22 years ago: A massacre in Montréal

Late in the afternoon of December 6 1989 the man, armed with a rifle and a knife, walked into one of the classrooms at the École Polytechnique engineering school (Université de Montréal.)^[1] He ordered the (approximately forty to forty-five) men to one side of the room and the nine women to the other. When the students did not immediately respond to his demand he fired a shot into the ceiling. Then he ordered the men to leave the room. The man told the remaining women that they were "une gang de féministes" and said "J'haïs les féministes [I hate feminists]."

The man then shot all nine of the women, six fatally. Exiting the classroom the man went up and down the halls of the École Polytechnique demanding "I want women." He went in and out of rooms, he went into the cafeteria and he shot one woman through the closed and locked door of her office. When the man heard one of the women he had shot crying for help he returned to where she was lying took out his knife and stabbed her to death.

The man injured ten women, four men and killed fourteen women.

Finally, the man shot himself

The initial response of the Canadian public was horror and anger. Why did this happen, people asked. And others answered, Why are you so surprised that something like this finally happened? The Montréal massacre (as the event became known) seemed emblematic to many of the endemic levels of misogyny in much of Canadian life. Women came forward with stories of the verbal (and sometimes physical) brutality in Canadian universities in general and engineering schools in particular.

The man had left behind him notes and letters that indicated that he believed that the only reason he had not been accepted into engineering school was because open slots were being taken by women. Yet even with the statements he made and the writings he left behind there was a backlash against seeing the man's actions as anti-feminist. Some who resisted that interpretation looked for some clue in the man's childhood. Others framed any emphasis on societal misogyny as anti-male. Barbara Frum (famous in her own right as a television journalist in Canada and, yes, the mother of that David Frum) claimed that to say that the man's actions were a hate crime was to "diminish" their horror. Yes, Barbara Frum argued that it would diminish the death of fourteen women if we were to acknowledge that they had died because they were women.

The following summer I sat in a science class at a different university and listened to the (male) Professor apologize that both his Teaching Assistants were women "they make us give places to women these days" he explained. I can't remember the rest of the lecture that day. I stayed after class and approached the Professor, "don't you think it is a bad idea to complain about being forced to give assistantships to women after what happened in Montréal last year?" I asked. "Typical woman," he answered, "over reacting to everything."

As I left the classroom I noticed another student had also remained behind--a sad looking woman. We made eye contact as I passed her, "thank you," she said, "I don't think you were over reacting at all."

In memory of my fourteen sisters:

• Annie St-Arneault
• Annie Turcotte
• Anne-Marie Edward
• Anne-Marie Lemay
• Barbara Daigneault
• Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz
• Geneviève Bergeron
• Hélène Colgan
• Maryse Laganière
• Maryse Leclair
• Maud Haviernick
• Michèle Richard
• Nathalie Croteau
• Sonia Pelletier

---

^[1] For those who don't know the details of the Montréal Massacre Wikipedia is a good place to start.↩

100 years ago today: What's in a name?

We can tell much about a society by examining the words that they use (and don't use) and how they use them. For example, consider, this short headline on the front page of the November 24 1911 evening edition of The World (New York): THREE YEARS FOR AUTOIST GUILTY OF MANSLAUGHTER.

First, the word "driver" usually means "the person who drives that means of transport most common in society." Thus in this article WOMAN FOUGHT MOB OF 2,000 TO ARREST DRIVER on page 12 of the same edition of The World the driver the woman fought to arrest a man who was kicking the horse drawing his cart. Today the word "driver" will generally be understood to mean "person who drives a car." If the vehicle in question is not an automobile then that fact will be clearly indicated in the text. ("The driver of the tractor was not injured in the crash.")

In the America of 1911 automobiles were by no means rare but were still not the most common means of transportation for most people. If the headline had read THREE YEARS FOR DRIVER GUILTY OF MANSLAUGHTER it would not be clear to the reader of the time what type of vehicle had been involved in the accident. Because the word "driver" left ambiguity as to the type of vehicle involved writers used a number of words, such as autoist and automobilist.

Reading the newspapers of 1911 one soon realizes not only that automobiles were comparatively new and uncommon things but also they were viewed with alarm and concern by much of the population. Often the wording of the article implied/suggested either intentionalilty on the part of the automobile or that these machines were inherently difficult to control and therefore always dangerous. Often people are identified as being in the vehicle or riding it but there is no indication as to who (if anyone) was actually driving it.

• FIRE CHIEF HURLED FROM HIS SPEEDING AUTO BY COLLISION / On Way to Blaze Langdon of Brooklyn and Chauffeur Are Tossed Over Fence (The Evening World November 24 1911 p. 3)
  
• "While returning from visiting a patient the automobile in which Dr. Claggett and Lew Ferguson were riding became unmanageable and the two were violently thrown out when the machine turned turtle" AUTO TURNS, TWO ARE HURT (The Norfolk Weekly News Journal July 28 1911, page 1)
  
• "According to bystanders the automobile, coming along Third street and trying to turn north into Broadway, did not turn sharply enough and ran into the car, which was going along Broadway." WOMEN INJURED IN AUTOMOBILE CRASH / Mother and Daughter Thrown From Machine That Collides With Streetcar (The San Francisco Call April 7 1911, p. 11)
  

Second, let's think about the word "manslaughter." As I wrote in my post yesterday (Questions of Personhood) even after gaining the vote, women still were not able to exercise the same rights and privileges of citizenship as did enfranchised men. Language was used in ingenious and slippery ways by those trying to find reasons why not to allow women to do (or not do) various things.

It had long been accepted that the "people" whose rights were protected in the 1st Amendment to the Constitution were both men and women. Legal figures did not argue that the 4th amendment's protection of "The right of the people to be secure in their persons" did not extend to women. When the law said that "no man shall kill" or "no man should steal" or "no man should speed" or "no person shall kill" or "no persons shall steal" or "no person shall speed" then it was understood that those restrictions extended to women.

However, when the law said "all persons may" or "all men may" then prevailing social/legal opinion as to whether women had the same rights as men depended on whether that action was one traditionally accepted as appropriate for women. A good example of this was the shocked responses to Mrs. Craig Biddle's decision to smoke in public. The problem wasn't that a person was smoking in public since men were allowed to do so. The problem was that a woman was exercising a privilege that had traditionally been enjoyed only by men. As I wrote in an earlier post, When Smoking is a Civil Right, attempts were made to restrict only the rights of women to smoke in public while continuing to allow men to do so.

In 1911 the exact meaning of the word "man" in legal documents seemed to vary on the basis of whether the right, privilege or protection undermined or supported the status quo. There were still many who wished to accord some of the rights and privileges accorded to "men" only to male human beings. And if you read the news in 2011 you will find that there are still many people attempting to do the same.

100 years ago today: Questions of personhood

Winning full rights in society isn't a matter of battlefield set pieces--it is like taking a city one street and one house at a time.

One might think that the women of California having earlier in the year won the right to vote would have then been automatically accorded all the rights and privileges enjoyed by those who had already been enfranchised. This was not the case. Watching women who had already won the right to vote then have to separately struggle for the right to do things such serve on a jury highlights the degree to which women had not been treated as second class citizens because they didn't have the right to vote but rather had been denied the right to vote because it served the powers that be to treat them as second class citizens.

Case in point--the article JURY SERVICE ONLY FOR MEN, DECLARES WEBB / Attorney General Gives Informal Opinion on Present Law of California on the front page of The San Francisco Call November 23 1911:

Jury service is not a political right, he [Webb] said. "It is a duty incident to citizenship. It is in the nature of a burden which may by law be cast upon all or certain citizens. It is a judicial service, the performance of which is enjoined by law upon some citizens and which other citizens are debarred from performing because they do not possess the qualification which the law prescribed for those by whom this service shall be performed.

Webb was being disingenuous at best. Serving on a jury is not only a duty it is a right. First, if only a specific subgroup of society is able to serve on juries then only their perspective on the law will be reflected. Second, if women are barred from sitting on juries it will have a substantial impact on their ability to function as lawyers and judges. Third, if women are barred from juries it will have a substantial impact on their ability to run for and win any political position that involves the courts or the law. Even were it true that individual women were statistically more likely to suffer from particular impediments that would stand in the way of serving as jurors there was already in place a way of examining all jurors before selecting them to hear a case. Just as some men were found unfit (in general or for the purposes of a particular case) to be jurors so could unfit women be dismissed from jury duty.

The Supreme Court of the United States had ruled unconstitutional state laws that debarred men from sitting on juries on the basis of their race and yet specifically allowed that citizens of all races could be debarred from juries on the basis of their gender. Given the wording of the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

and the words of the ruling in U.S. Supreme Court Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303 (1879)

The very fact that colored people are singled out and expressly denied by a statute all right to participate in the administration of the law as jurors because of their color, though they are citizens and may be in other respects fully qualified, is practically a brand upon them affixed by the law, an assertion of their inferiority, and a stimulant to that race prejudice which is an impediment to securing to individuals of the race that equal justice which the law aims to secure to all others.

Reading the opinions in that (and similar) cases one is forced to conclude that the court did not consider women to be, in truth persons.

In the words of Burnita Shelton Matthew, from "The Woman Juror" WOMEN LAWYERS' JOURNAL Vol. 15, No. 2 (January 1927)

Since the adoption of woman suffrage, women have arrived, so to speak, and are demanding the why and wherefore of their exclusion from jury service. Evidently they are not satisfied with the reasoning of the great English jurist, Sir William Blackstone. He held that the common law requires jurors to be free and trustworthy "human beings," and that while the term "human beings" means man and women, the female is, however, excluded on account of the defect of sex. If it be, as Blackstone says, a "defect of sex" that bars women from the jury box, the women claim that the defect lies in the masculine, not the feminine ranks. Anyway, in these modern days, women always take what Blackstone said with a grain of salt. They remember that when expounding the common law – a law which actually bristled with injustices to womankind, and which even permitted a man to beat his wife, Blackstone remarked that under it, a female is "so great a favorite."

As women are dissatisfied with Blackstone’s reasoning, so they are dissatisfied with the reasoning of the United States Supreme Court. That court has decided that a state can not bar colored men from jury service because the debarment would brand them as an inferior class of citizens, and deprive them of the equal protection of the law which is guaranteed by the National Constitution. Since the Constitution guarantees that protection to persons and not merely to negroes, that doctrine should apply to women as well. However, with the curious ability which judges of the male persuasion have manifested to regard women as persons at one time, and not as persons at another, the court in this case said that certain restrictions might legally be put upon jury service – such as limiting it to males!

I will write more about court cases that specifically address that question the personhood of women in a future post.

100 years ago today: One of these things is not like the other

Headlines on the front page of November 10 1911 issue of The San Francisco Call (California) [NOTE: Like many newspapers of the day The Call used multiple stacked headlines for many articles. Where there are more than two headlines in the original not all of the "lesser" headline are included below. The original capitalizations/spellings have been retained where possible. In a few cases the words are "best guesses" due to the condition of the scanned newspapers]:

• REBELS FALL BACK FROM NANKING LEAVING 1,000 DEAD / Manchu Dynasty in Last Desperate Stand Holds but Two Strategic Points
• ROLPH BEGINS HIS TASK PLANS LAID TO BUILD UP CITY / SUPERVISORS TO ORGANIZE PRIOR TO NEW REGIME
• TWO MEN ARE MISSING AFTER GAS EXPLOSION / Others Are Seriously Burned by Fire Which Swept Hunters Point Drydock
• PRINCE APPLAUDS MINISTER'S CRITICS / Von Bethmann-Holweg Defends Morocco-Congo Pact in Reichstag
• WOMAN SUSPECTED OF SLAYING THREE / Chicago Has a New Chain of Deaths Resembling the Vermilya Case
• MRS. CRAIG BIDDLE SMOKES IN PUBLIC / Philadelphia Society Leader Puffs "Cigawette" in Believue=Stratford Restaurant
• THOUSANDS HIDDEN BY WOMAN FOUND / Cobwebbed Corners in House Where She Died Yield Small Fortune
• MAN SCARED DUMB BY "COP'S" GREETING / Chicagoan Had to Get" Doctor to Find Lost Voice
• "GOLDEN RULE" CHIEF ORDERED ON DUTY / Doctor Certifies Kohler's Physical Condition. Is "Good"
• ALLEGED RUSSIAN ANARCHIST JAILED / Teofil Klempke Held at San Luis Obispo as Terrorist
• MAETERLINCK GIVEN 1911 NOBEL PRIZE / Noted (Belgian Author Wins Award for Literature
• HUSBAND SOLD WIFE FOR CENT AND HALF / Admits Deal With Former Convict; Calls It a Jest
• TARKINGTON IS SUED FOR $10,000 DAMAGES / Author in Europe When Chauffeur Ran Down Man
• PARSON AND BROTHER LOCKED UP AS SPIES / Italians Arrested Ohio Citizens on Sightseeing Tour

All save one are about foreign affairs, crimes, actions of public officials or institutions. Save one. Mrs. Craig Biddle was in the news for having broken the norms for the performance of social place. Since she was wealthy and a member of "society" and since her actions took place in an expensive, although public, venue she was stared at rather than being hounded, arrested or physically chastised.

Mrs. Biddle's actions took were in a place considered "public" and therefore her defiance of the public norms of gender performance were seen by the editors of the time as newsworthy. Her actions were particularly troublesome to the behavioural norms of the time because she was wealthy and well connected. If poor woman, women of colour, women who were immigrants or the children of immigrants, violated the social norms then their acts were understood and reported as a commentary of the shortcomings of the women in question. When a women as well educated, wealthy and well versed in social norms acted as did Mrs. Biddle then the social norm, as much as the woman, was in danger of being held up for examination and criticism.

For those who are imagining that both the write-up of this article and the choice to put it on the front page is due to the fact that the newspaper in question is the product of a small town and produced by people who are at best part time newspaper writers and editors that is most certainly not the case. Not only is San Francisco at this point in time a fairly large city, this is not a local story. Mrs. Biddle's act took place in Philadelphia and the story in the local Philadelphia paper was picked up and distributed nationally. For example, you can find a similar headline SOCIETY STIRRED AS MRS. BIDDLE SMOKES IN PUBLIC / Philadelphia's Social Mentor Daintily Puffs Cigarette in Fashionable Restaurant in The Evening World (New York, page 21) on the same date. This write up on page 37 of the December 23 1911 issue of Godwin's Weekly (Salt Lake City, Utah) gives some sense of how seriously people were taking Mrs. Biddle's actions:

The important thing to remember is that in 1911 women still did not have the right to vote in much of the United States. They could not sit on juries. They had limited access to, and rights in, the public sphere. We might now look back and laugh off Mrs. Biddle's actions as silly and even dangerous to her health. And Mrs. Biddle may have chosen to smoke in a public place simply to demonstrate her social prominence. Yet in a way Mrs. Biddle was a pioneer of women's rights to the full enjoyment of citizenship just as were women who were campaigning to extend suffrage to women as well as men.

Women's Rights and the Decline of Democracy, Part Four

Right now, in the United States, there are still places where people are being told that they have to ride at the back of the bus.
See:
City Human Rights Commission To Examine Sex-Segregated Bus Line

A driver observed and interviewed by The New York World did not intervene when a woman accompanying this reporter was forced to move to the back of the bus. The New York Post subsequently sent its own reporter, who was told by the driver, as well as passengers, that the front of the bus was reserved for men.

Women ride in back on sex-segregated Brooklyn bus line

The B110 bus travels between Williamsburg and Borough Park in Brooklyn. It is open to the public, and has a route number and tall blue bus stop signs like any other city bus. But the B110 operates according to its own distinct rules. The bus line is run by a private company and serves the Hasidic communities of the two neighborhoods. To avoid physical contact between members of opposite sexes that is prohibited by Hasidic tradition, men sit in the front of the bus and women sit in the back.

‘Back of bus’ furor

Rosa Parks must be spinning in her grave!

A Brooklyn bus contracted by the city to operate a Williamsburg-to-Borough Park route -- catering to Orthodox Jews but open to the public -- is under investigation for allegedly forcing women to sit in the back of the bus, authorities said yesterday.

At Front of Brooklyn Bus, a Clash of Religious and Women’s Rights

Even though a private operator runs the bus, it was awarded the route through a public and competitive bidding process. Seth Solomonow, a spokesman for the Transportation Department, said the bus was supposed to be “available for public use” and could not discriminate.

[snip]

On Wednesday afternoon, the custom of women’s sitting at the back of the bus was evident, both in practice and in writing.

Guidelines, posted in the front and the back, said that “when boarding a crowded bus with standing passengers in the front, women should board the back door after paying the driver in the front” and that “when the bus is crowded, passengers should stand in their designated areas.”

If you read the articles (and the comments attached to them) the lack of outrage is noticeable. Why, I wonder, does forcing someone to sit at the back of the bus not spark massive anger and immediate reactions from government institutions? I suggest that the reasons are twofold: what group is the discrimination being carried out by and who is being discriminated against.

First, In certain areas of American politics today it is important to demonstrate that you are for Judeo-Christian ethics/beliefs and that you are a "friend of Israel." Ironically your friendship for Israel may be based on your belief that Israel needs to be around to be destroyed at the right time, but until then you are a friend of Israel. Specifically (for a secular Israel will not result in the rebuilding of the temple) this involves supporting the those groups within Israel that are least supportive of western values/women's rights. This political "third rail" is not equally electric in all communities in the United States but it plays a crucial role in New York politics.

Second, Women rights are always negotiable. They are something that will have to wait. Brutal and unequal treatment of women can be included as one of many charges against another country or leader but that is never enough to spur western countries to action. If men are not being jailed then the jailing of women will not bring down upon you the wrath of the United States. If men are not being mistreated then the mistreatment of women will not bring down upon you the wrath of the United States. Women rights are the last rights that will be insisted on, the last rights to be granted and the first rights to be lost.

One hundred years ago yesterday (October 19, 1911) the Mayor of New York decided to not veto legislation that mandated that the New York City school system pay all women teachers the same wages as male teachers. The first several times such legislation was passed it was vetoed. As the mayor announced his intentions he reassured his constituents that paying women more would actually lead to more male teachers getting jobs.

Women's rights don't seem to have traveled as far as we had hoped over the last 100 years.

The past is indeed a foreign country

The thing about being in a foreign is the way in which the strangest things will trip you up. You are prepared to find that most of the people in Turkey speak Turkish but you may be set aback when you excuse yourself from the dinner table to visit the toilet in your host's home and find that the facilities look rather different than you had expected.[1]

Similarly when one reads books written in fifty or one hundred years ago one expects that gender expectations, indeed the very performances of gender, would differ from those of the present day. If one is at all familiar with the past (or the history of the women's movement) one is not taken aback to learn that women did not have the vote in England in 1914 or that most women in the 1890s did not routinely go to college.

What trips one up is that these changes did not take place in a lockstep fashion. Women did not get the right to vote, go to university, live on their own, open their own bank accounts, sit on juries and hold public office all at the same time. So one will come across rather remarkable scenes such as this one from Barbara Pym's book Excellent Women[2] (the narrative voice is that of Mildred Lathbury, the book's protagonist. The book is set in the early 1950s. Lathbury is what would once have been called "a gentlewoman", unmarried, living alone in London after the death of her parents. She worked for the government during the war and now has a job working with "distressed gentlewomen." Earlier in the book she met Everard Bone through mutual acquaintances. She and Bone are, at most, vaguely friends. One day Lathbury receives a telephone call from Bone:

'I rang up to ask if you would come and have dinner with me in my flat this evening. I have got some meat to cook.'
I saw myself putting a small joint into the oven and preparing vegetables. I could feel my aching back bending over the sink. (p. 284)

My initial response as a reader is to wonder why Lathbury jumped to the (in my mind unwarranted) assumption that Bone was expecting Lathbury to cook the dinner to which he had invited her but it is soon made clear that she is correct in her assumption.

'I'm sorry about the meat,' I said, 'trying to infuse life into our now nearly dead conversation.
'Why should you be sorry about it?'
'Do you know how to cook it?'
'Well, I have a cookery book.'
..........
I had not wanted to see Everard Bone and the idea of having to cook his evening meal for him was more than I could bear at this moment. (p. 285)

Throughout the book Pym (through Lathbury) highlights the degree to which men expect things to simply be done. For women of the class of Lathbury this creates a particular problem since the changing economic structure of English life has changed the ubiquity of servants. Just a few decades earlier men of Bone's class and education would have someone who "did" things for them. They might not have been able to afford a live-in servant but they would not be doing the cooking and cleaning themselves. From my reading of novels set in the 1920s and 1930s many of these men lived in buildings that had a staff that provided meals and similar circumstances. Now such buildings were beyond the financial reach of many of those who might have lived in them before and servants were no longer plentiful and cheap. What was a gentleman to do? Apparently such men, robbed of servants, turned to the nearest gentlewoman to solve the problem.

One imagines that if one had even brought this matter to the attention of a man such as Bone he would have been perplexed as to why it was a problem. "After all," I can imagine Bone saying, "Mildred would have to cook her own dinner anyway. The only difference is now two of us can eat what she cooks." The idea of the reverse (Lathbury calling him to suggest that he come over to cook her dinner) is one thinks, beyond his imagination.

And yet, things are changing. The couple through whom Bone and Lathbury met do not live out the normal gender roles. She is an anthropologist and he is a retired Naval officer. He likes to cook and she refuses to learn to do so well. They do not see themselves as revolutionary and yet their very refusal to do so is perhaps the most transgressive thing about their marriage.

For readers who are interesting in the "facts on the ground" of the way in which gender expectation and performance have changed over the last century reading books such as Excellent Women is the literary equivalent of an anthropologist's field trip.


[1] This example was inspired by an episode of House Hunters International. I was baffled the a woman who was planning to buy a house in Istanbul and move permanently to Turkey should be so taken aback at the sight of a perfectly clean squat toilet. She didn't say that she wanted an American style toilet, she took one look at it an exclaimed in horror "what is that!"

"That", I said back to the television set, "is an indication that you are a typical drive-by Westerner who thinks they know a lot about a country because they like visiting it as a tourist or when staying with friends. I bet she doesn't even carry her own toilet paper with her.

[2] Pym, Barbara. Excellent women. Boston, Mass: G.K. Hall, 1985.

Women's Rights and the Decline of Democracy, Part Three

  Some time ago I wrote about how "negotiable" women's rights were in much of the modern (particularly American) democratic discourse. Recent events, and more importantly coverage of recent events, have only increased my level of concern.

A number of websites (and major newspapers) covered the fact that more than one Hassidic Newspaper edited Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Counterterrorism Director Audrey Tomason out of the photo the White House published of the officials in the situation room on May 1 2011 waiting for the outcome of the bin Laden raid.

Original White House Picture:

This is not just an example of people rewriting history in order to make it more palatable ideologically this is an example of a kyriarchy aggressively thrusting a specific subset of the human race out of the public sphere. And make no mistake about it, refusing to show pictures of women (on the grounds of sexual modesty) does more to sexualize and objectify those women than would showing pictures of them naked. It is pointless to argue that the opportunities of women are not limited by the fact that they cannot be pictured just because no law says that a woman cannot own a newspaper or a television station. To function effectively in the public sphere one must be visible in the public sphere.

Prime Minster Julia Gillard (Australia), Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (United States) and Michelle Obama (First Lady, United States) at the International Women of Courage Awards

If women cannot be seen then women are dependent on men deciding that women's issues are of importance. Imagine an award ceremony such as that pictured above if the public face of courageous women was a man (or a blank space.) No money could be raised, no discussions could be held if no man felt the issue to be important.

Imagine how difficult it would be for any woman to run for office if her male opponents could appear on television and be seen and heard debating and she was but a smudge mark on a photograph. Politicians must be seen to be doing their work.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard at a community cabinet in Australia

Prime Minister Sheikh Hassina of Bangladesh presiding over a joint meeting of the NDC and DSCSC at Armed Forces Division in Dhaka Cantonment.

Not showing pictures of woman allows members of the kyriarchy to live in a world in which, obviously, women aren't needed/useful in the public sphere since we have the photographic evidence that despite their absence the required functions of governments, institutions and organizations carry on. Yes, you might argue that a little girl need not actually see a picture of woman president/prime minister/doctor/lawyer/astronaut/writer/athlete in order to dream of being one herself but one wonders how hard to is to dream of working hard so that one can be obliterated from the pages of history.

If I could ask those men who wish to erase from the newspapers and history the images of all women one question it would be.....

What would Golda Meir think?

Golder Meir, Prime Minister of Israel 1969-1974

Note: All the above pictures are in the public domain. Each was available on the official website of the country in question.

Are Women Really People: Images of Women in Fiction, Part 1

Some time ago I was involved in a rather heated discussion on another blog about the expectations that readers may reasonably have of writers. Among the many questions under debate was how unreasonable it was of me to "be hard on" male authors who portrayed women in 1 dimensional and stereotyped ways if those authors themselves lived in a time and culture where such attitudes were normal. 

The discussion soon focused on a rather narrow moment in time as one poster responded to criticisms of an author by making the argument that it was unreasonable of me to expect a more enlightened attitude toward women from an author writing in the late 1960s. When I demonstrated that other authors writing at roughly the same time had been published (and received awards for) books that showed far more nuanced, varied and challenging images of women the poster countered by claiming that such writing was extraordinary and exceptional and that thus it was unreasonable of me to expect it of the author in question.

I will leave for a future post a discussion of the tendency of people to find it personally insulting a writer they enjoy(ed) is racist, exist or homophobic in order to write to the poster's claim that to see and write about women in a way that recognized their varied abilities, intellects and interests and that recognized and valued them in a way that did not objectify them was, in 1970, extraordinary and exceptional.

I have been, for the last day, reading Mrs. Ames, a book written by E. F. Benson and published in 1912. Benson is probably best known and remembered today for his Mapp and Lucia series and for his ghost stories. He was a popular and successful writer who wrote both fiction and nonfiction but is not considered among the great writers of his time. Yet in reading this book, which follows the life a number of upper middle-class families in a sleepy English town in the years leading up to what they would come to call "The Great War," I find a deeper, more thoughtful and, sometimes, chilling picture of interior and exterior life of women than in many books written in the intervening years..

The titular Mrs. Ames becomes involved in the Suffragette movement. As the book opened she had been vaguely in support of it and she becomes more active in it as a "stunt" to reclaim her place as social leader of village society. However her involvement has an unexpected effects on her and the others who follow her:

And no less remarkable than this growth of the league was the growth of Mrs. Ames. . . . The bonds of her barren and barbaric conventionality were bursting; indeed, it was not so much that others, not even those of " her class," were becoming women to her, as that she was becoming a woman herself. She had scarcely been one hitherto; she had been a piece of perfect propriety.

The chairman asked Mrs. Brooks to address the meeting. Another and another succeeded her, and there was complete unanimity of purpose in their suggestions. Sir James' meetings and his speeches to his constituents must not be allowed to proceed without interruption. If he had no sympathy with the cause, the cause would show a marked lack of sympathy with him. . . . And as the discussion went on, and real practical plans were made, that strange fascination and excitement at the thought of shouting and interrupting at a public meeting, of becoming for the first time of some consequence, began to seethe and ferment. Most of the members were women, whose lives had been passed in continuous self-repression, who had been frozen over by the narcotic ice of a completely conventional and humdrum existence. . . . To the eagerness and sincerity with which they welcomed a work that demanded justice for their sex, there was added this excitement of doing something at last. . . . To this, a sincere and wholly laudable desire, was added the more personal stimulus. They would be doing something, instead of suffering the tedium of passivity, acting instead of being acted on. For it is only through centuries of custom that the woman, physically weak and liable to be knocked down, has become the servant of the other sex. She is fiercer at heart, more courageous, more scornful of consequences than he; it is only muscular inferiority of strength that has subdued her into the place that she occupies, that, and the periods when, for the continuance of the race, she must submit to months of tender and strong inaction. [Bolding added. Note: This work is in the Public Domain]

Benson is, in many ways, the most conventional of writers. One might theorize that he, the son of woman who found companionship in partnership with another woman after her husband, the Archbishop of Canterbury, died, might have observed some of what he was writing about over the dinner table at home. Neither Benson nor any of his siblings married and some have claimed that he was himself was gay. What is clear is that this good, but clearly not exceptionally good, and thoughtful but anything but ground-breaking author was able to observe, and empathize with, the realities of life for women of his class.

So, to answer that poster, I do not think it was unreasonable of me to not "give a pass" to a man writing in the 1970s. I was only asking him to be at least as observant and empathetic as was Benson writing over 50 years earlier.

Women's Rights and the Decline of Democracy, Part Two

In yesterday’s blog I argued that the attitude that the rights of women’s were negotiable should be viewed as the crack in the apparently solid wall of democracy into which the wedge of the anti-democratic movement was being inserted. 

It may have appeared to the reader that I was engaged in hyperbole in order to make my point. Unfortunately I was, if anything, underplaying the lack of support for the basic rights of women that can be found among many in the political chattering class of America.

Consider, for example, Justice Antonin Scalia's statement:

  Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't. Nobody ever thought that that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws. You don't need a constitution to keep things up-to-date. All you need is a legislature and a ballot box. [California Lawyer]

 Scalia was arguing that since the rights of women not to be discriminated against were not specifically mentioned in the text of the 14th Amendment and since it is doubtful that those who framed that the amendment envisioned it as forbidding sexual discrimination then the amendment itself should not be read as constitutionally prohibiting sexual discrimination.

For those who are not familiar with the amendment in question the relevant text is

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Notice that the words used in this amendment are "persons" and "citizens" rather than the sometimes contentious word "man." One might argue as to whether the word "man" actually means "person" but not whether the word "person" means "person."

Would I argue against Scalia's claim that those who wrote, and voted for, this amendment did not envision it as an effort to prevent laws discriminating against women? 

No. 

But neither would I claim that when the founding fathers referred to "inalienable rights" they considered those rights to apply to people who happened to be female or African-American. That political thinkers in the past were incapable (or unwilling) to consider women and African-Americans people should not give a modern politician latitude to call into question the personhood of members of either group.

How fragile are the rights of women of women in the United States? Scalia's comments did not result in a firestorm of criticism and demands that he be impeached and removed from the bench. A member of the Supreme Court of the United States publicly stated that his reading of the 14th amendment allowed him not to consider women people unless it was clear that the original framers of that amendment considered its protections to extend to women and he is not publicly excoriated by politicians across the political spectrum.

Given Scalia's method of constitutional interpretation nothing short of a constitutional amendment clarifying that women will henceforward be considered "people" will prevent Scalia, other judges and politicians from chipping away at women's rights. Given the realities of American political life that passage of such an amendment both needs to happen to ensure the rights of American women and will not happen because so few powerful political figures consider those rights important.

Some insight into the legal importance of the argument as whether the writers of a constitutional document meant the word "person" to include women can be seen in a series of court cases and rulings in Canada. These give some idea as to the importance for the women's rights movement of arguments about legislative intent and strict constructionism.

In the British North America Act (the act of British Parliament that created the Dominion of Canada) the word "he" is used when referring to an individual and "person" when referring to more than one individual. The question was whether the word "he" was generic and if "persons" included women. In 1917 the Supreme Court of Alberta held that the word "person" did include women but that court's rulings only applied to the province of Alberta.

Prime Minister Robert Borden actually stated that a woman could not be named to the Canadian Senate since she did not fulfill the legal requirement of being a person. In 1927 five women appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada whether women were, for legal purposes, persons. In 1928 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that women were not legally persons. The court's reasons, that at the time the  BNA Act was written women could not vote and would not have been considered for political office, sound very like Scalia's argument about  the 14th Amendment.

With the support of Mackenzie King, then Prime Minister of Canada, the women appealed the Supreme Court's ruling to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in England which was at the time the highest court of appeal for Canada. In 1929 the Lord Chancellor of the Privy Council announced that "yes, women are person." Lord Sankey further wrote, 

that the exclusion of women from all public offices is a relic of days more barbarous than ours. And to those who would ask why the word "persons" should include females, the obvious answer is, why should it not?"

The idea that Lord Sankey's question still needs to be asked almost a century later indicates just how fragile are the rights women have won in the intervening years.