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puttingherinhistory · 3 years ago

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“Covid has unleashed the most severe setback to women’s liberation in my lifetime. While watching this happen, I have started to think we are witnessing an outbreak of disaster patriarchy.

Naomi Klein was the first to identify “disaster capitalism”, when capitalists use a disaster to impose measures they couldn’t possibly get away with in normal times, generating more profit for themselves. Disaster patriarchy is a parallel and complementary process, where men exploit a crisis to reassert control and dominance, and rapidly erase hard-earned women’s rights. (The term “racialized disaster patriarchy” was used by Rachel E Luft in writing about an intersectional model for understanding disaster 10 years after Hurricane Katrina.) All over the world, patriarchy has taken full advantage of the virus to reclaim power – on the one hand, escalating the danger and violence to women, and on the other, stepping in as their supposed controller and protector.

I have spent months interviewing activists and grassroots leaders around the world, from Kenya to France to India, to find out how this process is affecting them, and how they are fighting back. In very different contexts, five key factors come up again and again. In disaster patriarchy, women lose their safety, their economic power, their autonomy, their education, and they are pushed on to the frontlines, unprotected, to be sacrificed.

Part of me hesitates to use the word “patriarchy”, because some people feel confused by it, and others feel it’s archaic. I have tried to imagine a newer, more contemporary phrase for it, but I have watched how we keep changing language, updating and modernising our descriptions in an attempt to meet the horror of the moment. I think, for example, of all the names we have given to the act of women being beaten by their partner. First, it was battery, then domestic violence, then intimate partner violence, and most recently intimate terrorism. We are forever doing the painstaking work of refining and illuminating, rather than insisting the patriarchs work harder to deepen their understanding of a system that is eviscerating the planet. So, I’m sticking with the word.

In this devastating time of Covid we have seen an explosion of violence towards women, whether they are cisgender or gender-diverse. Intimate terrorism in lockdown has turned the home into a kind of torture chamber for millions of women. We have seen the spread of revenge porn as lockdown has pushed the world online; such digital sexual abuse is now central to domestic violence as intimate partners threaten to share sexually explicit images without victims’ consent.

The conditions of lockdown – confinement, economic insecurity, fear of illness, excess of alcohol – were a perfect storm for abuse. It is hard to determine what is more disturbing: the fact that in 2021 thousands of men still feel willing and entitled to control, torture and beat their wives, girlfriends and children, or that no government appears to have thought about this in their planning for lockdown.

In Peru, hundreds of women and girls have gone missing since lockdown was imposed, and are feared dead. According to official figures reported by Al Jazeera, 606 girls and 309 women went missing between 16 March and 30 June last year. Worldwide, the closure of schools has increased the likelihood of various forms of violence. The US Rape Abuse and Incest National Network says its helpline for survivors of sexual assault has never been in such demand in its 26-year history, as children are locked in with abusers with no ability to alert their teachers or friends. In Italy, calls to the national anti-violence toll-free number increased by 73% between 1 March and 16 April 2020, according to the activist Luisa Rizzitelli. In Mexico, emergency call handlers received the highest number of calls in the country’s history, and the number of women who sought domestic violence shelters quadrupled.

To add outrage to outrage, many governments reduced funding for these shelters at the exact moment they were most needed. This seems to be true throughout Europe. In the UK, providers told Human Rights Watch that the Covid-19 crisis has exacerbated a lack of access to services for migrant and Black, Asian and minority ethnic women. The organisations working with these communities say that persistent inequality leads to additional difficulties in accessing services such as education, healthcare and disaster relief remotely.

In the US, more than 5 million women’s jobs were lost between the start of the pandemic and November 2020. Because much of women’s work requires physical contact with the public – restaurants, stores, childcare, healthcare settings – theirs were some of the first to go. Those who were able to keep their jobs were often frontline workers whose positions have put them in great danger; some 77% of hospital workers and 74% percent of school staff are women. Even then, the lack of childcare options left many women unable to return to their jobs. Having children does not have this effect for men. The rate of unemployment for Black and Latina women was higher before the virus, and now it is even worse.

The situation is more severe for women in other parts of the world. Shabnam Hashmi, a leading women’s activist from India, tells me that by April 2020 a staggering 39.5% of women there had lost their jobs. “Work from home is very taxing on women as their personal space has disappeared, and workload increased threefold,” Hashmi says. In Italy, existing inequalities have been amplified by the health emergency. Rizzitelli points out that women already face lower employment, poorer salaries and more precarious contracts, and are rarely employed in “safe” corporate roles; they have been the first to suffer the effects of the crisis. “Pre-existing economic, social, racial and gender inequalities have been accentuated, and all of this risks having longer-term consequences than the virus itself,” Rizzitelli says.

When women are put under greater financial pressure, their rights rapidly erode. With the economic crisis created by Covid, sex- and labour-trafficking are again on the rise. Young women who struggle to pay their rent are being preyed on by landlords, in a process known as “sextortion”.

I don’t think we can overstate the level of exhaustion, anxiety and fear that women are suffering from taking care of families, with no break or time for themselves. It’s a subtle form of madness. As women take care of the sick, the needy and the dying, who takes care of them? Colani Hlatjwako, an activist leader from the Kingdom of Eswatini, sums it up: “Social norms that put a heavy caregiving burden on women and girls remain likely to make their physical and mental health suffer.” These structures also impede access to education, damage livelihoods, and strip away sources of support.

Unesco estimates that upward of 11 million girls may not return to school once the Covid pandemic subsides. The Malala Fund estimates an even bigger number: 20 million. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, from UN Women, says her organisation has been fighting for girls’ education since the Beijing UN women’s summit in 1995. “Girls make up the majority of the schoolchildren who are not going back,” she says. “We had been making progress – not perfect, but we were keeping them at school for longer. And now, to have these girls just dropping out in one year, is quite devastating.”

Of all these setbacks, this will be the most significant. When girls are educated, they know their rights, and what to demand. They have the possibility of getting jobs and taking care of their families. When they can’t access education, they become a financial strain to their families and are often forced into early marriages.

This has particular implications for female genital mutilation (FGM). Often, fathers will accept not subjecting their daughters to this process because their daughters can become breadwinners through being educated. If there is no education, then the traditional practices resume, so that daughters can be sold for dowries. As Agnes Pareyio, chairwoman of the Kenyan Anti-Female Genital Mutilation Board, tells me: “Covid closed our schools and brought our girls back home. No one knew what was going on in the houses. We know that if you educate a girl, FGM will not happen. And now, sadly the reverse is true.”

In the early months of the pandemic, I had a front-row seat to the situation of nurses in the US, most of whom are women. I worked with National Nurses United, the biggest and most radical nurses’ union, and interviewed many nurses working on the frontline. I watched as for months they worked gruelling 12-hour shifts filled with agonising choices and trauma, acting as midwives to death. On their short lunch breaks, they had to protest over their own lack of personal protective equipment, which put them in even greater danger. In the same way that no one thought what it would mean to lock women and children in houses with abusers, no one thought what it would be like to send nurses into an extremely contagious pandemic without proper PPE. In some US hospitals, nurses were wearing garbage bags instead of gowns, and reusing single-use masks many times. They were being forced to stay on the job even if they had fevers.

The treatment of nurses who were risking their lives to save ours was a shocking kind of violence and disrespect. But there are many other areas of work where women have been left unprotected, from the warehouse workers who are packing and shipping our goods, to women who work in poultry and meat plants who are crammed together in dangerous proximity and forced to stay on the job even when they are sick. One of the more stunning developments has been with “tipped” restaurant workers in the US, already allowed to be paid the shockingly low wage of $2.13 (£1.50) an hour, which has remained the same for the past 22 years. Not only has work declined, tips have also declined greatly for those women, and now a new degradation called “maskular harassment” has emerged, where male customers insist waitresses take off their masks so they can determine if and how much to tip them based on their looks.

Women farm workers in the US have seen their protections diminished while no one was looking. Mily Treviño-Sauceda, executive director of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, tells me how pressures have increased on campesinas, or female farm workers: “There have been more incidents of pesticides poisonings, sexual abuse and heat stress issues, and there is less monitoring from governmental agencies or law enforcement due to Covid-19.”

Covid has revealed the fact that we live with two incompatible ideas when it comes to women. The first is that women are essential to every aspect of life and our survival as a species. The second is that women can easily be violated, sacrificed and erased. This is the duality that patriarchy has slashed into the fabric of existence, and that Covid has laid bare. If we are to continue as a species, this contradiction needs to be healed and made whole.

To be clear, the problem is not the lockdowns, but what the lockdowns, and the pandemic that required them, have made clear. Covid has revealed that patriarchy is alive and well; that it will reassert itself in times of crisis because it has never been truly deconstructed, and like an untreated virus it will return with a vengeance when the conditions are ripe.

The truth is that unless the culture changes, unless patriarchy is dismantled, we will forever be spinning our wheels. Coming out of Covid, we need to be bold, daring, outrageous and to imagine a more radical way of existing on the Earth. We need to continue to build and spread activist movements. We need progressive grassroots women and women of colour in positions of power. We need a global initiative on the scale of a Marshall Plan or larger, to deconstruct and exorcise patriarchy – which is the root of so many other forms of oppression, from imperialism to racism, from transphobia to the denigration of the Earth.

There would first be a public acknowledgment, and education, about the nature of patriarchy and an understanding that it is driving us to our end. There would be ongoing education, public forums and processes studying how patriarchy leads to various forms of oppression. Art would help expunge trauma, grief, aggression, sorrow and anger in the culture and help heal and make people whole. We would understand that a culture that has diabolical amnesia and refuses to address its past can only repeat its misfortunes and abuses. Community and religious centres would help members deal with trauma. We would study the high arts of listening and empathy. Reparations and apologies would be done in public forums and in private meetings. Learning the art of apology would be as important as prayer.

The feminist author Gerda Lerner wrote in 1986: “The system of patriarchy in a historic construct has a beginning and it will have an end. Its time seems to have nearly run its course. It no longer serves the needs of men and women, and its intractable linkage to militarism, hierarchy and racism has threatened the very existence of life on Earth.”

As powerful as patriarchy is, it’s just a story. As the post-pandemic era unfolds, can we imagine another system, one that is not based on hierarchy, violence, domination, colonialisation and occupation? Do we see the connection between the devaluing, harming and oppression of all women and the destruction of the Earth itself? What if we lived as if we were kin? What if we treated each person as sacred and essential to the unfolding story of humanity?

What if rather than exploiting, dominating and hurting women and girls during a crisis, we designed a world that valued them, educated them, paid them, listened to them, cared for them and centred them?“

#women #coronavirus #life and style #world news #inequality #Covid 19 #COVID-19 #feminism #womanism #gender inequality #gender equality #corona virus

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theliberaltony · 4 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

For the past few months, Alicia Wertz has barely seen her husband. Since schools closed in their northern Alabama town in March, they’ve been single-mindedly focused on a single goal: making sure that someone was watching their three kids. At first, Wertz tried working from home. But she wasn’t getting anything done, so they tried splitting the hours: Wertz’s husband watches the children in the morning, then a sitter comes to relieve him in the afternoon until Wertz takes over when she returns from work.

“When we’re not working, we’re by ourselves with the children. It almost feels like you’re a single parent. All you do is go to work and care for the kids,” Wertz said.

In her mind, Wertz is counting down the days until schools reopen. But there’s a nagging worry at the back of her head — what if they don’t open at all? “The thought of [my kids] not going back in the fall is devastating,” Wertz said when we spoke in early July. “It raises this question of — if one of us has to stay home with the children, whose job is more important? I think it was something that we did have conversations about before, but COVID-19 has made it much worse.”

Wertz isn’t the only working mother for whom the thought of the fall calendar sparks both relief and dread. And what comes next could have disproportionate — and long-lasting — effects on the careers of countless women across the country. Studies have shown that women already shoulder much of the burden of caring for and educating their children at home; now, they’re also more likely than men to have lost their jobs thanks to the pandemic. And the collapse of the child care and public education infrastructure that so many parents rely on will only magnify these problems, even pushing some women out of the labor force entirely.

“We’re in danger of erasing the limited gains we’ve made for women over the past few decades, and especially women of color,” said Melissa Boteach, Vice President for Income Security and Child Care/Early Learning at the National Women’s Law Center.

The crux of the issue: Child care just isn’t as available as it was before the pandemic. Data provided to FiveThirtyEight by the job-search website Indeed shows that child-care services have been much slower to hire again (a useful proxy for re-opening) than other areas of the economy:

Combine that with the news that many schools will remain closed in the fall, and it’s easy to see the crisis at hand. If polling is any indication, the vast majority of the fallout is being weathered by mothers, who were already doing the majority of household work even before the pandemic began.

In 2015, the Pew Research Center asked parents about how they divide family responsibilities when both work full-time.1 Some tasks were split relatively evenly: Twenty percent of respondents said the mother disciplined children more, 17 percent said the father disciplined more, and 61 percent said that responsibility was shared equally. For every task, however, more respondents reported that the mother carried a greater amount of the load than those who said the father did — including areas involving managing children’s schedules, caring for children when they’re sick and handling household chores.

Moms usually shoulder more of the load at home

Share of parents in households with two full-time working parents who say each parent does more work in a given category, according to a Pew poll

Share of parents who say… Category Mother does more Father does more Work split equally Managing children’s schedules/activities 54% 6% 39% Taking care of sick children 47 6 47 Handling household chores, etc. 31 9 59 Playing/doing activities with children 22 13 64 Disciplining children 20 17 61

Based on 2015 poll by Pew Research, with a sample size of 531 respondents. The sample included male/female married couples only.

Source: Pew Research center

Along similar lines, Pew also found in a poll from 2019 that 80 percent of women living with a partner who had children did the primary grocery shopping and meal-preparation duties for their families. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey — which tracks the average amount of time people spend per day on different categories of activity — married mothers with full-time jobs spent 56 percent more time doing childcare and housework than corresponding fathers. By contrast, fathers spent more time on work-related tasks, travel and leisure activities.2

All that extra time moms spend really adds up

Daily time spent doing various activities by married parents of children under 18 who both worked full-time, according to the American Time Use Survey

Hours spent per day Activity Mothers Fathers Diff. Household activities 1.87 1.23 +0.64 Physical care for children 0.59 0.28 0.31 Child care – other 0.36 0.22 0.14 Child-related travel 0.25 0.13 0.12 Education-related activities 0.10 0.06 0.04 Reading with children 0.05 0.03 0.02 Playing/hobbies with children 0.27 0.29 -0.02 Total 3.49 2.24 1.25

Survey data covers the combined years of 2015 through 2019 and includes both opposite- and same-sex couples.

Source: bls.gov

Even under normal circumstances, it was difficult for mothers of young children to balance work against the heavy burden of child care. The BLS found that in 2019, the labor force participation rate for women with children under age 6 was 66.4 percent, well below the rate for women with children age 6 or older3 (76.8 percent). According to a 2014 survey by the U.S. Census Bureau, 61 percent of women who were out of a job and have young children listed “caretaking” as a reason why they were not employed. Forty-six percent of women who were out of a job and have older children said the same. To put that in perspective, only 10 percent of all respondents who were out of work gave caregiving as a reason.4

A similar strain is apparent in working mothers’ decisions to take unpaid leave, or even part-time jobs instead of full-time ones. According to that same census survey from 2014, 30 percent of women who were part-time workers with young children — and 19 percent of women with older children — said caretaking was a reason they worked part-time. (Among part-time workers, the overall share is just 7 percent.)5

Now, with schools closed and day cares struggling to remain open, even more women may conclude that the best — or perhaps the only — choice for their family and their own sanity is to reduce their hours, or even press “pause” on their career.

“Sometimes I’ll get to a point where I’m like, ‘I’m so tired, I’ll have to go part-time to make it all work,’” said Lee Dunham, a lawyer who lives in Delaware. Since the pandemic started, Dunham has been mostly responsible for her 10-month-old daughter during the day — which means her work day doesn’t start until 8 p.m. and usually wraps around 2 a.m.. “I’m just basically not getting enough sleep because I’m watching the baby 40 hours a week and doing my job 40 hours a week. It’s really rough.”

Dunham feels she’s lucky to have an understanding employer who told her earlier this year that they’d be cutting all of their employees some slack because of the pandemic. But at the time, she added, everyone was assuming day care would be up and running by mid-summer. “It might be that I have to dial back my hours, which of course means I will get paid less.”

This kind of calculus already depresses women’s wages and makes it harder for their careers to progress. According to the National Women’s Law Center, mothers are typically only paid 71 cents for every dollar paid to fathers. In fact, a lot of recent research into the gender pay gap has found that much of it is simply due to the constraints on working mothers. For instance, a 2018 analysis of data from Denmark — which offers a counterpoint to the United States in terms of social safety net, yet still has a very large and persistent gender wage gap — found that women’s earnings drop significantly after having their first child, while men’s earnings aren’t affected at all. And crucially, several studies in the U.S. and other countries have found that the trajectory of wages for women who don’t have children resembles those of men, whether they have kids or not (although some research has actually suggested that becoming a father can contribute to men’s career success).

This disparity is particularly intense for women of color. Black mothers are paid only 54 cents for every dollar paid to a white father, according to NWLC; for Latina mothers, it’s 46 cents. Low-income women of color are also among the likeliest to have lost their jobs in the current recession. And they’re disproportionately likely to be the child-care workers who are being asked to come back to work, sometimes in unsafe working conditions, for low wages. “We’re in a vicious cycle where we need child care as one of the tools to get women to equal pay, and yet unequal pay is one of the primary reasons that women are pushed into staying home,” Boteach said.

Leaving the workforce, even if it’s just for a year or two, has ripple effects that can follow a woman for the rest of her life, even depressing her earnings in retirement. Finding a new job after a few years on hiatus can be very difficult for mothers, who may be stereotyped as less serious about their careers because they took time off to be with their children. One study from 2007 found that mothers were perceived to be less competent than fathers, and their recommended salaries were also lower.

During this pandemic, you can already see the disproportionate impact taking shape. The unemployment rate for women in April was 16.2 percent, higher than it has been in any month since at least 1948, before dropping to 11.7 percent in June — a percentage point higher than the rate for men (10.6 percent). Even more striking, labor force participation for women dipped to 54.7 percent in April before rising to 56.1 percent last month. Both of those numbers are reminiscent of the rates for women from the 1980s — back when the very notion of women in the workforce was still gaining momentum.6

Wertz has no plans to leave her job — at least for now. “I worked incredibly hard to get to where I am now,” she said. “I essentially paid my way through school with no family support. For years I worked entirely too hard for not enough money.” Already, she worries that she’s perceived differently in the workplace because she’s a mother. “Even if it was just a year, I know how that gap would look on my resume,” she said. “If I had to take that step back, I just don’t know if I’d recover from it.”

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Neil Paine and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

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brokestminimalist · 7 years ago

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Minimize your bills!

We have five bills. Here they are: Utilities, Phone, Internet, Car Insurance, Car Payment. That’s it. Those are the five things we pay every month. How did we achieve this? Partly, we’re just broke as shit and can’t afford any extras. Partly we don’t like extras. Extras take up time we don’t have and money we don’t have. Let’s go over a few common types of bills here and see how you can reduce how much money you are paying to various companies every month.

Rent/Housing payment: We are very fortunate to own our own house. It is paid for. If you do not own a house, paying rent or a house payment is unavoidable. There are arguments to be made in favor of both renting and buying. We like owning our own house because we can do whatever we want with it. Purple light bulbs? Totally. Glitter walls? You can’t stop us, motherfucker! The truth is that there’s not much you can do to reduce your rent or house payment, it’s just going to be there. Make sure to prioritize it over everything else; there’s no point having cable if you’re homeless.

Phone: We consider cell phones a necessity. Chuck out your landline and get a cheap pre-paid cell phone. We favor Boost Mobile but there’s also Virgin Mobile and a wide variety of others. Don’t get yourself locked into a contract, it’s way more expensive and you don’t need upgrades every year. If you don’t smash it or drop it in a toilet your average cell phone can last several years. Right now we have a Samsung Galaxy J3 that we bought in 2016 and it’s still going strong. We pay $30 a month. Even if you are currently stuck in a contract, it’s always worth calling to negotiate. Also eliminate extra stuff like app and ringtone purchases and any bs insurance plans attached to your line.

Cable: No. You do not need cable tv. If you must have shows to watch, look at Netflix or Hulu or Crunchyroll or a dozen other cheap streaming services. You do not need to waste 20 minutes per show seeing commercials; that is time out of your life that you will never get back. You do not need 3000 channels when you can only watch one at a time. Get. Rid. Of. Your. Cable.

Internet: We can say yes to internet because it’s so intertwined into modern society. You need it to fill out job applications, file a claim with your insurance company, to talk to loved ones across the country. In our state you need it to apply for food stamps. You don’t need to go broke for it, though. Find a reasonably priced plan at a moderate speed. Do not let anyone tell you that you need 150mbps to stream movies or play games. 10 is sufficient for SD, 25 for HD. (If you have a 4K device then you need to go find a different blog to read, Scrooge McDuck.) If you can’t afford it, there’s always the library and many fast food restaurants that offer free wifi.

Insurance: Whether it’s health insurance, auto insurance or homeowners insurance, you probably need to prioritize this. We are of the opinion that the young and very healthy can go without it for a few years, but when you hit your 30′s it’s a good idea to start doing the kind of preventive maintenance that comes with a health insurance plan. Auto and homeowners insurance policies vary a lot, so contact your company and see what extras you can cut out to shave a few dollars off your bill. If you drive an old beater, drop the full coverage and just hang onto liability. Your deductible may be more than your car is actually worth. (PS, one cool perk we do recommend is roadside assistance if your insurance company offers it. It’s often 3-5 extra bucks and they will come get you off the side of the road. Worth it.)

Vehicle payment: We can’t wait until our car is paid off. We were very lucky to have been given a car when we were 18 and we drove it until it just wouldn’t go anymore, and then we kept driving it anyway. From 2004 to 2017 we did not have a car payment, just liability insurance and getting the tags renewed once a week. It was beautiful! Right now we still owe about $600 on the used car we bought last year and life is going to be sweet again very soon. Driving for free is a great experience. To minimize this bill, pay extra when you can, put as much into your down payment as you can, and never buy a new vehicle. The subject of minimalist vehicles will get its own post later.

Life Insurance: We know for some folks with kids and grandkids this is a necessity, but uh... frankly there are none of our relatives who deserve to get a ridiculous sum of money in the event of our death. So let the state cremate us and auction our house off to the highest bidder. Whatev.

Utilities: Unless you’ve got a roof made of solar panels (and if you do, we applaud you!) you probably are connected to municipal electricity, gas and water. After rent this is going to be your second priority. You can see our post about conserving electricity and water to reduce this bill as much as you can. You can make a huge difference by doing simple things and most of them are low or no cost!

Cards/Loans/Debt: It’s always worth calling to negotiate interest rates. The bottom line is, you’ll just have to pay these as you can. We’ve been as broke as we can be for the last year or so, so we’ve got a credit card that was charged off because when you don’t have food to eat or heat in your house, you kind of don’t give any fucks about your old Visa card. We’re catching up though, and we’ll pay it. Don’t let yourself default on loans if you can help it, stay in touch with credit card companies and be straightforward with them about what you’re able to do. DON’T take out any new loans or cards.

Misc. Other Stuff: This is stuff like gym memberships and house cleaning service and that kid that mows your grass and walks your dog. You can reduce or eliminate all of these by going “Derp, I’m an adult who can do things for myself!”. Mow your own grass. It’s a great workout. Scrub your own baseboards, you’re burning calories. Walk your own freaking dog. If you’re wondering how you can pay your light bill then you do not need to spend money on things you can do for yourself. Grow a pair and do your own chores.

Childcare: This one is tough, and we admit we don’t know a lot about it. From what we’ve read, swapping childcare with a neighbor or friend is effective if you’ve got someone you trust. Don’t go cheap on this if you have to hire a sitter. The person caring for your child in your absence deserves to be paid well for their services. So if you can’t afford to pay that person what you would expect to get paid for the same amount of work, you need to skip that movie you were going to see and stay home. As far as finding daycare for while you’re at work goes, we will kindly ask our followers to chime in with suggestions.

There are lots of other types of bills that you might have, but take a day to go through your finances and see which ones you can do without or can trim down. Also give our post about Needs vs. Wants a look, maybe it can help you put things in perspective. We know this blog is only tangentially about personal finance, but consider minimalism a tool for every area of life. By reducing the bills you don’t want, you’ll have more to spend on the ones you do.

Links: Seven Common Bills

#minimalbills

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cutsliceddiced · 5 years ago

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New top story from Time: How the Rise of the Working Wife Changed British Society

This post is in partnership with History Today. The article below was originally published at History Today.

The 1950s is remembered as an era of ideal homes and perfect housewives. Yet this decade marked the beginning of a momentous social change: the rise of the working wife and mother.

Poor women had always labored when they needed to earn a crust for their families, often through casual occupations such as charring, baby-minding and taking in lodgers. But in postwar Britain, the proportion of married women in regular paid work grew dramatically: from around one in five in 1951 to nearly half two decades later.

This phenomenon was first glimpsed during the Second World War, when patriotic housewives were recruited for munitions work, and again in the late 1940s, when women were called back into the factory to help the nation’s flagging export industries. “Britain is up against it,” one 1947 poster proclaimed: “Try and free yourself for work, whole-time or part-time. In the next big effort, you can be one of the women who turn the tide of recovery.”

Through the course of the 1950s, such measures became peacetime norms. Early marriage, smaller families and improved healthcare made it possible for mothers to consider a return to the workplace once their children were at school. This marked a significant change from earlier times, when marriage had usually signaled a woman’s permanent withdrawal from paid employment. Sociologists named this emerging pattern the “dual role,” noting how young wives were now working until their first pregnancy, retreating to the home for five or ten years, then re-entering the workforce fit and healthy in early middle age. By the late 1960s, media commentators were convinced that a fundamental shift had taken place: “Not so long ago women were expected to choose either a job or marriage,” a Woman’s Own journalist observed in 1969. “Today the ambitious girl doesn’t see why she can’t have marriage and a career.”

This verdict was optimistic, given the narrow range of jobs available to the returning married woman. Her labor was in greatest demand in low-paid sectors, where women had toiled for decades as factory hands, shop workers, cleaners, cooks and carers. More attractive openings could be found for those with formal qualifications, in nursing, teaching, medicine and social work, all occupations in which single women had previously made a mark. By the 1950s, employers in these fields were beginning to recognize married women’s demands for flexible hours and retraining. Careers in more prestigious professions, such as law, academia, business and the civil service, remained largely the preserve of men.

Nonetheless, these “little jobs,” as they were often called, represented new pleasures for the postwar housewife. Paid work, even of the most routine kind, could offer her a ticket to the world beyond the kitchen and a small slice of financial independence. “You do feel nice when you get your bit of money on a Friday and know that you’ve earned it,” was how one woman in south London put it to a researcher in the mid-1950s. “I used to turn the room around just for something to do,” recalled another, describing her former non-earning self. Many working wives took pride in helping to secure “extras” for their families: a juicier cut of meat, new clothes for the children, even a television or a car. One Swansea housewife spoke of her morning paper round in near euphoric terms: “I meet people, have a chat, hear the news and have a glorious walk … My savings are slowly rising and our family will be able to have a holiday this year.”

Few husbands were willing to relinquish their breadwinner status, but they did recognize the advantages of a second income. “With only one working in the house we wouldn’t be able to get things we wanted and we wouldn’t be able to go on holiday,” explained one 30-year-old welder. A few husbands even lent a hand with cooking and washing up, or put the children to bed when wives worked evening shifts at the factory. “Of course, a husband has to help out at home,” one plumber wrote, “but he’s getting the benefit.”

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“Helping out” did not amount to an equal sharing of housework and childcare. These tasks still fell to mothers. Many of the “little jobs” deemed a good fit for married women in the 1950s were part-time, which enabled wives to attend to their traditional duties alongside earning a supplementary wage. From one perspective, this was an ideal arrangement. Factories offering a choice of shift patterns, unpaid leave during school holidays or regular seasonal work had no shortage of willing recruits. On the other hand, part-timers were usually ineligible for promotion, pensions or pay rises and were the first to be laid off when trade was slack.

Furthermore, the promotion of part-time work as the “natural” domain of wives and mothers gave government and employers little incentive to invest in nurseries or after-school clubs, which would have given women more choice about the kinds of jobs to pursue. Part-time work also let husbands off the hook, presenting little challenge to their pattern of continuous, full-time employment, or to their exemption from most domestic chores.

Despite this, the rise of the working wife and mother proved transformative. She became an ordinary figure in affluent Britain: a resourceful, well-adjusted woman whose earnings allowed her family to enjoy the fruits of a consumer society. Moreover, returning to work after a period of home-making allowed many women to claim some sort of life of their own, beyond marriage and motherhood. The postwar housewife wanted more than her mother’s generation had been able to imagine. These desires presaged the politics of autonomy and self-determination that the Women’s Liberation movement would nurture in the 1970s. Little jobs could have big effects.

Helen McCarthy is author of Double Lives: a History of Working Motherhood (Bloomsbury, 2020).

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

#Time #top stories #IFTTT #news

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ficdirectory · 8 years ago

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Fic’s Fic Recs:

#3 (Rachel, inspirational quotes meme) by chemiglee (1,006 words)

Rating: G

Summary: spec fic for Funny Girl outcome (5.01)

Fic’s Comments: A refreshing possibility written prior to season 5 airing, giving Rachel the time she needs to grow as a performer, but in a sweet, respectful and unexpected way.

***

An Unexpected Goodbye by tarajean621 (914 words)

Rating: T

Summary: Rachel says an unexpected goodbye to something she loves after a medical emergency. Set pre 3x05, “The First Time.”

Fic’s Comments: Rachel’s heartbreak and loss are both poetically and eloquently described in this powerful story. One of my all-time favorites by this author.

***

Blaine the Distracted Tour Guide by alilactree (1,208 words)

Rating: PG

Summary: AU. Blaine, the distracted tour guide, has a penchant for blurting out terrible puns.

Fic’s Comments: Not my usual cup of tea, but Blaine’s characterization here always brings a smile to my face. Try to read it without smiling. I dare you.

***

Carry That Weight by hedgerose (50K+ words)

Rating: NC-17

Summary: AU. When Blaine's friend Susan drags him to an American Idol audition, he's not even trying to get past the first round-- much less into the top ten. And after getting through Disco Week, avoiding the media, and dealing with his very absent parents, Blaine's not sure he even wants to win-- although falling in love might make up for a lot of that. And maybe, just maybe, he can win this thing.

Fic’s Comments: As a longtime fan of American Idol (through Season 8) I always love a good, well-written account of Blaine Anderson competing.

***

Caught In The Storm by tarajean621 (1,402 words)

Rating: M

Summary: The rain had been unrelenting all week. Blaine, their usual chauffer, has his car in the shop. They’d planned to walk to make sure Unique got home okay, but a ride would be even safer. And dryer. Moving the piano inside will only take a few minutes. Allusions to episode 4x19, “Sweet Dreams.” WARNINGS: Violence, drugging of a minor. (Other characters include Sam, Marley & Brad.)

Fic’s Comments: An intense story with unexpected humor, the author does a fabulous job of building this particular scenario and of making it believable. Such a power packed story. I love it.

***

Dancing Shoes by tarajean621 (853 words)

Rating: T

Summary: AU. Mike & several of the New Directions go to great lengths to bring music to a silent world.

Fic’s Comments: I adore Mike as this story’s unexpected unsung hero. Vivid and poignant, the author creates a world completely devoid of music and uses Glee’s familiar characters to show just how vital music is, especially for people who love to sing and dance.

***

Follow Me, I’ll Be Your River by joshbroban (7 chapters)

Rating: NC-17 (not rated, so that’s my approximation)

Summary: Ryder Lynn is having a rough time. Confused about his feelings for Unique and dealing with emotions he's suppressed for five years, he's doing everything he can to hold it together.

Fic’s Comments: An unflinchingly realistic look at coping in the aftermath of sexual abuse. Definitely heed the warnings on this one, though.

***

Food to My Soul by thealmigtytrebleclef (1,039 words)

Rating: G (not rated, so that’s my approximation)

Summary: She’s always done her best.

Fic’s Comments: This is a totally precious story written for Glee Family Fic Week, focused on the Puckerman family. I absolutely love the complexity of the day, how everything wasn’t exactly as Jake wanted, but how eventually, all the pieces fell into place. I don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t read it yet, but if not, you should definitely give this one a chance.

***

Heart’s False Start by Sappho’s Ghost (73,027 words)

Rating: M

Summary: It begins as most things do: with a kiss. / After a break up with Brittany, Santana moves in with Quinn and things spin out of control. Future fic, rated M. Contains graphic depictions of violence.

Fic’s Comments: This is absolutely incredible. My favorite part of this fic was the final chapter (but everything leading up to it is a must-read, for the last chapter to make sense.) I don’t want to give anything away for those who have not read it but know that this author knows how to characterize these women in a way that feels deep, and honest and real. This story does not shy away from the impact of trauma and recovery from it. It remains, I think, one of my most favorite fics in the entirety of the Glee fandom. So powerful.

***

Her Name Is by chemiglee (1,236 words)

Rating: G

Summary: He gives her a name. (Or, the story of how Tina got her name.) Written for Glee Family Fic Week. My headcanon is that Tina has an older brother, since there is a picture of one (I think) in her locker in Diva.

Fic’s Comments: I love this fic because of the strong history Tina is given and how beautifully supporting and loving her family is. She’s in character, even as a baby, which is so impressive.

***

Hunger by tarajean621 (808 words)

Rating: T

Summary: The last few months have sucked, if Sam’s being honest. The motel was okay at first, but he had been looking at it as a temporary thing.

Fic’s Comments: A stark, but not hopeless, look at Sam’s family as they struggle to keep afloat financially. Kindness comes from a friend, when Sam least expects, but very much needs it.

***

Mine, Never Mine by rm (3,214 words)

Rating: M

Summary: The Anderson family is full of secrets, and Blaine’s father isn’t exactly. (This is based on a fandom theory that was circulating pre-“Big Brother,” that Cooper is really Blaine’s father rather than much older brother.)

Fic’s Comments: As the child of very young parents, I was wary when I first read this summary, but decided to give it a chance. I have to say, I am so glad I did. The author handled this theory in a plausible, respectful way, and I really applaud them for the complex storytelling in this. The tiny blurbs at different points in their lives read so effectively and powerfully. Fantastic story. One I recommended directly after reading.

***

Open House by tarajean621 (2,029 words)

Rating: PG

Summary: When Sam comes back from New York, it takes a few hours to locate his family. They aren’t registered at the motel anymore, and he has a moment of panic. (And guilt too. He’d done odd jobs for Mr. Schuester to offset the cost of the trip, so it’s not that. It’s that they depended on what he made in tips delivering pizza, and between final rehearsals and then the trip, he hadn’t been working. And his family isn’t where he left them.)

Fic’s Comments: There is a warmth implicit in this fic that’s almost impossible to communicate unless you read it for yourself. Sam’s father is depicted as loving and firm, and always wanting the best for his family. Mercedes and her family are what one would hope to find in the middle of financial hard times. Loving and open.

***

Perception by tarajean621 (360 words)

Rating: G

Summary: It was basically wishful thinking, the whole Army thing. Allusions to early Season 4.

Fic’s Comments: A beautifully brief look at Finn soul-searching and wanting to connect with his father after being kicked out of the army. The author has this great ability to give Finn this level of depth in very few words that is entirely believable.

***

Quinn, Puck and Beth by tarajean621 (754 words)

Rating: G

Summary: An otherwise untitled glimpse into an AU where Quinn has kept Beth. How she and her family struggle to adjust to life after her car accident in 3x14, “On My Way.

Fic’s Commments: It’s so rare to come upon a fic that addresses positively introducing a child to a parent’s wheelchair, as well as childcare from a chair. For those of us who live each day from a chair, it’s reassuring that fic like this exists that does not depict this type of life change as the end of a character’s world - just something to adapt to.

***

Something Peaceful by joshbroban (6 chapters)

Rating: G

Summary: When Sam Evans is hit by tragedy, he not only begins the process of grieving, but the journey of exploring the faith he’s followed blindly since the day he was born and learning how death has affected the people around him.

Fic’s Comments: This is one of the most deep, profound and quietly strong stories I have ever read. A beautiful portrayal of faith, loss, family and friends. The characterization is excellent - especially the depth and strength given to Joe. But Sam, Tina and Blaine all shine in their own rights. I love the role that The God Squad plays and how it really is that place of acceptance for so many who need it - much like glee club used to be.

***

Welcome to Apartment Life by KillerQueen80 (456 words)

Rating: G

Summary: Blaine is trying to adjust to apartment life in a big city.

Fic’s Comments: A short, sweet, and entertaining story. This one always makes me smile.

#glee fic #fic recs #i wrote this up a while ago #no idea why it's been hanging out in my drafts for so long #go read glee stories #they're great

3 notes · View notes

matildainmotion · 5 years ago

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The Superheroes who might save us: A Call to the Mothers of Parliament.

When I go shopping in the Co-op near our house, when I have reeled the children in from running up and down the aisles and made it to the check-out, I stand, holding their hands and waiting, and then, and only then, I allow myself to glance over at the newspaper rack. I read the headlines. I read them fast, as if I am doing something forbidden – having a smoke, a coke, a coffee. As if I am getting a sugar or caffeine hit. The fact is I am getting a ‘headline hit.’ Then we are at the front of the queue and it is time to buy our groceries and go home, where I do not read the papers, listen to the radio or watch the news. I have learnt that when I engage with the news fully, as many do, I do not know how to carry on with the next simple task in front of me – getting dressed, brushing teeth - and now that I am a mother this is not a good idea. It has never felt like an ideal solution – just to avoid the lot – but it is the best coping strategy I have found.

But every now and then, when I am standing in the Co-op queue, there is a headline that hits me so hard I have to engage. Something like, “Johnson to Ask Queen to Prorogue Parliament,” for example.

I had another blog lined up for September. It was about diversity. It will have to wait. On the whole, in leading Mothers Who Make (MWM), I don’t write about politics in order to honour diversity. MWM is for all mothers regardless of age, race, class, sexuality, (dis)ability, gender identity, religion or political persuasion. However, the truth is, MWM is deeply political, just like mothering. It is not ‘regardless of…’ but rather ‘regard-full’ of it all. It is the very stuff of our exchanges with our children, from the word go, from the first howl and how we respond to it.

It was one of the things that struck me most forcibly after my son was born, how political my new job was. The recommended literature fussed about nappies and naps, purees and poos – things that I heard other mothers both obsess over and scorn as unworthy of true intellectual engagement, but under it all rumbled the profound responsibility with which I had been entrusted and to which no one seemed to be admitting. “What does ‘MP’ stand for?” my son, now 7, asked not long ago. I was tempted to answer, “Mother of Person” for the personal, and specifically the maternal, is political. Here is the Wikipedia definition of ‘politics’:

Politics…involves making decisions that apply to members of a group. It refers to achieving and exercising positions of governance—organized control over a human community.

There I was, 7 years ago, a new mother, thrust into a sudden position of governance, organising control over a brand new human community, otherwise known as a family. Every choice I made – including the ones about nappies and naps – had, it seemed to me, political ramifications. I had to decide how to shape the world, how to interpret it for this new citizen under my governance, what laws to lay down, how best to spend our resources, and of course all this had to take place within the wider context of the country and its government– and how these two governments, at home and at large, aligned or did not, had to be continually negotiated. No wonder I was tired.

Given this, I have for a long time now, felt startlingly radical. Mothers Who Make, early on, gained the strapline of being ‘a quiet revolution.’ One of my favourite comments from an MWM participant (now North London’s MWM facilitator), Zoe Gardner, is about how astonishing she found it that “something as vanilla as breeding” could make her feel so marginal and alternative. Every day can feel like a kind of march, a protest. Out the door we go again, to meet the world, to bump up against its values, often, in my case as a breast-feeder, with a bare boob to boot. And those values frequently feel Victorian: I, and the small, contentious country under my governance, brush up against the attitude that children should be seen and not heard, and ideally not seen either, or only in certain designated child-friendly zones.

So, whilst I don’t engage with the world’s views and news, I also do - I engage with it all the time and therefore when I read a headline like “Johnson to Ask Queen to Prorogue Parliament” it is easy to join in the live news stream – I’m already knee deep in it. Being a mum, bringing up the next generation, involves wading in.

My second child was born in June, 2016. The fatal, famous referendum took place when she was barely two weeks old. The Brexit story has formed the background to her entire life. I’m a Remainer – my father was a refugee from Nazi Germany and I feel more European than British. However, I am not interested in or qualified to add to the vast volume of Brexit-analysis articles. I recognise the truly horrific thing about the last three years is not in fact the leaving of the EU but the level of division and polarisation it has caused. But to shut down debate, to close parliament now….. It is too close to the mechanisms at work in a totalitarian state, reminds me too much of the sly sliding of the story in George Orwell’s Stalinist fable Animal Farm, for me to be able to bag up the groceries and turn away from the papers and their headlines, as I usually manage to do.

We came home from the shops on Wednesday evening and my children had been promised a treat: watching The Incredibles, the movie about a family of superheroes who have to hide their heroic powers because the frightened government has outlawed them. The film’s baddie is a man called ‘Syndrome’ who doesn’t have any super powers but develops a whole load of gadgets that makes it seem like he has. He looks, as it happens, rather like Boris Johnson – his hair is a bit more orange, but otherwise it is a good fit. While the children were watching the movie with their Dad, I went online and signed every petition I could find.

Then it was bedtime. The children, eventually, went to sleep. I did not.

I wondered if I could sneak out the house and make it to the protests in Parliament Square and back before they woke up. But I didn’t. I sat in the bedroom and I went online again. I signed some more petitions. I made my contribution to Gina Miller’s legal fees. I read about the suggestion, from Lloyd Russell-Moyle, that the only way we can stop the suspension of parliament is through a general strike. I went on Facebook. An old friend, Anna Dale, – someone I met through the early days of MWM – had written this above one of the petitions:

“This is a start. What else? Mother's strike, anyone?”

I wrote back:

“I’m in. I have no idea what a mother’s strike would look like but I think it is time we invented it – tonight.”

I spent the rest of that night, and most of the last 3 days and nights wondering what a mother’s strike might look like. I remembered the ancient Greek play, Lysistrata,in which the women, fed up with the never-ending war in which the men are engaged, go on a sex strike – no sex till you sort it out. It worked. I have been craving something this outrageous. I thought of the way in which, growing up near a river, I was afraid of the swans after their signets had hatched – the ferocity of the mother when the safety of her young is at stake.

Back on Facebook, Anna shared with me her ideas for a mother’s strike and I added my own:

-The mothers of the land leave their children to their menfolk and get themselves to Parliament Square to protest, so causing a knock-on effect of chaos as the public work gets disrupted due to newly shouldered childcaring responsibilities.

-We use social media to drown Johnson in the minutiae of our days – we tweet the moment by moment work we do of caring for our children, as he is busy moment by moment fucking up their futures.

-We stage protests in our homes. We make small podiums in our living rooms and then film ourselves and our children making speeches of protest. We get out the paints and we make banners. We put them up in our windows and we put them up online.

Feel free to run with any of these. Any of them could be potent and brilliant. For me, however, none of them quite feel achievable. Despite my passion and fury, despite my sense of the critical importance of this moment, I do not feel able to action these or mobilise the numbers needed in time, or even if I did, I am not sure that it would have enough impact. Why?

I think it is because, as a mother, it is more or less impossible to go on strike. We cannot stop our work. We cannot fold our arms and refuse the naps and the nappies. It is hard to find the time even to write this blog, let alone organise a major national action. The children are here – their needs are loud and immediate. I cannot stop looking after them. We cannot stop caring. It is why what we do, as mothers, is invisible and marginalised because it is fundamental and its impact is incalculable – beyond metrics. Something as vanilla as breeding, as basic as breathing, as radical as loving.

Mothers are both the least and the most powerful people in the land. In this paradox lies the key, I think, in my quest for what a mother’s strike might look like. We have a fantastically ambivalent status. I think of the phrase: ‘Women and children first.’The weakest members of society are put first, in an emergency, in a chivalric act by the strongest and most powerful. But there is another way to frame this. For a time my son was obsessed by the sinking of The Titanic and, in reading the story of that night, I found that the news headlines from over a hundred years ago were ones from which I also could not turn away. Most of the men drowned, whilst most of the women and children got into those precious few lifeboats not because they were weak, but because the future belonged to them - it belonged, at least, to the children, and the women were vital in ensuring they inherited it. (Yes, men can do this too, but allow me to give the women their moment of honour).

We are powerful because the future is in our hands. It is in our arms. We rock it to bed at night. We sing to it. We dress it in the morning. We give it the present, as a present. “Here,” we say. “This is ours now. One day it will be only yours.” We teach and we guide it as best we can. We tell the future when we think it is misbehaving because we desperately, deeply, want the future to be good, for all the love and the care to travel beyond us –life boats sailing out into the years ahead. And so I wonder whether the key to ‘a mother’s strike’ might lie not in disrupting what we do, not in doing it less, or even in doing it loudly, but in quietly doing it more.

One of the articles I have read since Wednesday night was a commentary in The Guardian, entitled, ‘Johnson wants us to feel outrage. Let’s take back control – starting with ourselves.’ I think this is right. Part of my resistance to the news in general is that the papers and media want to get a rise out of me. It makes me think of being a mum to a stroppy, outrageously-behaving child – an almost daily experience of mine.

On my best days (and these, I have to admit, are few) I do not react to the outrageous behaviour of my children with further outrage. I have responded in this way enough times to know it does not go well for anyone. On my best days I hold my ground but I do not dig in my heels. Nor do I march anywhere. I do not protest. I stay calm whilst they do the protesting, the kicking, the screaming, the spitting, the stamping off. I do not give in, but nor do I fight back. I do not threaten. I do not punish them. I do not strike them and I do not go on strike. In fact I do the opposite. I stay right there, more ‘on’ than ever.

As a ‘mother of parliament’ I think this is what I should do, and invite others to do, in response to the pseudo-superhero that is Boris Johnson – a man with lots of showy gadgets, but no real power. I should be how I am on my best days as a mother. I should stand in the centre of my invisible but very real power as a caretaker of the future. Hold my ground, like a swan in front of her signets – not yet attacking, but showing up with full, fierce presence.

I think mothers are like The Incredibles. They have incredible power, but they have to lead ordinary lives. They have to hide the fact that they are super heroes. But they are.

Imagine them all - the incredible mothers of the land, holding the children, and quietly surrounding Westminster.

We cannot necessarily drop our lives, stop our care, make it to Parliament Square but we can still hold this ground. This is the latest image I have, and I am inviting you to help me build it - a mother’s strike which requires only that you strike a match.

Go, light a candle for your children, do it casually or reverentially. It need not be holy. Or only in the way that our thousand prosaic, daily acts of care are holy. It is just a candle. I like candles. My children love them- blowing them out, relighting them, picking the cooled wax off the kitchen table. Light a candle for each child, for the care of them and their future. A night light, a broken birthday candle from the bottom of the drawer, or a pristine dinner candle – any candle will do. Take a photo of it, of the candles, of the future you are holding. And put this online. Use this hashtag: #motherstrike. Be quietly, fiercely present to the outrageous behaviour of the government.

Maybe we can surround Westminster with our candles. And it doesn’t matter how many or how few of us do this because this is not about metrics (though, hey, it would be cool if it spread far and wide). For regular striking to have an impact it depends on enough people doing it. But instead of striking we will be staying. We will be being more present, quietly more ‘on’, than ever, letting our invisible, incredible power be known, those of us who hold the future in our arms.

Before I go and light my candles, here is one other thing you can do –

Next Friday, Improbable, the theatre company with whom I work, will be Opening Space. Children will be welcome. This event, will also, in its own way, be candlelit, in the sense that it is an invitation to turn up and turn on your presence, rather than deny it, to work beyond your outrage and find a creative response. It’s free. Go here to book your place: https://www.devotedanddisgruntled.com

And, if you are part of the MWM network and want a question for the month, here it is:

How, as a mother and a maker, do you wish to engage with the wider world? What do you do? What do you notdo? What do you want the future to look like and how can you help make it so?

Now, go find the matches, and the night lights– strike your match and share it, let it be known that you are here: #motherstrike

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nancydhooper · 6 years ago

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It’s Not Just Roe: How the Future Supreme Court Could Gut Abortion Rights

A new Supreme Court could effectively decimate women’s access to abortion, even without overturning Roe outright.

Now that President Donald Trump has nominated Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, it will be up to the Senate to fully vet him so that the American people can determine whether he will uphold the basic civil rights and liberties relied on by everyone in this country. This is particularly true when it comes to abortion rights, where Kavanaugh’s prior opinions on the subject, coupled with the fact that Donald Trump vowed to only nominate justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, give rise to serious concern about women’s continued ability to access abortion if Kavanaugh is confirmed.

The ACLU as a matter of policy does not endorse or oppose nominees to the Supreme Court. But we do think it’s essential, given Trump’s promise, that any nominee is questioned extensively and directly about their commitment to the 45-year-old precedent of Roe v. Wade.

Some background is in order. Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in all 50 states by holding that politicians cannot constitutionally ban abortion — except after the point in pregnancy at which the fetus could survive outside the woman’s body. The 1973 decision nullified abortion bans across the country, but it provided imperfect protection for abortion access. Shortly after the decision, the Supreme Court held that politicians may exclude abortion coverage from Medicaid and may require parental or judicial involvement in a minor’s abortion decision. Those rulings cruelly placed abortion out of reach for many people — especially low-income women and, disproportionately, women of color.

Then, in 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court opened the door to myriad additional restrictions on abortion access. In that decision, the court reaffirmed the core holding of Roe — that politicians cannot ban abortion — but ruled that states may restrict abortion as long as those restrictions do not impose an “undue burden” on a woman’s access.

And restrict it they did: Since 2011, politicians have quietly passed more than 400 abortion restrictions. These include laws that shut down all or most of the clinics in a state under the guise of promoting women’s health. Where possible, women, medical providers, and advocates have challenged these laws — and in many cases, lower courts weighed in on their side. In a critical decision, so did the Supreme Court.

In Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the Supreme Court in 2016 struck down two such laws out of Texas: one law that banned abortion unless the physician had admitting privileges at a local hospital, and another that required that physicians perform the procedure in a mini-hospital called an ambulatory surgical center. The five-justice majority, which included Justice Kennedy, relied on the undue burden standard articulated in Casey and ruled that these restrictions were an unconstitutional undue burden because they did nothing to safeguard patient health while shutting down three-quarters of the clinics in the state.

Despite that decision, states across the country continue to pass and defend laws that fail the standard articulated in Roe, Casey, and Whole Woman’s Health. Arkansas and Missouri, for example, are defending laws indistinguishable from the Texas laws the Supreme Court struck down in 2016. But legal advocates have been able to use the Whole Woman’s Health decision to challenge other restrictions, which federal courts have struck down in multiple states.

Where does that leave us today?

If the Senate confirms a Supreme Court nominee who shifts the balance on the court, and the court overturns Roe v. Wade, many states will ban abortion. By some counts, almost half the states would do so. Seventeen states already have laws on the books to accomplish this swiftly if the Supreme Court overturns Roe.

We would then have a legal patchwork in which large swaths of the South and Midwest lack abortion access, with no recourse to federal courts. Certain state constitutions would provide protections, as we saw in Iowa, where the state Supreme Court just relied on the state constitution to block a ban on abortion starting at six weeks of pregnancy. But in most of the states where politicians seek to end abortion access, such state constitutional protections are the exception.

Congress, too, could ban abortion. If that happened, we would not have a “patchwork” of access: A federal ban would end abortion throughout the nation, and there is nothing states could do to make the practice legal within their borders. While there are not currently enough votes in Congress to ban abortion nationwide, only time will tell who goes to Washington in 2018, 2020, and beyond.

But a new Supreme Court Justice could effectively decimate women’s access to abortion, even without overturning Roe outright. A new Supreme Court could uphold nearly unlimited state restrictions — including the kind of clinic shut-down laws from Texas that the court struck down in 2016. In upholding them, the court could say that it is simply applying the longstanding undue burden standard but deferring to legislative determinations of what is medically justified. In that way, the court would end abortion within the states that pass them — as surely as if the court had overturned Roe and allowed politicians to ban abortion explicitly.

In seven states, there is just a single women’s health center left providing abortion care. The only thing stopping politicians in those states from shuttering those clinics with faux health regulations is the federal judiciary, and if the balance on the Supreme Court shifts against abortion rights, there will be nothing stopping them.

One need look no farther than Texas to understand the staggering impact of this scenario. In 2015, politicians’ draconian, pretend health restrictions shuttered more than half the state’s clinics. Women had to wait weeks for an appointment, drive hundreds of miles or to another state, take more days off work, lose income, find childcare, and arrange and pay for transportation. For many, the process of obtaining safe and legal health care became an onerous, grueling feat — or just flat-out impossible.

Overturning Roe would be catastrophic, but it is not the only scenario in which politicians would be able to shut down abortion care. The court can give them back the power to do so by simply upholding whatever obstacles they throw in a woman’s path.

Brett Kavanaugh and the case of Jane Doe

There is cause for concern that Judge Kavanaugh could do just that. President Trump promised to select justices who would overturn Roe, so even if he did not directly ask Kavanaugh that question, his selection presumably means that the president has reason to believe he would be open to doing so.

Moreover, in the one case Kavanaugh has decided involving abortion, he vacated an order directing that a young woman be allowed to access abortion while in government custody. The ACLU represents Jane Doe, a 17-year-old undocumented woman who came to this country without her parents, was detained by the federal government, and was living in a shelter. While in federal custody, she found out she was pregnant and requested an abortion, but the Trump administration refused to allow her to have one.

After she had been delayed several weeks, a federal court ordered the administration to allow her to get the procedure. The administration appealed and Judge Kavanaugh wrote an opinion that allowed the government to continue to block her from having an abortion for 11 days while the government continued their weeks-long search for a sponsor to whom she could be released (at which point she could get the abortion while no longer in government custody). If no sponsor was approved by that point, Judge Kavanaugh ruled that Jane Doe could go back to the lower court to ask the court to re-enter the order directing the government to allow her to access abortion, but he indicated that that decision could be appealed, further delaying her abortion.

In short, he was willing to tolerate weeks of delay where a woman had decided to obtain an abortion, which pushed her further into her pregnancy against her will. The full panel of the D.C. Circuit quickly reversed Judge Kavanaugh’s opinion, and Jane Doe was able to obtain her abortion.

Given this history and Trump’s promise, it’s imperative that senators press Brett Kavanaugh on whether he intends to protect a woman’s right to real access to abortion. If they don’t do their job, the impact could well be dire, and marginalized communities will pay the steepest price.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247012 https://www.aclu.org/blog/reproductive-freedom/abortion/its-not-just-roe-how-future-supreme-court-could-gut-abortion via http://www.rssmix.com/

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100wordanime · 8 years ago

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Overview:

This one is kind of hard to explain without spoilers but I will avoid the major revelations as much as possible. Essentially we are following Kobato who has limited memories but has arrived in the town with Ioryogi (who looks like a stuffed toy) and she has a mission. Essentially she has to fill a jar with shiny things and she does this by healing the hearts of those around her. Later we learn there is a time limit as to how long she can take to fill it the jar. Meanwhile, Kobato gets a job at a childcare/kindergarten and slowly grows closer to the children and the others working there. This anime also got a spot on my Top 5 Christmas Focussed Episodes list.

Review:

This anime is all about sweetness and light and breaking your heart so if that isn’t appealing you should probably move on. While there is a supernatural element at play this anime all boils down to human emotions and experiencing them and learning from them. While most episodes fall into the Kobato finds someone who has a problem and by the end she’s solved said problem and left them smiling, the ongoing story of Kobato’s quest to have an unnamed wish fulfilled is never forgotten as Ioryogi steadily works to keep both Kobato and the audience on track with what the real story is supposed to be.

And that’s probably how Kobato gets away with being so ridiculously sweet early on. There isn’t much happening in the story in the first half. She gets a job, she meets people, she says naive things, she sings a lot, and she occasionally manages to help out in situations. If that was all there was to this story, some people would still enjoy it as a nice slice of life. But between Ioryogi and Fujimoto we realise not everything in this anime is sweetness and light.

Ioryogi knows a lot more about what is going on with Kobato and the wish than he is intent on letting on. At times the audience are given some insight into what those secrets are as Ioryogi occasionally leaves Kobato’s side to visit his ‘friends’ and we learn about his past. As you would expect from CLAMP, this backstory is full of magic and lore and while we never learn all of the details, the picture it paints is pretty vivid (and part of me wonders why we didn’t get to see that story instead, though perhaps the imagining of what happened is greater than the viewing would be). This darker side to the story lets us know early on we’re dealing with a tragic tale and it gives us just enough to really cut through that sickly sweet tone that Kobato herself keeps throwing off.

The other reason this show doesn’t become overly adorable is Fujimoto. He is a very angry young man and of course bullies Kobato fairly mercilessly for being useless (which given she has no memories and other than singing can’t really do anything is probably a fair call). Of course Fujimoto is actually a great guy under it all and Kobato is going to become infatuated, hence the Christmas episode with the potential love triangle, but Fujimoto injects some very much needed rancour into what the early episodes.

For fans of Tsubasa Chronicles there’s also a small cameo from some of our favourite inter-dimensional travellers during one of the episodes.

Other points of interest include Kobato’s outfits. She has one outfit for each season so it is very easy to keep track of time and how long she’s been there and how long she has left. The time limit is literally the only thing driving any sense of haste in this story as Kobato herself is completely unable to really care about time passing. As Ioryogi becomes desperate, Kobato all but throws off her duty to fill the jar to go on a personal mission to save Fujimoto and at that point most of the pieces of the puzzle as to what is going on click but the final revelations in the last couple of episodes will still break your heart and then slowly help you piece it back together.

There’s an array of interesting side and supporting characters and some of these add much needed humour and human interactions. The whole kindergarten getting shut down storyline is necessary though seems really dragged out at times and yet still manages to turn itself around into something sweet.

That’s really the recurring theme. Things don’t really end they just get new and different beginnings. It fits with the overall tone of the anime and makes the ending a little easier to take. And it’s a theme that is interwoven through almost every plot and subplot in this story so there is a cohesion to this show that is fairly rare in anime.

Anyway, this isn’t fast moving, it isn’t overly exciting, and the emotions it hits you with are clearly telegraphed from a mile away but it is very effective and it is some good entertainment for when you just want the world to be a little bit nicer (first half) or when you’d like a good cry (second half). I would recommend this anime but I know that it won’t be for everyone and Kobato as a blank slate protagonist (particularly in the early episodes) is certainly not going to win everyone’s hearts no matter how sweet she is.

If you’ve watch Kobato let me know what you thought of it.

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Karandi James.

Review of Kobato - girl with no memories spreads happiness. #anime Overview: This one is kind of hard to explain without spoilers but I will avoid the major revelations as much as possible.

#anime #Clamp #fantasy #Fujimoto #Ioryogi #Kobato #review #series

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