them, not help them.” As one Afghan woman put it, “we’ve seen firsthand how well-intentioned efforts sometimes promote progress for Afghan women while quietly failing them.”

 For example, a multi-year U.S.-funded program to teach computer programming to women in Afghan villages ended without funds and no real opportunities having been provided, confirming for village men that educating women was useless.

 Intra-Afghan peace talks a year ago included women and received accolades from international media, but Afghan women were not impressed. “It was mere tokenism,” a woman who participated said. “Women on the delegation were called two days beforehand, leaving women to appear unorganized and unprepared.”

 As Afghan journalist Mariam Atahi told Pass Blue, “There have been lots of conferences across Afghanistan to see what women wanted in rural and urban areas . . . Women have worked to form the narrative on women’s right, including efforts to change the interpretation of Islamic law implemented by the Taliban in rural areas they control, but these activists were sidelined from the peace negotiations.”

 Najia Nasim, Executive Director of Women for Afghan Women, the largest women’s rights organization in Afghanistan, told me recently that “Afghan women insist on an inclusive intra-Afghan process where we can meaningfully participate to address institutional mechanisms of peace and amplify the diverse voices of women from around the country.” Women’s omission from the peace process, she said, “inhibits our ability to convey our unique experiences, grievances, priorities, and hopes for Afghanistan’s future, and to shape post-conflict institutions and broader society.” 

 Afghan women need to be assured a seat at the table where they can participate substantively in political discourse, monitor problems and progress, and insure accountability on behalf of the country’s women. Nothing less than that is acceptable in an environment where the Taliban may well be at the table with them.

Guns, Voting Rights, an Election and Cognitive Dissonance

Over the July 4the weekend, 160 people died from gun violence in America. One was a six-year old in Philadelphia, another was an eight-year old in Atlanta, and a third was a 15-year old in New York. Chicago saw the worst of it with 17 people fatally shot including two children. Sixty-three others were wounded. And that’s just the count for the holiday weekend. 

Research conducted recently by the University of California/Davis revealed a link between the rise in violence in the country and a surge in gun-buying since Covid-19 began, with over two million more guns sold in a three-month period this spring.

Given the continuing lack of gun safety legislation, and the increasingly public displays of white supremacy, the increase in gun sales shouldn’t come as a surprise. Violence of all kinds is on the rise.  The question is, Why haven’t more Americans been proactive on the issue of community gun violence as we face a November election? How is it that post Columbine, Newtown, Pulse and all the rest, we haven’t taken to the streets as we did for #BLM?

As Elizabeth Warren wrote in her 2015 book A Fighting Chance, “If a mysterious virus started killing eight children every day [as gun violence does], America would mobilize teams of doctors and public health officials. We’d move heaven and earth until we found a way to protect our children. But not with gun violence.” (It was an eerily prescient analogy.)

The death of civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis reminds us of another problem that plagues us as we draw closer to the most critical election in our lives. Remember that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 eliminated legal barriers at state and local levels that kept African Americans from voting. But in 2013 the Supreme Court, headed by Chief Justice Roberts, effectively struck down the Voting Rights Act in a decision that allowed Republican states to enact voter ID laws, roll back early voting, and purge voter registration lists. Last year the Roberts court also barred challenges in federal court to partisan gerrymandering. Why in this now fragile democracy aren’t we repeating the brave and bold actions of the Civil Rights Movement to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to cast their ballot?

With secret government “police” being deployed to U.S. cities to kidnap and arrest journalists and citizens exercising their constitutional right to free speech, and with a runaway pandemic raging, which is nothing short of negligent homicide on the part of the president, why are we not in the streets demanding that Donald Trump resign (as Russians are now doing to oust Putin)?

As one friend put it, “You wouldn’t stay married to a serial killer, so why are so many Americans still putting up with Trump?”

The answer may lie in the concept of cognitive dissonance, defined by psychologists as “having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.”

Cognitive dissonance includes feeling discomfort when a behavior or attitude is in conflict with one’s values and beliefs, or when new information is contrary to those beliefs. A sign of the phenomenon is ignoring facts and therefore making irrational decisions, according to experts, which goes a long way in explaining why so many people aren’t wearing masks – or still insist on thinking that Trump is an effective leader.

Interestingly, when people experience an inconsistency between what they believe and how they behave, they often take actions, or don’t take them, to help reduce growing discomfort. So, for example, they may reject, explain away, or avoid information, even when that information is vital to their health and safety, or saving the country. They may grow angry at forced compliance (masks), avoid learning (fact-finding), and find decisions hard to make, but once a decision is made, it is justified as the best available option.

Donald Trump is clearly experiencing cognitive dissonance in the extreme, along with his other psychological disorders. His thought processes are deeply damaged (and limited to begin with), he is totally irrational, and his paranoia and narcissism only add to the dangerous mix.

Although I’m not a psychologist, I suspect that other Republicans who cannot stand up to Trump despite knowing he is dangerously delusional struggle privately with their own cognitive dissonance. As for mask refusing, fact denying, irrational decision-makers, it’s a possible explanation for their strange and troubling behavior.

The rest of us are understandably fatigued, frightened, and feeling fragile, which makes marching in the streets at the risk of being picked up by gun toting government goons less than appealing. Still, we must act to protect ourselves from the overt fascism that is coming straight at us, and we must overwhelmingly Vote Blue in November or our current nightmare will not end.

We would do well to remember the words of the late John Lewis: “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. … [And] Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”

Whatever form it takes, and psychology aside, the time for trouble that we create is now.

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River, Vt. www.elayne-clift.com

Painting the Color of Hope

“What’s the art that comes when what happened is out in the open? When what’s been buried is laid out for all to see? What would the country’s [creative works] look like if they said what was happening?”

That quote from a pre-Black Lives Matter novel jumped out at me after a conversation I’d had with an editor of an art magazine. He’d hoped to feature a portrait of a black man but his publisher vetoed the idea because the artist was white, even though it was a beautiful and timely work of art that might have opened dialogue around race relations as well as the social function of art.

His decision was based on a firm belief that it was time for white people to stop depicting black people who needed to tell their own stories and make their own art. The white artist’s responsibility, the publisher argued, was to open doors for black creativity, to mentor black writers, artists, and thinkers, to help them secure funding, visibility, and legitimacy, all of which required providing a venue for their work.

A friend agreed. White artists need to move over and create space for black artists to make their own art, she argued. They should attempt to assist black people in accessing grants and exhibitions so black artists can share their artistic identity free from idealized versions of black people that ultimately reflect white bias.

I fundamentally agree with the intent of this position, grounded in a strong sense of reparation and social justice. But something about it doesn’t seem quite right. As Princeton professor Eddie Gaude said recently on MSNBC, “it’s not about doing something for African Americans, it’s about doing things with us,” which begs the question, why identify an artist’s skin color? Artists produce art, good art moves and enlightens. Establishing boundaries can preclude necessary dialogue, learnable moments, and heightened awareness, which occurs when any creative artist offers portraits of lives lived, whether with words or a pallet.

Imagine a conversation between two people seeing a portrait of a black man, and a picture of a white artist who created it. Perhaps one of them has never considered the publisher’s point of view. Maybe the other resents the notion that only artists from the same milieu as their subject can portray people in art or literature.  How sad to miss that dialogue, that heightened awareness and new way of thinking.

There are larger questions to consider.  What is the connection between art and social justice? What is the role and responsibility of artists to educate or advocate? Do they have a responsibility in this moment to do that?

I once met a South African artist who thought social justice should be the sole purpose of art. He was driven to paint and sculpt anti-apartheid works because he saw it as his responsibility as a white South African who deplored the injustices in his country. His powerful work was viewed internationally.  It was moving and instructive. It led to all kinds of dialogue when communicating was vital and affirming. Should only black artists in South Africa have done that work?

The existential question may be this: Can disparate communities - ethnic, cultural, religious, racial, geographic – converge as one human family, arms linked in hope, moving together toward a fragile future where there is room for all to co-exist peacefully?

I am reminded of a black woman in a book group I attended once who called me out for a piece I’d written about my grandmother’s suicide. My story included aspects of her life that had driven her to despair.  Suddenly, the woman grew enraged. “Your grandma wasn’t cleaning white women’s toilets like mine. She went to the beach once in a while! She wasn’t dirt poor!” Stunned by her need to trump my grandmother’s hopelessness with her grandmother’s pain, I thought, they were both women who suffered. Wasn’t it our mutual task to tell each other’s stories of women’s oppression?

Surely it’s more productive to have people of all skin tones and backgrounds speaking together about their lives and their Other-imposed limitations; more instructive to represent each other artistically and politically in compassionate ways, more hopeful to act in solidarity, free from politically correct positions, clasping hands in mutual protest, respect and understanding.

In the same way, if one is moved by a work of art, and takes action for the greater good because that piece of art has enlightened them, does it matter who made it?

Buddhism teaches that to be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake involves risk. Sometimes that means letting someone speak for you in their own way, telling stories even though they aren’t your own, or painting faces that are different from yours. Without that might we be shutting down various ways to create new landscapes of possibility?

 The poet John Keats said being able to embrace uncertainty, things we don’t know, doubts – and sharing those uncertainties and doubts – could be a gift.

I think the portrait of a black man by a white artist could be such a gift. That the artist’s skin color denied us that is, in my view, a sadly unnecessary lost opportunity.

How the Other Half Lives: The Perils of Being Female in Many Countries

Her name was Romina, she lived in Iran, and she was 14. Her life ended when her father beheaded her with a farm sickle because she ran away with her boyfriend. The lawyer said at most her father would get ten years for the “honor killing.” Hanieh Rajabi, a Ph.D. student, was luckier. She survived her father’s lashing, the result of  walking home alone from class instead of taking the bus.

Stories like these are rife in Iran, where women are educated, hold political office and have professional careers, providing a male relative allows them to, all while covering their hair, arms and curves. They must seek permission from a male relative to work outside the home, or if they wish to leave the country or file for divorce.

But Iran isn’t the only country where women’s lives can be miserable. When I read about Romina and Hanieh I remembered the women I met over years of working internationally on women’s health and gender issues.

I recalled Charity, a housemaid, who told me polygamy saved her from nights of abuse. A Muslim woman said she would be punished for attending the United Nations Decade for Women conference in Nairobi but she came anyway. Others in black chadors tried to shake their male chaperones. I heard of a teacher whose husband put her eyes out in front of her children because he thought she was unfaithful. Other stories revealed women slashed with razors to make them unattractive to other men.

In Sudan there were tales of female genital cutting, a practice in many counties across Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.  Often mistaken for a Muslim ritual, amputating a female’s genitals is undertaken as a way to make girls “marriageable,” and to ensure their “virginity, purity and sexual restraint.” More than 100 million women and girls living today have experienced some form of female genital mutilation or cutting, usually in unsterile and torturous conditions. There is no way to know how many victims have died from the practice and FGM has now been transported to western countries due to immigration, despite laws prohibiting it, because the tradition is so deeply embedded in the cultures of 29 nations worldwide.

In conversations with Indian women in Nairobi I learned that the Hindu tradition of “sutee” is still occasionally practiced. Sutee refers to a widow burning herself to death on her husband’s funeral pyre, once a voluntary act considered to be heroic. It later became a forced practice and it is still done secretly in some rural villages. The last known case of sutee occurred last year when an 18-year old woman named Roop Kanwar’s death stunned the nation, forcing a rewrite of Indian law banning the horrific ritual.

Another horrendous example of women’s oppression internationally stems from a medical condition known as fistula. It occurs when a woman has a prolonged, obstructed labor but can’t access emergency care or a C-section. The laboring mother can experience agonizing pain for days and often loses her child. At least a million women in Africa and Asia suffer from an untreated fistula after a painful or tragic birth. They often face physical and psychological consequences because a fistula, or severe tear that can easily be repaired, is left untreated, rendering her incontinent.

Unable to control the leaking of body waste, she suffers chronic infections and pain, and the odor drives away her husband, family and friends.  Often living in isolate huts these young women are frequently blamed for their condition, which usually occurs with a first pregnancy. They may not know that others have suffered the same thing and they certainly don’t know that the problem can be remedied with surgery.  Performed properly a woman with fistula can return to normal life and a happy future. Instead most rural women with this condition live lives of hopelessness, ostracized and alone.

In other parts of the world, women’s oppression takes the form of sexual slavery and abuse. In Paris alone, for example, thousands of teenage girls from the Middle East disappear into forced prostitution every year while globally wives, daughters and partners suffer emotional or physical abuse, often beaten, drugged or sold into sexual submission.

The refugee crisis many now experience adds another dimension to women’s oppression. The war in Syria provides a glimpse into sex trafficking. Fleeing to Lebanon, refugees are victimized by sexual slavery and are treated as criminals despite the country’s legalization of prostitution after WWI. Hundreds of women and girls have found themselves forced into prostitution.

Women in refugee camps also suffer sexual abuse and sex trafficking. I met one of them when I volunteered in a camp in Greece.  Young, pretty, and alone in the world, she had been sold from one man to another until she escaped to Turkey, then Greece. Her story was impossible to imagine, her fortitude incredible.

The dimensions of women’s suffering can make us uncomfortable but they are important to know because victims of violence also matter, and because no systemic oppression should be ignored or continued. Whatever its form, it always calls for resistance and reform, which is why I am compelled to tell these women’s stories.

Who We Are, Who We Could Be

“This is not who we are.” “We are better than this.” 

I can’t bear to hear those platitudes from people who are blind, lazy, or have no sense of American history.

This is who we are, and who we have been since Columbus stood on American soil. Since then Native American peoples have been oppressed and the oppression continues.  Forced into soul-destroying reservations, the 17th to 20th century Indian Wars led to the Wounded Knee massacre where thousands of Native Americans were slaughtered. The Trail of Tears march that forced native people off their land killed more than 15,000 first Americans. Today Customs and Border Protection contractors tear through sacred tribal sites destroying archeological treasures that represent America’s history and culture to build a wall for keeping brown people out of this land.

This is who we are, and who we have been since lynching terrorized black Americans into submission and an inferior caste system. Post-Civil War to the 1950s, African Americans living in the south were subjected to unimaginable physical torture that usually ended with being hung and set on fire. Jim Crow laws legalized racial segregation to ensure African American’s couldn’t vote, hold decent jobs, or get a good education.

In 1921 black residents in Tulsa, Oklahoma were driven from their homes while their entire community was burnt to the ground. The crime was so effectively silenced that few people today know about it.

The infamous Tuskegee Study subjected black WWII airmen to syphilis without their consent so that researchers could conduct experimental treatments. None of the 399 men infected with syphilis received penicillin even though it proved to be an effective treatment.

This is who we still are, as police continue murdering black men and women and bludgeoning peaceful protesters standing up for justice in the names of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, and multitudes more.

But fragile though they are, there are signs of who we can be in the face of dictatorial repression. Mass protests, along with global solidarity from people of all ages, races, and economic strata willing to risk Covid in the name of justice, offer hope for another kind of “new normal” as we move forward in these deeply difficult, terribly troubling times.

Police taking a knee and line dancing with protesters gives me hope. Children, black and white, singing and chanting “No Justice, No Peace” gives me hope. Local leaders, like the mayor of Washington who painted the street with “Black Lives Matter” in defiance of a would-be monarch in her city give me hope, as do those who are calling racial injustice an emergency that requires ending police funding and forging new paths to saner, safer policing.

Organizations ranging from local theaters to community foundations to businesses publicly apologizing and pledging reform in hiring, training, and intolerance of racial injustice gives me hope. People learning about the history and violence of institutional racism gives me hope. Bad cops getting charged with felonies gives me hope. Whistleblowers and those willing to forfeit their careers in the name of justice give me hope. Political and military figures who say Enough is Enough! Give me hope. Rev. Al Sharpton’s eulogy of George Floyd gives me hope.

Recent polls like those conducted by Monmouth University and CBS News give me hope. The Monmouth poll showed that 76 percent, including 71 percent of white people, called racism and discrimination a “big problem” in the U.S., an increase of 26 percent since 2015.  Almost 60 percent of Americans see protesters’ anger as fully justified. And the CBS poll revealed that almost 60 percent of Americans believe police officers are more likely to treat black people unfairly than to mistreat whites.

I’m not saying the change we urgently need will be fast, easy or unanimous.  But we are at a bend in the road, because we are on the brink of disaster. We can no longer deny, disregard or ignore that reality. We know now that there is no justice, no peace without racial justice and that demands that we understand the connections between race, class, poverty, discrimination, i.e. “intersectionality.”  Black writers and leaders like James Baldwin and Angela Davis and Martin Luther King, Jr. understood that before many of us did. Today no one understand it better than African Americans who still can’t get a good education, a decent job, or a safe roof over their heads and who worry every day about driving, jogging, living while black.

“What’s really driving home for me right now, what this moment is teaching me, what the death of George Floyd and all the other losses teaches us is that there is no justice anywhere for anyone until there is racial justice. That’s the starting point, the nexus for change,” a friend wrote me.

Her comment reminded me of another crucial moment, and movement, that demanded sustained change. The women’s movement’s starting point, its nexus for change came with the realization that unless women had agency over their own bodies, there would be no justice, no equality, no self-determined future. The movement had measurable results and it’s not finished yet.

Still, we can hope that the hymn is right: “Once [we were] lost, but now [we’re] found, now we see.” As Rev. Sharpton said, the time has come.

The Pain of Feeling Other's Pain

More and more I avoid watching the news. I closed my Twitter account ages ago and I rarely visit Instagram, now more political than picturesque. I recoil at the thought of opening Facebook.

 Every day it’s one sad, upsetting, outrageous story after another. Innocent black youth murdered by police. Armed men with Nazi flags entering a state capital building. Newspaper headlines screaming “Syrian Children Freeze to Death. Bombs Rain Down,” while in an Afghan maternity hospital women and newborns are gunned down, and in America refugees seeking asylum are given a choice by ICE: Separate from your children or remain in detention indefinitely.

 All the cruelty makes me weep, and reflect that we can drown in the agonies and sorrows of our time - or we can choose to act.  I empathize with those who agonize, and I admire those who act.

 Recently a book inspired me to act. It is called The Book of Rosy: A Mother’s Story of Separation at the Border to be published this month. It’s a well-told tale by and about two remarkable women and how they connected with each other. It is also the story of an amazing grassroots organization and the Latin American women they have reunited with their children after being separated at the U.S. border. 

Co-author Rosayra Pablo Cruz crossed the border with her two sons because she had survived an attempt on her life and her older son was subsequently threatened.  Separated from her sons upon arriving in the U.S, she was sent to detention in Arizona while her sons were put in foster care in New York. With the help of a grassroots organization called Immigrant Families Together, Rosy, who now lives in New York, was finally reunited with her sons months later. In February she was granted asylum.

Julie Schwietert Collazo, a bi-lingual writer, editor and translator is the founder of the organization that helped Rosy. Dedicated to reuniting and supporting immigrant families separated at the US/Mexico border, the organization’s story is extraordinary.

It began with Yeni Gonzalez, an immigrant mother from Guatemala whose three children were transported by ICE agents to New York. When she was unable to pay a $7,500 bond, a group of American mothers led by Julie, who heard Yeni’s story on NPR, quickly mobilized to raise the bond money. Then they arranged to transport Yeni safely, state by state, to New York. There she was reunited with her children and Immigrant Families Together (IFT) was born. To date it has raised over a million dollars and paid over 100 bonds.

 Rosy’s story is stunningly moving as she describes the magnitude and the impact of the human tragedy taking place still. She shares the horrific journey north this way: “The trip is long enough for your stomach to struggle to accept food and water when you finally have access to them again. … The journey is long enough for you to make choices that, when you think about them later, fill you with disgust, like eating mangoes full of worms or drinking dirty water from a creek where cattle stand to cool off. You grip the mango with both hands… and you’re so ravenous, you don’t even avoid the worms.”

 Of the agony of detention, she writes, “In my short time here, I have seen women go crazy with hysteria. They curl up on their bunks and refuse to leave their cells. They cry without ceasing, as if their hoodies are bottomless wells of tears. I have seen them shut down, becoming shells of who they once were. I have seen them lose their will to fight, their will to go on. … I ache for my two boys, of course, but if I let my tears flow, I will become one of those women, hanging on the edge of her own being, and then, what will I be able to do to get my boys, who have been taken from me, back into my arms?”

 Her description of the icebox detention cells is as chilling as the cells themselves. “Months from now, Rosy writes, “when there are news stories about children dying in the icebox I won’t be surprised.”

 Concluding her story, Rosy says, “This is the immigrant experience I wish people could see, not because it’s my experience, but because it’s the story of so many of us, coming to the United States to escape violence and to build lives in which we will contribute to society. … We want to be part of your American dream. We want to help you realize it. We want to share it with you.”

 Rosy’s story is particularly compelling because Donald Trump, on advice of his revered advisor Stephen Miller, has closed the border with Mexico indefinitely, using Covid-19 as the excuse, when it’s really meant to end immigration altogether.

 I’ve been wanting to go to the border to help for a long time, so pre-Covid I contacted Julie. She led me to organizations that still need volunteers. I don’t know when, but I hope to go after the pandemic ends. The detention centers will still be full, despite Covid deaths and deportations.

 How could I not choose to act after reading Rosy’s story and knowing the vital work of Immigrant Families Together?  

Diminished, Dismissed, Misdiagnosed: When Doctors Don't Trust Women

Rana Mungin was 30-years old when she died of Covid-19 in March. A black teacher in Brooklyn with asthma and hypertension, she was twice diagnosed with having a panic attack in an ER, despite a fever and shortness of breath.

That reaction and lack of appropriate response by doctors was not a fluke. It happens frequently if you are female, especially if you’re a black woman, as several recent books about women’s health care reveal. That’s not news to women’s healthcare advocates, but perhaps now healthcare providers who may not have considered inherent problems involving diagnosing and treating women will be more enlightened.

Possibly the most important book on this issue is Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick by Maya Dusenbery. Adding to the impressive and important literature of women’s health, Dusenbery addresses two of the biggest impediments to women getting good care, the “knowledge gap” and the “trust gap.”

 The knowledge gap refers to the fact that many doctors don’t know enough about women’s bodies, their symptoms, or the diseases that affect them disproportionately. The trust gap speaks to the stereotyping of women as unreliable reporters at best, and hysterical at worst. These gaps are apt to occur more often with black women. Dusenbery’s central and necessarily repeated mantra is that women are either not trusted when they report symptoms or they are labeled crazy, malingering, or opioid- addicted.

“This book is not about a few sexist bad apples within the medical profession,” Dusenbery says in her introduction. “It is about how all health care providers, like all of us, have unconscious biases by virtue of living in a culture that holds certain stereotypes about women.”

These biases are revealed over and over again as women share their first-person horror stories of trivialization, misdiagnosis, not being believed and more, whether they suffer chronic pain, autoimmune diseases, reproductive problems, heart attacks or other life-threatening emergencies. 

Here’s one example. “I was asking for help. But my doctor said, ‘I don’t think you’re at the point where medication is an option, and it can be addictive. Keep exercising and doing yoga and maybe consider meditating. Try to get more sleep. If your symptoms persist, come back in a few months.”

Here’s another. A black woman I know was found to have multiple cysts in her body. She had gained weight and stopped menstruating. What did the doctor tell her? “You have a demanding job and a young child. I think it’s stress.” That opinion was rendered with no diagnostic workup, no referral to an endocrinologist, no curiosity or concern about what systemic problem might be causing the troubling symptoms.

Dusenbery backs up her conclusions with copious references to research studies, women’s personal stories, and other books in the women’s health canon, as she exposes “bad medicine and lazy science” in compelling and convincing ways.

“Doctors think that men have heart attacks and women have stress” speaks to the frequency with which women are told their symptoms are due to stress, a theme played over and over again in the stories women share. “It’s hard work behaving as a credible patient,” as one woman said, underscoring how often pain is deemed to be “all in your head.” 

A chapter in Dusenbery’s book called “This is Not Normal” reveals how often women must insist on having diagnostic workups. “Young women aren’t the only group of patients who frequently find their symptoms dismissed as ‘normal’ by healthcare providers. The tendency to normalize symptoms associated with women’s reproductive functions finds echoes in the way elderly patients, trans patients, and overweight patients are often treated.”

 “The Career Women’s Disease” points to the modern version of age-old myths suggesting that motherhood and work are incompatible. One 20th century “expert” on endometriosis notoriously stated that the painful condition was on the rise because of “delayed and infrequent childbearing.” The 19th century version of this myth was that if a woman exercised her brain her uterus would atrophy.

Autoimmune diseases are especially challenging for physicians who receive about five hours of lectures on this difficult topic during their entire medical education. Research has shown that women with these diseases, like with many others, see about five physicians over a period of seven years before receiving a correct diagnosis.

The frustration of not being believed or properly diagnosed is intense.  As Dusenbery puts it, “The long, frustrating search for a diagnosis is such a common theme running through the stories of women patients that many feel immense relief to finally get a diagnosis, any diagnosis. Being sick without knowing why is very stressful; being sick and told ‘nothing’s wrong,’ is more stressful still.” 

Delayed, downplayed, poorly diagnosed illnesses are not simply a medical issue. In this time of “intersectionality,” it’s important to realize that race, class, age, gender and more come into play. As one analyst put it, “if you’re not wealthy, not white, and not heterosexual, you may be receiving less than optimal care.”

That’s why Rana Mungin’s story is so sad, and why Dusenbery’s message, echoing that of other healthcare advocates, is so important. “Listen to women. Trust us when we say we’re sick. Start there, and you’ll find we have a a lot of knowledge to share.”  Books like Doing Harm go a long way in arming women for the task.

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Elayne Clift has been a women’s healthcare educator and advocate for over three decades. She lives in Saxtons River, Vt.  

The Death of Privacy: Big Brother is Watching You

Every day I feel guilty numerous times, not because of something I’ve done wrong.  It happens because of something I haven’t done. Although I’m an activist worried about what is happening in the world in which we now live, I don’t sign online petitions, answer surveys, or vote on Facebook posts or in emails, no matter how urgent the issue.  Nor do I answer phone calls if I don’t recognize the number.

These sins of omission are easily explained. I don’t respond to requests or calls to “make a difference” because it’s very likely I am being surveilled. It’s likely you are too. The fact is our privacy is rapidly eroding and becoming a thing of the past.

Chilling evidence is emerging about how readily everything from our whereabouts to our political views and personal preferences are known and shared. The New York Times and other publications have reported on this issue and explained how spying on our privacy is done and how information is being used.

A recent report in The New York Times revealed that data used by the government is provided by location data companies that “collect precise movements of all smartphone-owning Americans through their phone apps.” The data these companies collect and store is then sold to third party buyers, including the government. And because the data is for sale, the government is convinced that no legal oversight is needed.

The Wall Street Journal points out that the Trump administration “has bought access to a commercial database that maps movements of millions of cellphones in America and is using it for immigration and border enforcement.” Customs and Border Protection thinks that practice is fine. As a spokesperson told The Times, “While the C.B.P. is being provided access to location information, it’s important to note that such information does not include cellular phone tower data, is not ingested in bulk, and does not include the individual user’s identity.” Really? Shouldn’t that be challenged in court? And what exactly does “ingested in bulk” mean anyway? Who sees the data, where is it kept, and for how long?

The truth is that when we accept those long, difficult to read “terms and conditions” that keep being revised and stuffed into our Inboxes, we really have no idea what data is being collected about us and how it is being used. More worrisome is that we are consenting to possible future uses that are unpredictable.

That’s why Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts wrote in a 2018 decision, “When the government tracks the location of a cellphone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user.”

 This whole mess started with an Australian guy who invented an app that allows facial recognition (which is why Hong Kong protesters wear face masks). His company, Clearview AI, means that an uploaded picture of someone can be linked to public photos of that person and to other links where the photos have appeared. According to The Times, the database of more than three billion images that Clearview has were taken from millions of websites, including Facebook and YouTube. Federal and state law enforcement, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, have used the Clearview app along with over 600 law enforcement agencies that used it just in the past year.

“The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” a co-director of the Santa Clara University High Tech Institute in California told The Times.  “Imagine a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.”

Given our present political climate, thoughts of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 come to mind. Considered one of the most terrifying novels ever written, it showed what actions individuals can take when given too much power. In the story the political “Party” takes control over most of the world’s population resulting in individualism and independent thinking being banned.  Everyone is manipulated -- and under constant surveillance. “Big Brother” is watching them. The members of the “Party” use force and mind control to ensure that individuals are kept in line. Anyone who tries to live by their own rules (or tells the truth) is labeled a traitor and terribly punished.

 “Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship,” Orwell wrote.

Tactics like face recognition surveillance used today against immigrants could easily be used tomorrow for enforcement of other nefarious laws. That’s why Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), head of the Oversight and Reform Committee in the House, is calling for lawmakers to hold hearings and to protect people legally from abuses that can occur when law enforcement and others use Clearview and other private entities to track people.

“I am deeply concerned by reports that the Trump administration has been secretly collecting cellphone data, without warrants, to track the location of millions of people across the United States to target individuals for deportation,” Maloney told The Times. “Such Orwellian government surveillance threatens the privacy of every American.”

Imagining a New Normal

What will it be like, I wonder, when this terrible pandemic ends? Sure, we will never take toilet paper, pasta, or flour for granted again. We may feel less guilty about binge watching TV. Maybe we’ll even say “I love you” more often. But how will we be changed personally, professionally, culturally?  What lifestyle changes will we choose to make? What will “community” look like? Where will we work and how will we play?

No one knows for sure how we will be irrevocably altered by what has happened, but sociologists, psychologists, writers, and homespun “experts” are beginning to suggest answers to those questions, and to speculate on, or idealize, a remodeled future. Some of these people were invited to weigh in on a “new normal” in a recent article in Politico.

Communications professor Deborah Tannen thinks that having been so vulnerable to calamity will change us forever such that we will become compulsive hand washers who distance ourselves from others. Some analysts counter with the idea that we’ll be drawn together in real and virtual communities that we may not have considered joining or building before we experienced the loneliness of isolation. I agree with their assessment. I think we’ll become closer to family and friends, some of whom we’ve already re-connected with as a result of the pandemic.

Peter Coleman, a psychology professor, suggests that the shock of Covid-19 could put an end to the “escalating political and cultural polarization we’ve been trapped in, and could help us to change course toward greater national solidarity and functionality.” Sociologist Eric Klineberg adds that market-based models for social organization will fail. “When this ends,” he posits, “we will reorient our politics and make substantial new investments in public goods, especially for health and public services.” Given the blatant flaws in our health care system that have been exposed during the current crisis Americans will surely demand urgently needed healthcare reform, whether we call it Medicare for All or universal health care.

The digital lifestyle will likely take on new meaning and new tasks, as Sherry Turkle of MIT says. Whether it’s watching a performance, taking yoga or meditation classes, communicating with legislators, staying connected to long-distance friends and family, or telecommuting to work there are measurable benefits (and some drawbacks) that accompany such a change. One of the benefits is a cleaner environment, as demonstrated by the unpolluted air over cities like Beijing and Sao Paulo, Venetian canals no longer smelling like sewers, rivers running clean again, and the earth’s surface quieting down, which all attest to the benefits of living less frenetic lives and appreciating nature’s healing gifts.  

Two things that will make a comeback in the new normal are a renewed respect for science, and the realization that good governance along with ethical institutions are essential to a functioning democracy, writer Michiko Kakutani suggests. Applying lessons learned from the Trump administration’s failures, he believes people will realize that “government institutions need to be staffed with experts, and decisions need to be made through a reasoned policy process predicated on evidence-based science and geopolitical knowledge.  … We need to remember that public trust is crucial to governance, and that trust depends on telling the truth.”

Consistent with the urgency of good governance in this country is the recognition that we live in a globalized world.  Participation in international organizations, cooperation with other nations, and empathy for multitudes of people who live in conditions we cannot imagine, whether in shanty towns, refugee camps, detention centers, or on the streets has become essential. We can no longer avert our eyes when it comes to human frailty and suffering. 

In the U.S. we also can no longer live with the stark divide between an insanely wealthy one percent world while the 99 percent struggle to survive. As one pundit put it, change is inevitable and social justice actions will make the Occupy Wall Street movement look like child’s play.

There is another change that hasn’t received sufficient attention: More women are likely to be in leadership positions given their proven expertise in handling the pandemic and modeling leadership at all levels. Whether mayors, governors, community organizers, or prime ministers, women have proven their political and practical skills.

For example, New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s early actions, including shutting down tourism and imposing an immediate month-long lockdown, limited the spread of Covid-19 and the death toll dramatically. So did the actions of Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s president, who ordered all planes arriving from Wuhan to be inspected as soon as the outbreak there was identified.  She also opened an epidemic command center and ramped up production of personal protective equipment resulting in a stunningly low number of Covid-19 cases and deaths. These two examples help illustrate that women have proven their decision-making and managerial skills, especially in a crisis.

Julio Gambuto, writing for Cognoscenti, noted that “this is our chance to define a new version of normal, to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes us truly proud. …We can do it in our communities, in what organizations we support, what truths we tell. We can do it nationally by considering “to whom we give power.”

We need only look to New Zealand and Taiwan for models.

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River, Vt. www.elayne-clift.com

Love Thy Neighbor - Until There's a Pandemic

It was Day Ten of social distancing when someone in my Vermont community posted the governor’s phone number on Facebook, urging people to call about too many New Yorkers flocking to Vermont to escape the pandemic. The usurpers were allegedly hoarding, emptying local groceries, and using medical services meant for Vermonters. Even  second homeowners paying taxes were trouble. Something needed to be done about it.

“Check out Rhode Island’s measures on how to handle this,” wrote one responder. “We can’t stop them from coming, but we can make sure they follow the rules.” I wondered if she realized how Draconian Rhode Island’s plan was and if she knew it had been rescinded. I also wondered what rules she thought the invaders were breaking?

Another post read, “I never thought I would suggest surveillance of population, or rationing of a sort, but I am leaning toward such measures…. There is just not enough we can do to keep them out.”

Posts like that made me cringe so I responded. “These posts reveal an underbelly I never expected in my chosen state,” I wrote. “They smack of a new kind of xenophobia. Where were the outcries of gluttony in grocery stores when Vermonters left no toilet paper for others? Where had all the flour gone? Why so hard to get bread? Who among us would not do what we need to in order to protect our families? To survive? It is coming close to Passover. Do I need to ask ‘why is this [time] different from others? Do I need to wonder what we’d be thinking if they weren’t New Yorkers, but Jews? (Or is this really about NY Jews?) I could weep for what these posts reveal.”

That’s when rebuttals started flying.  “Chill,” wrote the writer of the original post. “This is only about stay home, stay six feet apart, don’t hoard, don’t buy all the food in a small grocery store just because you can. … Don’t make it into something it’s not.”

The thing is, I wasn’t making it about something it’s not.  I was exposing how easy it is to slide into subliminal stereotyping, shaming, blaming, casting out, scapegoating -- in other words, how quickly one can slide down the slippery slope leading to what Hannah Arendt referred to as “the banality of evil,” a phrase my admonisher found despicable. “We are all in this together,” she wrote. “We are all Jews, Muslims, Christians,” she said, not realizing the irony in the photograph she posted for my benefit of a chapel table upon which sat a large cross and several other small religious icons, while the star of David was conspicuously absent.

 I used the example of Jews to make my point not only because New York is home to many Jews, but because it is my historical context; I know what it’s like to be treated as an Outsider and I am sensitive to matters of exclusion. I could as easily have used Asian, or Latina, or Black or immigrant populations to make my point. After all, let’s remember that in addition to millions of Jews, almost as many gays, priests, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people and others were put to death during WWII.

The issue is Otherness, the shunning of people in dark times, the underbelly of racism and violence, the xenophobia that is gripping our nation in the face of a pandemic threat. Stories are emerging about what is already happening. An Asian woman’s jaw was broken because she wasn’t wearing a mask. Three Asian Americans in the same family were stabbed. One was two years old, another was six. Three young men who arrived before shelter-in-place was implemented in a small town in Maine had a tree felled so that they could not escape quarantine.

In contrast to the posts I read, Senator Patrick Leahy’s message demonstrated another way entirely to speak to the difficult issue of asking others not to come to Vermont.  He acknowledged the economic contribution visitors and second homeowners make to the state. He said they would be very welcome once the pandemic is over.  He made clear that the issue was public health and safety, the only reason he was asking people from out of state to remain in their own homes.

In her famous essay, “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag, dying of cancer, argued that people who are ill are often stigmatized as sinners. In our time, those who literally cross the [state] line, especially if they come from places hardest hit by the pandemic, are seen as sinning against residents.

Ian Buruma, writing in The New York Times, reminds us of the “long history of illness being used to stoke hatred.” It goes as far back as ancient times and reminds us of the European plague of the 14th century, he says, when “disease was seen as a foreign invader, an alien attack on people,” for which, by the way, Jews and foreigners were blamed.

But it was Camus who put it most succinctly in The Plague: “The only way to fight the plague is with decency.” 

That was really all I was asking for when I read those chilling posts, and sounded a plea against disease driven xenophobia. Because yes, we are in this together.

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxton’s River, Vt. 

Can a Pandemic Restore Humanity?

When Albert Camus published his allegorical story The Plague in 1947 about a deadly plague sweeping the French city of Oran in 1849, he raised a number of questions about the nature of the human condition. “I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends,” one of his characters says. Later Camus reflects that “a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour …when all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.”

As we share the experience of a dystopian world of rapidly spreading disease, political despair and economic disaster, Camus’s words have renewed meaning. They help us remember what is truly important in a world in which we find ourselves increasingly isolated from each other, not only now in an abundance of caution, but because of growing isolation derived from social media in a computer age which fosters disconnection from each other.

That kind of solitude has meant a notable decline in courtesy, responsiveness, and compassion such that we no longer feel it necessary to respond to each other, to check on each other, to truly care about others. Our communities are now virtual to a large extent and loneliness has crept into the lives of many, especially those with limited mobility or age-related restrictions.

We have for too long been disinterested in others and disconnected from each other. Basic responsiveness and reciprocity have all but disappeared.  Now we find ourselves living on a planet spiraling out of control, its inhabitants pleading for a return to safety, and a return to communal well-being. It’s almost as if a higher order – some may call it God – is begging us to return to our fundamental humanity before it’s too late.

The earth itself seems to weep for what we’ve lost by casting upon us catastrophic floods, fires, and famine as we struggle to survive and now to cling to hope.

Of course, there are those among us who bear witness and who offer heart-based action. We donate money, share information, and volunteer while learning to grasp the lessons of isolation, among which are knowing how much we need each other for comfort and survival, practically and emotionally. We recognize our shared fragility and reach out to each other with virtual hugs.

In contrast there will always be those people who don’t look beyond themselves and who ignore and exploit others while remaining complacent, and even finding perverse pleasure in their ignorance and selfishness. We may never be able to expect more of them. As a Facebook post admonished, “Next time you want to judge boat people, refugees, migrants fleeing war-torn lands, remember that we fought over toilet paper.”

But the vast majority of us realize the urgency of compassionate, face-to-face interactive community. We often mourn the downside of computer-driven solitude and work-from-home opportunities, even though now our solitude and work are relieved by computer connection. Perhaps above all, we understand more than ever what can happen when our political leadership fails us and what we can do for each other in the face of such failure.

Still we carry on, and hopefully grow from the current experience of this shared, separative crisis. We offer virtual hugs and comfort, not in fear and despair so much as with the knowledge that our aloneness is no longer sufficient once we reach a new normal. We understand that we must actively and visibly renew our obligation to, and affection for one another. Perhaps  in that renewed knowing we can dare to steward ourselves toward a new world in which we shepherd each other back to a place where we can once again wrap our arms around each other in the knowledge that together, we can, as Winston Churchill once said, “brace ourselves … [and be able once again] to say, This was [our] finest hour.”

A despairing F. Scott Fitzgerald, quarantined in 1920 as a result of the Spanish flu, was able to write to a friend, “I weep for the damned eventualities this future brings. … And yet, … I focus on a single strain of light, calling me forth to believe in a better tomorrow.”

Even more inspiring is a poem by Lynn Ungar, a San Francisco poet, called Pandemic, circulating online, in which she writes, “Know that you are connected in ways that are terrifying and beautiful. Know that our lives are in one another’s hands. Reach out your hearts. Reach out your words. Reach out the tendrils of compassion that move, invisibly, where we cannot touch.  Promise this world your love – for better for for worse, in sickness and health, so long as we all shall live.”

Amen.

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River. Vt.  www.elayne-clift.com

The Female Face of Leadership Past, Present, Future

March is Women’s History Month. What better time to honor the women who influence the worlds in which they live(d), whether they are contemporary or not, familiar or unknown.

Even in ancient times examples abound. Cleopatra, the last Pharaoh of Egypt, was a favorite of Julius Caesar’s. Another Cleopatra was a Syrian queen who claimed power when her husband died. Hatshepsut also ruled Egypt as did Nefertiti.

The Vietnamese Trung sisters led the first national uprising against Chinese conquerors in 40 AD. Then there were the famed Amazon women, and later, women like Grace O'Malley, chieftain of the O Maille clan, who challenged 16th century politics in England and Ireland. And we all revere Joan of Arc for her role during the Hundred Years' War.

Not all heroic women have literally been warriors, queens or saints.  Mary Wollstonecraft was a symbolic warrior when she published The Vindication of the Rights of Women in England in 1792, asking that women have “power over themselves.” The Grimke sisters were warriors when they stomped for women’s suffrage and abolition of slavery in the mid-1800s, along with multitudes of other women including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

In 1872 America’s first female stockbroker, Victoria Woodhull, had the temerity to run for president.  Lawyer Belva Lockwood ran twice, in 1884 and 1888.  Ten years later social activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote her pioneering book Women and Economics, a scathing treatise about women’s dependence on men and marriage for survival and sexual legitimacy.

In the early 20th century Emmeline Pankhurst called for militant action to secure women’s suffrage in England, leading the way for Alice Paul, founder of the National Women’s Party and nemesis of Woodrow Wilson, as her “Sentinels of Liberty” picketed the White House for women’s right to vote. Many brave women were jailed, brutalized, force fed, and threatened with psychiatric incarceration. But they carried on, forcing Wilson to support suffrage when their treatment was publicized.

These women, foremothers of today’s female activists, advocates and educators had spoken truth to power. Their work led to vibrant and courageous female leadership across all sectors of society in the U.S. and elsewhere that continues today.

One example is Jacinda Kate Ardern, the world’s youngest female head of state when she became prime minister of New Zealand in 2017. Under her leadership New Zealand has focused on issues like child poverty, housing, and social inequality. Ardern was recognized globally in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque attack in 2019 that led to strict gun legislation.

Finland’s Sanna Marin, leader of the Social Democratic Party is 34 years old, younger than Ardern’s 37 when she became prime minister, making Marin the youngest sitting PM in the world. Formerly a transport minister, she now oversees a governing coalition of five parties, all headed by women under age 35.

Iceland also has a female prime minister, Katrin Jakobsdottir, a strong supporter of the country’s Left-Green Movement. At 41 years old she is the second woman to hold the position. Her priorities are the environment, health and education. She hopes to make Iceland carbon neutral by 2040.

Closer to home, it now seems that no matter who wins the November election, having a woman president in the U.S. is not in question. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar are top tier candidates. If not this year, perhaps one of the “Squad”– Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley or Rashida Tlaib - may find herself on a future ticket. And don’t rule out Stacy Abrams who nearly made Governor of Georgia and works tirelessly for voting rights. Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Omar and Tlaib are the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, and Pressley is the first black congresswoman to represent Massachusetts.

It isn’t only female political leaders we should remember and recognize.  There are women in the sciences, education, technology, communications and other sectors worthy of note as well. From Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in America to receive an M.D. in 1849 to Cecilia Payne, the first person to earn a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard and the one who answered the question “What are stars made of?” in 1925, to Katherine Johnson of Hidden Women fame, and astronaut Sally Ride, women have been pioneers.

Women have also excelled as business leaders, experts in various trades, academic visionaries, media specialists, and more.

And now we see them emerging as social justice and human rights activists across the globe, from education advocate Malala Yousafzai, the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, climate change activist Greta Thunberg, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year, and Emma Gonzales, whose leadership in stopping gun violence, along with other Parkland High School youth leaders, put a measurable dent in the NRA.

Behind each of these young women are multitudes more all over the world, raising awareness about critical issues, educating policymakers, organizing effectively and mobilizing mightily for social change in their communities and countries. We should honor them all, along with their pioneering role models, who through the ages have had the courage, skill and tenacity to keep the world moving forward, even in its darkest days.

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