As the centennial of International Women’s Day is celebrated, there is cause for rejoicing and for concern.
Egyptian Women in Tahrir Square
Foremost among the jubilant faces in Tahrir Square were the women of Egypt, and their trilling ululations of triumph filled the airwaves when the people’s revolt toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak. Elsewhere in the belt of revolution, women stepped forward to claim their place as spokespersons of democracy and a more equitable distribution of wealth in their socieities. Younger women played serious roles in the cyber-revolt across the Middle East. Dare we hope that their long-repressed power will exert a beneficial influence in these lands where women have long been second-class citizens?
But while there is reason to hope, there is reason to worry too. While waves of democratic demands sweep across North Africa and the Mideast, rights that women have come to take for granted in the last generation are under attack here in the U.S. “Conservative Republicans” (i.e., social radicals in the pay of huge corporate interests) were swept into power in the November elections, under the banner of the astroturf Tea Party, and they have been busily doing their masters’ bidding: untying all corners of the social safety net, especially those that pertain to reproductive rights and women’s health services. Just as Wis. Gov. Scott Walker has used his state’s budgetary impasse as an excuse for union busting and tax breaks to the wealthiest 2% — just as Florida’s Tea Bagger governor proposes gutting $1.7B from his state’s public education (and hypocritically restoring $1.6B of it in upper-crust tax cuts) — right-wing politicians are busily undermining health programs that help women.
Right-wing kooks protest against Women's Rights
Just for instance, there’s the complete defunding of all Title X programs in the House-passed budget bill. This would zero out money for women’s health (including birth control and family planning; making Planned Parenthood go away). My mother used to say in the 1960s that anti-abortion and anti-sex ed laws were a way of oppressing women, keeping them tied down with large numbers of children, and often without any support from their one-time sex partners. This is clearly so. Women with multiple young children, mired in poverty and substandard jobs, can less frequently get out to protest their lot in life.
Also on the block in the House budget are prenatal care, women’s and children’s nutritional assistance, job training and college tuition assistance. All this while no sacrifice whatever is required from Big Defense. Au contraire, our two endless wars are funded at $6B per month. The House measure not only increases military spending but adds further tax breaks for the wealthiest, while imposing the greatest burden on those who can least bear it — the poor and unemployed, predominantly women. It’s called balancing the budget on the backs of the poor. Except that it’s not even balancing the budget — merely stealing programs from the poor and delivering the cash up to the obscenely wealthy.
Yet more extreme measures that will still require much money and effort to defeat include the “Let the Women Die Act,” which allows public hospitals to let a pregnant woman die rather than perform a life-saving abortion, and the bill known as “Stupak on Steroids,” which permanently outlaws public funding for abortion care and imposes tax penalties on companies and employees whose insurance covers abortion.
It is time to marshal the forces of progressivism to eliminate these crude measures of oppression one by one through a vigorous campaign of letters and phone calls to your legislators; op-ed pieces in papers in blogs; and cyber-lobbying to recruit more people in the effort. We must have the satisfaction of remembering rights successfully defended when we look back at the centennial of IWD — not the shame of knowing we are going backward on women’s and workers’ issues while the rest of the world surges forward.
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