It’s Us Against Them – Especially in the Trump Era

Why did almost a million woman march as a rebuttal to Donald Trump’s inauguration? To let this administration know we will hold them legally accountable to maintaining the rights of women under what is likely to become a concerted conservative effort to roll back what we have gained.

Throughout most of America’s history women have had fewer legal rights and career opportunities than men. Wifehood and motherhood were regarded as women’s most significant professions.  In most eras, women have been considered not only intellectually inferior to men, but also a major source of temptation and evil.¹

Nevertheless, when they were allowed personal and intellectual freedom, women made significant achievements. Whole eras were influenced by women, Sappho, Cleopatra, Boudicca, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Catherine de Medici, Queen Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, and Queen.

But look how long it took the United States to get to the same place. The 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, adopted in 1868 and 1870 respectively, granted citizenship and suffrage to blacks but not to women. It was not until 1920 that the 19th amendment gave women the right to vote (with Mississippi the last to ratify it on March 22, 1984) and it ushered in a new era of social liberation. It was the women’s rights movements of the late 1800s which gave us our most basic rights and we fight and march to retain our equality today, lest we go backwards into our past history.

1. It was not until the end of the 19th century that the admission of women to regular colleges and universities was gained. Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania did not start accepting women until 1870 and 1876, respectively. Other Ivy League institutions didn’t follow suit until more than two decades after World War II, with Yale and Princeton starting to accept female students in 1969, and the rest doing the same over the next 12 years.
2. Not until the 1910s could women attend most medical schools or be admitted to the American Medical Association. In 1890, women constituted about 5 percent of the total doctors in the United States, lower than Germany, France or Israel.
3. In 1930 about 2 percent of all American lawyers and judges were women, in 1989, about 22 percent.
4. In 1930 there were almost no women engineers in the United States. In 1989 the proportion of women engineers was only 7.5 percent.
5. In 1930 women held about one third of the teaching positions in higher education, concentrated in such fields as education, social service, home economics, nursing, and library science. A small proportion of women college and university teachers were in the physical sciences, engineering, agriculture, and law. Today, about 33% of STEM professors are women.
6. In the 1910s legislation limited the working hours and conditions for women and children, but the laws prohibiting women from working more than an eight-hour day, or at night, prevented women from holding supervisory positions that might require overtime work. Today women constitute more than 43 percent of employed persons in the United States, but only 37% of those are in management positions.
7. It took until the 1960s to pass several federal laws improving the status of women in the workplace.
   1. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 required equal wages for men and women doing equal work. Women may make 77 cents to every man’s dollar today, but the numbers were much worse years ago, when women made as little as 59 cents for every man’s dollar back in 1963 (think about it: we’ve only made up 18 cents over the last 53 years; that’s one third of a cent per year).
   2. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination against women by any company with 25 or more employees. But courts didn’t recognize sexual harassment in the workplace until 1977 and it only became less murky in 1980, when the term was officially defined by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
   3. A Presidential Executive Order in 1967 prohibited bias against women in hiring by federal government contractors.
8. It wasn’t until the mid-1800’s that states passed equity laws allowing married women to own property separate from their husbands. It took much longer for a divorced husband not to have automatic legal control of both children and property.
9. It took until the 1970’s to institute laws regarding
   1. Issuing independent credit cards to married women (Equal Credit Opportunity Act 1974)
   2. Allowing divorced or single women to rent an apartment or apply for a loan to buy a house or car
   3. The violation of a woman’s right to privacy when a mother receiving government welfare payments was subject to frequent investigations in order to verify her welfare claim.
   4. A woman who shot and killed her husband would be accused of homicide, but the shooting of a wife by her husband could be termed a “passion shooting.”
   5. It wasn’t until 1968 that the Pennsylvania courts voided a state law which required that any woman convicted of a felony be sentenced to the maximum punishment prescribed by law.
   6. Women prostitutes were usually prosecuted, but their male customers were allowed to go free.
10. Rape within the confines of marriage wasn’t recognized as a crime in all 50 states until 1993. Meaning, a women basically couldn’t refuse sex to her husband or legally fight back if he raped her.
11. The pill wasn’t approved by the FDA until 1960. But it took until 1972 for the Supreme Court to make it accessible to all women, regardless of marital status. Until 1973, abortion was legal in most states only if the mother’s life was judged to be physically endangered. Emergency contraception wasn’t approved by the FDA until a staggeringly late year—1998—but a prescription was needed for Plan B until 2014, when it became available to women of all ages prescription-free.
12. Working women could have their careers cut short if they became pregnant until the passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, which outlawed the practice. By federal law a full-time worker is entitled to time off and a job when she returns, but few states by the early 1990s required that the leave be paid.
13. In many states, women couldn’t serve on juries until 1973, using the justification that women shouldn’t be asked to leave the home, or that their sensibilities were too delicate to hear the gory details during a trial.
14. In the United States during World War II almost 300,000 women served in the Army and Navy performing noncombatant jobs. In 1948, Congress passed the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act but it wasn’t until January 24, 2013, that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta removed the military’s ban on women serving in combat. In 2016 the debate is still ongoing as to how to implement it.
15. Jeanette Rankin of Montana, elected in 1917, was the first woman member of the United States House of Representatives (even though she didn’t have the right to vote for herself). In 1968 Shirley Chisholm of New York was the first black woman elected to the House of Representatives.
16. In 1933, Hattie Caraway of Arkansas was the first woman elected to the United States Senate.
17. Wives of former governors became the first women governors Miriam A. Ferguson of Texas (1925-27 and 1933-35) and Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming (1925-27). In 1974 Ella T. Grasso of Connecticut won a governorship on her own merits.
18. In 1971 Patience Sewell Latting was elected mayor of Oklahoma City, at that time the largest city in the nation with a woman mayor.
19. Frances Perkins was the first woman Cabinet member under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Jimmy Carter chose two women for his original Cabinet including Patricia Roberts Harris who was the first African American woman in a presidential Cabinet.
20. Reagan set a precedent with his appointment in 1981 of Sandra Day O’Connor as the first woman on the United States Supreme Court.
21. In international affairs, Eleanor Roosevelt was appointed to the United Nations in 1945 and served as chairman of its Commission on Human Rights. Eugenie Anderson was sent to Denmark in 1949 as the first woman ambassador from the United States. Jeanne Kirkpatrick was named ambassador to the United Nations in 1981.
22. Not until 1984 did a major party choose a woman, Geraldine Ferraro of New York, to run for vice-president. Despite women holding the highest elective offices around the world since 1960, America has yet to elect a female Vice President or President.

¹In Greek mythology Pandora opened the forbidden box bringing plagues and unhappiness to mankind. Early Roman law described women as children, forever inferior to men. St. Jerome of the Christian church, said: “Woman is the gate of the devil, the path of wickedness, the sting of the serpent, in a word a perilous object.” Thomas Aquinas said that woman was “created to be man’s helpmeet, but her unique role is in conception . . . since for other purposes men would be better assisted by other men.”