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For the week of 8 October 2006

© Janus Adams 2006

“Where in the world is it better to be a woman than in the United States?” asked Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Tx) at the National Book Fair. It was a rhetorical question meant to rally the troops and get out the vote for her book, “American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country.”

While talk of women may be all the fashion, how has it changed the fabric of our lives?

From the Bloomer girls who took the first radical strides towards women’s liberation, we’d have to wait for the Flappers to kick up their heels in celebration. In between, there’d been movement-thwarting corsets and the “hobble skirt,” allegedly inspired by the first American woman to join the Wright Brothers in flight. To keep her voluminous skirts from billowing skyward, she anchored the fabric with a rope just below her knees. Just as the Wright Brothers idea took off, so did the Hobble Skirt; “breaking the bonds of earth” for men while placing restraints on the movement of women – physically and politically. It was the dark before the dawn of a new age.

A movement that had begun with the first American Women’s Rights Convention of 1848 would yield passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the constitution in 1920 and women’s suffrage.

After one man’s call to his mother just before casting the deciding vote for passage in the Tennessee state legislature, and 150 years spent ignoring Abigail Adams’ call to her husband and Founding Father, John, to “remember the ladies,” it was official: women could vote. Victory.

Where, indeed, would one rather be a woman that here? Well, in this election season, according to those who track and promote women’s leadership, there are 68 better places to be than the United States. This year alone has brought the inaugurations of Michelle Bachele, the first female president of Chile, and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia, the first female president on the African continent. These nations moving forward while the United States debates its “readiness.”

Our nation’s image vs. our reality; it’s a contradiction as old as the quest.

On October 8, 1920, the International Congress of Women met in Memphis, heart of the state that had brought to victory the seventy-two-year fight for suffrage and self-respect that was the women’s voting rights movement.

With delegates in a festive mood, it was left to Palmer Institute founder, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, to put the moment in context. Millions of women of color, along with their men, would still be denied the vote in most southern states – and candidates worthy of their fledgling votes in the North. Challenging her fellow “Christian women” to make of their faith a fact, Brown detailed everyday acts of sanctioned violence by Whites on Blacks – especially the nation’s Achilles heel, lynching.

The next year, true to her word and her challenge, a relentless Brown continued the good fight by suing the Pullman Company. She had been forced to ride a Jim Crow car despite her first-class ticket. Her lawyer sued for $3,000; the company offered $200. She would settle for no less than $1,500, asserted Brown. Even threats by benefactors to abandon support for her school did not sway her. To be so deterred would be to lose more than the suit. As she wrote her attorney, “I am willing to become a martyr for Negro womanhood in this instance and give up my chance of holding, as friends, people who would withdraw because of my attitude.... A few of us must be sacrificed perhaps in order to get a step further.”

In good conscience, how many more women must be sacrificed – “his”-torically corseted and hobbled – before women not only have the vote but the 50% representation that is our due?

One month before Election Day, here’s some fuel for thought:

• Since the first congress of 1789, only 2% of the members have been women.
• Of the nine Supreme Court justices only one is a woman.
• Of 180 nations worldwide, only eleven are led by a woman president or prime minister.

For more information on women in political leadership, contact the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics on the Rutgers University campus by phone at (732) 932-9384; or online at: http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu

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