American women did very well in the 2018 elections for themselves, and also for the Democratic Party. The results aren’t all in, but here’s a preliminary tally.
At least 102 women were elected to the House of Representatives, including 89 Democrats and just 13 Republicans. Among the 36 newcomers, only one was a Republican.
The makeup of the Senate stayed the same, with 17 Democratic and six Republican women. There’s a runoff election in Mississippi on Tuesday, in which a white Republican woman is running against a black Democratic man, so there’s a possibility of one more Republican woman.
A record 43 women of color were elected to Congress. Only one was a Republican.
The number of women governors increased from six (two Democrats, four Republicans) to nine (six Democrats, three Republicans). The number of women serving in state legislatures will cross 2,000 for the first time. I don’t know how many are Democrats, but I bet a lot of them are.
Thomas Frank, with his usual incisiveness, explains in the current issue of Harpers why so many rich liberals such as Hillary Clinton and Melinda Gates endorse micro-lending.
It is a way of identifying the interests of American women who aspire to be corporate executives or partners in law firms with Third World women basket-makers and market-place vendors.
Merely by providing impoverished individuals with a tiny loan of fifty or a hundred dollars, it was thought, you could put them on the road to entrepreneurial self-sufficiency, you could make entire countries prosper, you could bring about economic development itself.
What was most attractive about micro-lending was what it was not, what it made unnecessary: any sort of collective action by poor people coming together in governments or unions.
The survivalist blogger Dmitry Orlov thinks debating “political correctness” is a way to prevent discussion of real issues of American politics.
Discussions of social policy, especially with regard to such things as the rights of women and sexual and racial minorities, play a very special role in American politics. … It has recently been shown that the US is not a democracy, in which public policy is influenced by public opinion, but an oligarchy, where public policy is driven by the wishes of moneyed interests.
Dmitry Orlov
On major issues, such as whether to provide public health care or whether to go to war, public opinion matters not a whit. But it is vitally important to maintain the appearance of a vibrant democracy, and here social policy provides a good opportunity for encouraging social divisions: split the country up into red states and blue states, and keep them in balance by carefully measured infusions of money into politics, so as to maintain the illusion of electoral choice.
Throw a bit of money at a religious fundamentalist candidate, and plenty of feminists, gays and lesbians will vote for the opposing kleptocrat who will, once elected, help Wall Street confiscate the rest of their retirement savings, in return for a seat on the board; throw another bit of money at a rainbow-colored lesbian, and plenty of bible-thumping traditionalists will vote for the opposing kleptocrat who, once elected, will funnel tax money to his pet defense contractor in return for some juicy kickbacks. This part of the American political system works extremely well.
On the other hand, if some matter comes before the politicians that requires helping the people rather than helping themselves and their wealthy masters, the result is a solid wall of partisan deadlock. This part works very well too—for the politicians, and for the moneybags who prop them up, but not for the people.
The reproductive justice framework – the right to have children, not have children, and to parent the children we have in safe and healthy environments — is based on the human right to make personal decisions about one’s life, and the obligation of government and society to ensure that the conditions are suitable for implementing one’s decisions.
I recently learned a new buzzword—”reproductive justice”—which is being promoted by a black women’s group called SisterSong, and recently has been taken up by my own religious denomination, the Unitarian Universalist Association. The idea behind the phrase is that a women’s right to choose whether or not to have children goes far beyond the right to an abortion. It means that women who want to have children ought to be free from the fear that they won’t be able to feed, clothe and shelter the children, that the children won’t be able to get medical care, that there won’t be day care when they go off to work, and so on.
I’ve read the platforms of the political parties on this subject, and it is one in which there is a real and meaningful divide. The Democratic Party and even more so the Green Party endorse reproductive justice. The Libertarian Party defines the issue as one of individual rights and responsibilities. A woman has the right to get an abortion or not, as she chooses, the Libertarians say, but then it is the individual responsibility of the parent or parents to care for the child.
The Republican Party platform says the issue is not the right of the mother, but the right of the fetus, or unborn child, to be born. It endorses help for mothers to make sure they are able to bring the child to term and then, if the mother is unmarried, to enable the newborn child to be adopted into a two-parent family.
I don’t quarrel with the two-parent man-woman family as an ideal, or with encouragement of adoption. I know a woman who was an adopted child and, as an adult, sought out her birth mother. The birth mother was a mentally ill person who would have been unable to care for her, so she is thankful to have been adopted. But there aren’t enough adoptive parents to go around, and of course not every child is adoptable.
I agree with SisterSong, and I like the Democratic and Green party platforms on this issue, but I also think reproductive justice is as much about the responsibilities of parenting as it is about the rights of women. I know a woman my own age who has tried to befriend a young unmarried mother who lives in the same apartment house. She could teach the young mother much about housekeeping and child care, but neither the mother nor the irresponsible father think they need help or advice. I think people like that are a problem, and I don’t know of any government program that is a solution—not that I advocate abandoning the children to their fate.
I imagine that if any SisterSong members read this post, they would respond that they know their responsibilities as mothers very well, and don’t need any admonitions from an elderly, childless, well-off white man such as myself. Maybe so. I hope I do not propagate the stereotype of the black unmarried mother drawing welfare. To the extent that what I describe is a problem, it is not a problem of just one ethnic group.
Click on Honey Boo Boo Nationfor thoughts on the limitations of reproductive justice.
Click on highlighted words for the full Republican, Democratic, Green and Libertarian party platforms, or read the portions of the platforms relevant to the reproductive justice issue below.
Companies with women on their boards performed better in challenging markets than those with all-male boards in a study suggesting that mixing genders may temper risky investment moves and increase return on equity.
Shares of companies with a market capitalization of more than $10 billion and with women board members outperformed comparable businesses with all-male boards by 26 percent worldwide over a period of six years, according to a report by the Credit Suisse Research Institute, created in 2008 to analyze trends expected to affect global markets.
The number of women in boardrooms has increased since the end of 2005 as countries such as Norway instituted quotas and companies including Facebook Inc. added female directors after drawing criticism for a lack of gender diversity. The research, which includes data from 2,360 companies, shows a greater correlation between stock performance and the presence of women on the board after the financial crisis started four years ago.
“Companies with women on boards really outperformed when the downturn came through in 2008,” Mary Curtis, director of thematic equity research at Credit Suisse in Johannesburg and an author of the report, said in a telephone interview. “Stocks of companies with women on boards tend to be a little more risk averse and have on average a little less debt, which seems to be one of the key reasons why they’ve outperformed so strongly in this particular period.”
I wouldn’t over-generalize about women being more risk-averse than men, but the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations would all have been better off if they’d heeded the warnings of Brooksley Born, Sheila Bair and Elizabeth Warren about the dangers of giving Wall Street free rein, and then bailing them out unconditionally. They were all up against a macho posturing that is more common among Washington officials and Wall Street speculators than it is among men whose jobs actually require physical strength and physical courage.
Where human affairs are concerned, the greater the diversity of viewpoints and life experiences within the decision-making group, the better the decisions are likely to be. I imagine that a board of directors with a female majority and one or two men would make better decisions on average than an all-female board, but it will be many decades before there are enough examples to do that study.
There are two aspects to the Julian Assange rape case. One is his actual guilt or innocence. On that I think all reasonable people have to reserve judgment. The other is whether the case was exploited for political purposes. On that I think the evidence is clear.
For Aaron Bady’s well-reasoned argument for withholding judgment on guilt or innocence, click on If You’ll Pardon the Presumption.
For Nate Silver’s well-reasoned analysis of the political motivations behind the handling of the case, click on A Bayesian Take on Julian Assange.
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are husband and wife journalists who jointly won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on China. In their book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, they argue that just as slavery and totalitarianism were the great moral issues of the 19th and 20th centuries, crimes against women will be the great moral issue of the 21st century. After reading the book, I do not think that statement an exaggeration.
Millions of women are targeted for sexual slavery, rape, “honor” killing, and genital mutilation, and tens of millions allowed to die of neglect in childbirth or otherwise, specifically because they are women. But the struggle for justice for women is a very different kind of struggle than the battles against slavery, fascism and Communism.
Nicholas Kristof was once at the India-Nepal border, and an Indian customs official went through his gear fairly thoroughly, to make sure he didn’t have any smuggled DVDs. This was on a route where Nepali peasant girls are smuggled into India to be prostitutes, and Kristof asked what success the customs official had in stopping such trafficking. The customs official said such an effort would be useless. Young Indian men need access to prostitutes in order to protect the chastity of young Indian women. The customs official said that if this means Nepali peasant girls have to be forced into prostitution make this possible, this is an unfortunate necessity.
As Kristof noted, the reason the customs official was so concerned about smuggled DVDs is that the United States government put pressure on the Indian government to protect intellectual property rights. He was not concerned about human trafficking because this is not an issue any government has raised.
The authors are frankly propagandistic. Reporting mainly from southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, they tell story after story, by turns gruesome and inspiring, about atrocities against women, the courageous responses of some of them, and what philanthropic Americans and other Westerners have done to help. They throw in enough statistical information to persuade people like me that the stories they tell are not isolated instances.
The authors say that rape and prostitution are worst in countries such as India, Pakistan and Iran where male honor most requires protection of female virginity. “Honor” requires prostitution to protect “decent” women, and it makes rape an effective tool of humiliation and social control. Kristof and WuDann tell the story of a village girl in Pakistan who was sentenced by the village council to be stripped and publicly gang-raped to punish not her, but her brother, for some misdeed. The expectation was that she would commit suicide out of shame, and this would be humiliating to the brother. But her parents kept watch and prevented her from taking her life, a village Muslim elder denounced the rape as un-Islamic and she went to the police who, surprisingly, arrested the attackers. With the help of money contributed by Americans, and publicity by Kristof, she founded a girls’ school and then many schools.
The suppression of prostitution, murder and rape is a question of law enforcement. There are other problems no less serious, but harder to get a grip on. Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics, wrote an essay in 1990 on “100 million missing women.” Women live longer than men, and so there are more women than men in much of the world, including Latin America and much of Africa. Yet in China, India, Pakistan and certain other countries, men outnumber women. The reason, Kristol and WuDunn say, is that parents don’t try as hard to keep their daughters alive as their sons. Studies in India show that girls in India don”t get vaccinated as boys do, and are 50 percent more likely to die between ages 1 and 5.
Phil Ebersole's Blog 