What Are the Stakes for Women in the Presidential Election?

by Alissa DeRossa, Aubrey Arpieu and Beth Dyer / October 2008

The chants of "Drill, Drill, Drill" that pulsed through the Republican Party convention hall in Minneapolis spoke to feminist playwright Eve Ensler on many levels: "I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain."

Ensler, like many other feminists, has focused her rage on the symbolic theater of sexism that is the McCain-Palin ticket to the near exclusion of a critique of the Democratic Party candidates’ positions. This one-sidedness, however understandable, threatens to leave women’s rights activists unprepared for the deepening assault on women’s rights that will likely accompany the election of either party in November.

Equal pay for equal work

The Democratic Party has been attempting to woo women with their promotion of two pieces of legislation: the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Lily Ledbetter was a supervisor at Goodyear Tire who retired and then sued the company for a lifetime of pay raises smaller than those received by her male coworkers. She won, but the U.S. Supreme Court overturned this victory in the spring of 2007 on the basis that her case needed to be filed within 180 days of the first discriminatory act against her.

Lily Ledbetter appeared at the Democratic Party convention and became a national symbol of the struggle for equal pay. The legislation that bears her name, however, would only reverse that 2007 Supreme Court ruling and allow wage discrimination claims to be filed within 180 days of the last discriminatory act, rather than the first one. While much ballyhooed, the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act only takes women back to the unhappy legal state in which they found themselves in March of 2007.

The Paycheck Fairness Act addresses more directly the wage discrimination that leaves women earning, on average, only 77 cents on the dollar paid to men. This act, like the Ledbetter legislation, however, is not a major overhaul of inadequate protections for women. Instead, the Paycheck Fairness Act was written to close several loopholes in the Equal Pay Act of 1963.

These weak areas include restrictions on the filing of class-action lawsuits and the failure to limit use by employers of the so-called "affirmative defense." In the latter case, employers have been able to argue successfully that the wage differential resulted not from discrimination, but from the male employees’ stronger salary negotiation skills.

This sort of outrage would become more difficult if this bill were ever to pass both houses of Congress. This act would also require the Department of Labor to collect more data on gender disparity and to "assist" employers in the elimination of such.

Needless to say, in the absence of a fighting labor movement and a women’s movement that is in the streets, it is unlikely that these two bills—which at best make suing against wage discrimination a little bit easier—will significantly increase equality in the workplace.

Women and the economic crisis

Women do desperately need real economic relief. In an August 2008 article entitled, "The New Equality in Unemployment," Ellen Goodman popularized a new congressional report that overturned the myth that women were "opting out" of the work force to enjoy full-time motherhood. Instead, the report documents the fact that women have been pushed out of the work force at least at the same rate as men via layoffs, outsourcing, and downsizing.

The National Women’s Law Center reported that between July and August, the unemployment rate for women rose more than 15 percent. The male increase was only about a third of that rate. The net result of all these trends, according to Sharon Johnson of Women’s e-News, is that 3.3 million fewer women are in the work force than would be expected based on the trends from 1950 to 1990.

And since women still are more likely to be stuck in part-time jobs, they are less likely to have health care and less likely to be eligible for unemployment insurance. The number of single mothers failing to receive wages or cash assistance has risen from 20% to 30% in the 10 years since welfare "reform."

Even more troubling is the anecdotal evidence that violence against women is rising as the economic crisis grows. Marie Tessier wrote in July that over a thousand women are killed each year by a current or former sexual partner, leading to the startling fact that domestic violence is the leading cause of death of women between the ages of 15 and 44.

Most vulnerable of all are immigrant women who fear deportation if they report abuse. In Massachusetts, although immigrants make up around 14% of the population, they accounted for 26% of the domestic violence deaths there between 1997 and 2006.

War abroad, war at home

One of the great silences enforced by the election campaigns has to do with the relationship between the upsurge of violence against women and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Canadian New Democratic Party MP Dawn Black reported to CBC News that she estimated that reports of Afghanistan vets’ post-traumatic stress syndrome being expressed in domestic violence had risen 50% in the last several months. More alarming still is the rate at which women soldiers are being raped by their comrades in arms—a rate that is said to approach the victimization of one in three women soldiers.

While 40% of those accused of sex crimes in civilian life are prosecuted, in the military only 8% are going to trial. This level of abuse is reflected in the fact that 40% of the women veterans who are now homeless say that they were sexually abused while in the service.

Congresswoman Jane Harman recently reported that 41% of the women seen at a veteran’s hospital in Los Angeles reported being sexually abused in the military. Finally, on Aug. 26, Colonel Ann Wright published a second major article on the likelihood that there is femicide going on inside the U.S. military in Iraq.

Forty-one of the 99 U.S. military women who have been killed in Iraq died in "non-combat-related incidents." News of suspicious "suicides," non-combat related gunshot wounds, and the bone-chilling details of the death of Army Private Lavena Johnson have even made it to the pages of the October issue of the young women’s magazine Marie Claire.

Neither political party is willing to use their political campaigns to take on the culture of sexism and violence nurtured by their war machine at home and abroad. In fact, both campaigns are using the power of their platforms in a way that pushes the national discussion about women’s rights to a more primitive place.

The ideological war

The McCain and Palin team, romanticizing a nuclear family with five children who are prayerfully playing hockey, procreating, and shipping off to war, is an easy target for feminist critics. Mocking the spin is good sport as long as feminists acknowledge that their attempt to criminalize abortion in the minds of the U.S. population is a deadly serious operation.

A September New York Times poll found that only 37% of respondents said that abortion should generally be available to those who want it. A sizeable forty-two percent said that abortion should be available but with stricter limits than it is now. Roe v. Wade, the court decision that legalized abortion, has been under attack since the day on which it was announced in 1973.

The legal and physical availability of abortion has been seriously restricted in the last 20 years and it is understood that a repeal of Roe would likely quickly result in outright bans in 23 states.

What is needed in the face of this uncertain climate for women’s rights is a bold and highly visible acknowledgement that abortion has been a natural component of women’s reproductive health kit for thousands of years.

Obama, instead, has bent to the right wing’s ideological campaign, agreeing that states can reasonably restrict late term abortions and double-talking in his acceptance speech. Attempting to rhetorically bridge anti-abortion and pro-choice positions, he disingenuously said, "We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the numbers of unintended pregnancies in this country."

In truth, both campaigns are reinforcing traditional notions of woman and family that underlay the justification for most discrimination against women. Palin is being overtly promoted as the defender of the nuclear family, an institution she implies is central to the health of the nation.

In June, Obama publicly rebuked African American fathers and implied that the answer to the social ills facing the Black community was in their individual hands. If working people were just more personally responsible, both campaigns assert, things would not be so bad.

Unemployment, low wages and benefits, poor health, lack of child care that prevents gainful employment on the part of women—none of these conditions are the result of personal irresponsibility on the part of the majority of working women and men. The endless homilies to strengthening the family are just one more attempt to deflect justifiable outrage about the policies of the corporate and financial elites back onto their victims.

Women’s rights will never be secured or advanced with a strategy that kowtows to the backward sentiments of the far right. The National Organization for Women, the National Abortion Rights Action League and other feminist non-profits are giving women false hope when they urge us to trust Obama to right these wrongs.

The period of the greatest gains for women’s rights, the late 1960s and 1970s, was punctuated by regular mass marches and independent mobilizations of women who were unapologetic about abortion, single parenthood, and alternative lifestyles. This is a strategy proven in struggle.