hunter of justice

Should American women go Dutch?

A fascinating report by Jessica Olien for Slate, but to me it seems silly to imagine that one could transplant one aspect of progressive culture, in a way that would benefit women, without the rest of the welfare state that everyone in the Netherlands enjoys.  Decide for yourself:

I've been in the Netherlands for nearly three months now, and I've come to one overwhelming conclusion: Dutch women are not like me. I worry about my career incessantly. I take daily stock of its trajectory and make vicious mental critiques of my endeavors. And I know—based on weekly phone conversations with friends in the United States—that my masochistic drive for success is widely shared among my female friends. Meanwhile, the Dutch women around me take a lackadaisical approach to their careers. They work half days, meet their friends for coffee at 2 p.m., and pity their male colleagues who are stuck in the office all day.

Though the Netherlands is consistently ranked in the top five countries for women, less than 10 percent of women here are employed full-time. And they like it this way. Incentives to nudge women into full-time work have consistently failed. Less than 4 percent of women wish they had more working hours or increased responsibility in the workplace, and most refuse extended hours even when the opportunity for advancement arises. Some women cite the high cost of child care as a major factor in their shorter hours, but 62 percent of women working part time in the Netherlands don't have young children in the house, and mothers rarely increase their working hours even when their children leave home.

It's hard not to wonder: Have we gotten it all wrong? In the United States, the race for equality has gone mostly in one direction. Women want to shatter the glass ceiling, reach the top spots in the hierarchy, and earn the same respect and salaries as men do. But perhaps this situation is setting us up for a world in which none of us is having any fun. After all, studies of female happiness in the U.S. find that even as our options have increased and we have become financially more independent than in any previous time in our history, American women as a whole are not getting any happier. If anything, the studies show that we are emotionally less well-off than we were before. Wasn't the whole point of the fight for equality in the workplace to improve our wellbeing?

Dutch women could be considered extremely progressive when compared with most other women in the world—they have enviable reproductive rights and rates of political participation. But they are often responsible for only a small portion of the family income—25 percent of Dutch women do not even make enough money to be considered financially independent. The gap in pay between genders is among the highest in Europe, but because women are working only part time, this is not fodder for gender wars. Instead, women are more concerned with protecting their right to part-time work. In 2000, a law was passed mandating that women have the right to cut back hours at their jobs without repercussions from employers.

"We look at the world of management—and it is a man's world—and we think, oh I could do that if I wanted," says Maaike van Lunberg, an editor at De Stentor newspaper. "But I'd rather enjoy my life." Jacob Vossestein's book Dealing With the Dutch echoes that sentiment. He argues that people in the Netherlands view the hierarchical work environment with skepticism and do not generally envy those who climb its ranks.

Dutch women's refusal to seek longer hours has long bewildered economists. In the spring, the United Nations, suspicious that there was something keeping women from full-time jobs, launched an inquiry to see whether the Netherlands was in compliance with the women's rights treaty. A comprehensive 2009 study by Alison L. Booth & Jan C. Van Ours looked at the amount of time women in the Netherlands spend at work compared with women in other European countries. The authors assumed that part-time work was less desirable but ultimately confirmed that Dutch women don't want to spend more time at work. The NIS News Bulletin interpreted the results of the study as: "Attempts to get more women working full-time are doomed to failure because nobody has a desire for this. Both the women themselves and their partners and employers are satisfied with the Dutch part-time culture for women."

Real women don't wobble

From the NY Times:

When the Berlin Wall collapsed and Germany became one again, women in the former Communist East seemed to be the big losers.They lost their jobs and their maternity and child-care benefits. And they lost the form of equality that Communism had brought: Raised in a culture where women drove cranes and studied physics, they were reduced to clichés depicting them as oversexed.

The assumption was that as with everything else, East German women would become more “Western” — more domesticated and somehow more docile. But as Germany celebrates 20 years of reunification, it is Western women who, in many ways, strive to be more like their Eastern sisters.

Eastern women are more self-confident, better-educated and more mobile, recent studies show. They have children earlier and are more likely to work full time. More of them are happy with their looks and their sexuality, and fewer of them diet. If Western women earn 24 percent less than men, the pay gap in the East is a mere 6 percent (though overall levels of pay are lower)...

Jutta Allmendiger, a West German sociologist and author of “Women on the March,” a survey on young German women’s attitudes, said “women in the East are more holistic,” and “combine their children and their careers and their sexuality in a completely matter-or-fact way.”

“West German women wobble,” she said. “Eastern women have no fear.”

When the Cold War split Germany in two, the country became a living experiment in social engineering. East and West had the same history — a history in which women principally raised children and kept the home according to the mantra “kinder, küche, kirche,” or “children, kitchen, church.”

Four decades of radically different socialization led to two very different sets of attitudes, illustrating how politics can shape gender relations. In the East, a Communist state losing male labor to the West set up free day care centers and all-day schools so that women could work. Women had an extra vacation day per month, a year of paid maternity leave and shorter work hours after the second child. In the West, they could be divorced for being a “bad housewife” until the 1960s. They needed their husbands’ permission to work until 1977. Schools finished at lunchtime, and nurseries were scarce. Until reunification, single mothers were assigned a legal guardian.

Greenhouse and Siegel reflect on "Before Roe v. Wade"

Journalist Linda Greenhouse and law professor Reva Siegel recently published Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling.  Following are excerpts from an interviewer by Erin Miller of SCOTUSblog about what they learned in writing the book:

Q - Linda, as a journalist, you’ve been reporting on the legal battle over abortion for a long time.  Your book reprints an article you wrote on the subject for the New York Times in 1970.  How did your experience inform your writing of the book?

My early reporting experience gave me a passing acquaintance with some of the main players, but I can’t say that it really informed the writing of the book. Don’t forget, our book ends with Roe, which was decided on January 22, 1973. As a very young reporter in the early 1970s, I didn’t have the perspective to understand fully what I was witnessing, frankly, and many important events remained in my peripheral vision. I found the experience of reconstructing what was actually going on in those days rather humbling. I wish I had understood then what I know now!

Q - Reva, as a legal scholar, you’ve written extensively on abortion and the law.  How was your approach to the book different than Linda’s?

In writing about debates over abortion, race, and gun rights, I have been examining how social movement conflict can provoke and guide constitutional change.  I had written on the antiabortion movement after Roe, and feminist abortion rights claims before Roe, but in this work on “Roe’s Roots” I had only begun to explore the debate over decriminalization of abortion that feminists joined in the late 1960s. So it was fascinating to reconstruct how arguments for and against legalization of abortion evolved in the decade before the Court decided Roe.

Oddly enough, my recent work on gun rights proved important as well. Since writing on the Court’s changing interpretation of the Second Amendment, I have been interested in the ways that movements and political parties interact in shaping constitutional law.  When we noticed that Richard Nixon shifted position on abortion, we asked why, and uncovered evidence of the Republican Party’s earliest efforts to use abortion in the service of party realignment. In the years before Roe, Kevin Phillips and Pat Buchanan advised Republicans to appeal to abortion to court Catholics and social conservatives who had historically voted with the Democratic Party. A variety of documents in the book explore the roots of political polarization around abortion...

Q - After doing the research for your book, did your thinking about the Roe opinion, or the public debate after Roe, change?  If so, how?

One aspect of Roe that is rather frequently commented upon is the physician-centric nature of its argument. The opinion reads in some ways as if the case was about the rights of doctors rather than the rights of women. And neither does the Court really acknowledge the claims being made on behalf of the unborn. One might ask whether these arguments were simply not made to the Court, or whether the Justices were simply unable to hear them. In the book, we include excerpts from the merits briefs as well as the amicus briefs – and, clearly, it was all there.  In addition, we show that these feminist and right to life arguments were regularly asserted in the several years before the Court ruled.  . So the silences in Roe itself present something of a mystery. We suggest ways in which the Court’s silence might be understood as an effort to diffuse conflict—but in the end leave the question open, as an invitation to debate and further research.

Our book doesn’t really treat the evolution of the public debate after Roe, but some of the material we include certainly raises questions about the widely accepted “backlash” theory – that it was the Supreme Court that created today’s conflict over abortion.. With other historians, we show that courts are not required for conflict: a Catholic-led antiabortion movement energetically opposed decriminalization before Roe. We go on to identify another institutional basis for political polarization around abortion, offering evidence of abortion’s entanglement in party realignment in the period before Roe.  We show that before Roe, Republican strategists working toward Richard Nixon’s reelection in 1972 were pushing opposition to abortion as a way to pry Catholic voters away from their traditional home in the Democratic Party and to use the issue as an instrument of party realignment. Older readers might remember the “triple-A” label that the Republicans pinned on George McGovern, the Democratic nominee – for amnesty, acid, and abortion (although McGovern was actually no abortion-rights crusader.) In an afterword to the book, we draw on work that Reva along with Robert Post published in an article called “Roe Rage” [42 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties L. Rev. 409 (2007)] to show that, in the decade after Roe, appeals to abortion in the service of party realignment continued. In 1979, conservatives who supported Ronald Reagan’s election helped broker a new coalition of Protestants and Catholics to oppose abortion, in the name of family and faith. Our work points to crucial shifts in the shape of abortion conflict in the years before, and decade after, the Court’s decision.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe is commonly viewed as the cause of backlash. Our work identifies another institutional locus of conflict in party realignment—a form of conflict that does not require Supreme Court rulings and can play an important role in shaping their interpretation. Our research on the decade before Roe thus raises questions about the decades after: In what ways was Roe a cause and in what ways a symbol of political polarization?  . We explore the implications of our research for  “Roe-caused-backlash” claims in “Before (and After) Roe v. Wade,” forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal.

Glass ceiling for women in Capitol Hill jobs

Politico reports that fewer than 180 women fill the 535 chief of staff jobs available on the Hill, and among male Senators, the number is dropping. Only 35 percent of House offices employ a female chief of staff, and less than a quarter of senators do, according to an annual survey by the Women’s Campaign Forum” ...

Over the past four years, the number of male members who employ a female chief of staff has dropped to 20 percent in the Senate, WCF estimates. Female House members have a much better record, which has continually improved over the past four years, but the ratio of female chiefs of staff to female members of Congress is still below 50 percent.

...The average House chief of staff rakes in $134,000, according to the employment studies. A POLITICO review of several House compensation studies last spring found that the number of female chiefs of staff in the House had increased by only about 6 percentage points over the past five years.

The number of female legislative directors, a second-tier position that is largely influential in the formation of policy, increased by only 1 percentage point, to 36.5 percent, in the same five-year period.

But women are eating up the middle- to lower-level jobs on the Hill, at least on the House side. According to last year’s House Compensation Study, women filled 84 percent of executive assistant and 82 percent of scheduler jobs. These positions, which typically pay an average of $48,000 to $59,000, include orchestrating office functions and keeping tabs on a member’s schedule.

Abortion trends: more linked to poverty as states enact greater restrictions

Three recent reports read together drive home the point that abortion is becoming more and more a poverty issue, and choice advocates are at the same time losing ground in state legislatures around the country.

According to a Guttmacher Institute study, the concentration of abortion among poor women is not only intense, but also rising sharply. The relative abortion rate for poor women in 2008 (the most recent data available) was more than twice that for all women, and more than five times that for women at 200% or more of the federal poverty level. About 42% of women having abortions 2008 were poor, compared to 27% in 2000. By contrast, the rates for low-income (100-199% of FPL) and better off women (>200% of the FPL) decreased during that time. Among poor women, Black and Hispanic women were overrepresented.

On the legislative side, the Center for Reproductive Rights reports that "2010 has been one of the most challenging state legislative sessions for women's access to abortion in many years." Favorite anti-choice initiatives have included bans on insurance coverage for abortion and mandates that women seeking abortion must be exposed to ultrasound images of the fetus. Guttmacher also issued an analysis of state legislation as of midyear 2010, and reported that there are 49 new restrictive state laws.

Add to this the current frenzy about "anchor babies" in the Latino community. As ColorLines notes, there is a long disturbing history of paranoid delusions about allegedly excessive fertility (read sexuality) in people of color communities. University of Arizona Women's Studies Professor Nicole Guidotti-Hernández places the "anchor babies" issue as the latest episode in that history:

These ideas about Latina women’s bodies and hyper-reproduction are not new... [Such fears have been] localized in the figure of what [historian Ellen] Gutíerrez has called “the hyper-fertile baby machine.”

Beneath all this is an undercurrent of legal and political dehumanization of women of color. And one historically effective strategy for diminishing a liberty right for everyone is just that kind of racialization. If the Supreme Court continues to chip away at the woman's right, this will be part of the context and part of a new enabling discourse -- that "good" (white, middle class) women are less concerned now about abortion.

HUD investigates pregnancy discrimination in mortgages

From Women's e news:

When Olivia Salvador tried to close her mortgage loan in March, she hit an unexpected snag. "My husband and I were unable to close due to my being on maternity leave," said Salvador, of Oakland, Calif. "Though I was preapproved for my loan, though I was employed and though my leave was federally protected, I was told that in the eyes of my lender, I was unemployed, and thus didn't meet the financial qualifications for my loan. We had to bargain for extra time with our seller and had to wait until after my leave to buy our home."

Complaints such as these were brought to light by the New York Times in a series of stories written by Tara Siegel Bernard in July.

In response, MomsRising, the Seattle-based advocacy group, e-mailed its one million members and received about 120 similar e-mail complaints. The organization then forwarded these to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Now HUD is investigating whether lenders are denying mortgages to women who are pregnant or on maternity leave in violation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1973.

"We've received seven formal complaints so far and anticipate fielding more," John Trasvina, HUD's assistant secretary for fair housing and equal opportunity, told Women's eNews recently. "Such reports are profoundly disturbing and require immediate action." Trasvina said press coverage by the New York Times and other publications, combined with pressure from MomsRising, spurred the investigation.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--the two Washington-based, government-sponsored mortgage giants that back most conventional home loans--tightened their lending rules earlier this year. Since then, lending-rights advocates say borrowers with potential dips or gaps in income are having trouble getting mortgages. That can mean injured workers collecting disability insurance or those who have recently lost jobs or work hours.

Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, executive director of MomsRising, thinks pregnant women are bearing the brunt of stricter lending practices. "Tighter guidelines are affecting many mortgage applicants," she said. "But the problem is that they're affecting women who are pregnant or on maternity leave in disproportionate numbers."

Tony Blair on politics and "free bird instincts"

Tony Blair's memoir was published last week, and it apparently includes some comments on sexual acting out in the political world.  According to Politico,

At several junctures in the notably candid book, Blair muses about what drives powerful politicians to take the risks inherent with illicit sex.

“My theory is that it’s precisely because of the supreme self-control you have to exercise to be at the top,” he concludes. “And your free-bird instincts want to spring you from that prison of self-control. Then there is the moment of encounter, so exciting, so naughty, so lacking in self-control.”

Makes me wonder - who's going to write about how that "free bird instinct" works itself out for women at the top?

Ruth Ginsburg, still showing how it's done

A great story about Justice Ginsburg that I had never heard, framed in a lovely tribute by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate:

Anyone who didn't already believe Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to be fashioned of pure steel was reminded of the fact Friday night as she delivered a speech to a group of lawyers and judges that was meant to have been delivered by her husband. Martin Ginsburg had been invited to deliver his remarks at the 10^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' conference in Colorado Springs, Colo., but he died in late June of metastatic cancer. As Ginsburg explained Friday evening, "He had his speech all written out." And so she read it—with a handful of interpolations—in its entirety to several hundred rapt listeners.

The speech, "How the Tenth Circuit Got My Wife Her Good Job," described the only case the Ginsburgs ever worked on together—a 1972 tax case called Moritz v. Commissioner, challenging the denial of a dependent-care deduction allowed to women, widowers, or divorced men but denied to a single man who was caring for his ailing mother. According to Martin Ginsburg, as read by his widow, in the 1960s, while he worked as a New York tax lawyer, she toiled as a law professor at Rutgers. And when he entered her adjoining study in their apartment one night—"her room was bigger"—with a report on the Moritz case and the excited suggestion that she might represent the pro se litigant on appeal, his bride apparently retorted, "I don't read tax cases." She read it, and they took the case.

The Ginsburgs not only prevailed at the 10^th Circuit but also obtained—as Justice Ginsburg has detailed elsewhere—the solicitor general's Exhibit E, a "printout from the Department of Defense computer" that listed, title by title, every provision of the U.S. Code "containing differentiations based upon sex-related criteria." According to the brief filed by the solicitor general urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear Moritz, the 10^th Circuit decision "casts a cloud of unconstitutionality upon the many federal statutes listed in Appendix E." And as Martin Ginsburg noted in his speech, that computer printout proved "a gift beyond price" in his wife's future litigation career.

The Moritz case launched Ginsburg into her association with the ACLU Women's Rights Project, and Exhibit E offered a roadmap for litigation. She scored five victories in six Supreme Court appeals, using the 14^th Amendment to slowly and systematically eradicate gender discrimination in one law after another, pushing the courts to scrutinize laws that classify on the basis of gender with a standard higher than the deferential "rational basis" standard...

[Sarah] Palin and the Mama Grizzlies .. owe a debt of thanks directly to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who almost single-handedly convinced the courts and legislatures to do away with gender classifications ...

It was in Craig v. Boren [a case that involved different legal drinking ages for males and females] that Ginsburg secured the court's agreement that—in her words—the "familiar stereotype: the active boy, aggressive and assertive; the passive girl, docile and submissive" was "not fit to be written into law." The seed for Sarah Palin was sown... You can draw a straight line between Ginsburg's fight against ... seemingly harmless gender classifications that were rooted in seemingly harmless gender stereotypes and the Mama Grizzlies who roam our political landscape today...

After she finished reading her husband's charmingly funny speech, and while folks in the audience were still wiping away tears, Ginsburg sat down for a "fireside chat" with the chief justice of Canada, Beverley McLachlin, NPR's Nina Totenberg, and Robert Henry, the president of Oklahoma City University. (The woman sitting next to me whispered that the setup looked an awful lot like The View.) In response to a question about work-life balance, Ginsburg explained that in the early '70s, her son, "what I called a lively child but school psychologists called hyperactive," was forever in trouble and that she was constantly called in to his school, even though she and her husband both had full-time jobs.

"One day, I was particularly weary,"* she explained, and so when the school called, she said, "This child has two parents. I suggest you alternate calls, and it's his father's turn." She said calls from the school came much less frequently after that, because the school was "much less inclined to take a man away from his job." Ruth Bader Ginsburg doesn't growl and doesn't issue threats, and she rarely eats small forest dwellers. But she is still the mother of all grizzlies to me.

Changing marriage

Quote of the day, from Melissa Harris-Lacewell, writing at The Nation:

Typically advocates of marriage equality try to reassure the voting public the same-sex marriage will not change the institution itself. "Don't worry," we say, "allowing gay men and lesbians to marry will not threaten the established norms; it will simply assimilate new groups into old practices."

This is a pragmatic, political strategy, but I hope it is not true. I hope same-sex marriage changes marriage itself. I hope it changes marriage the way that no-fault divorce changed it. I hope it changes marriage the way that allowing women to own their own property and seek their own credit changed marriage. I hope it changes marriage the way laws against spousal abuse and child neglect changed marriage. I hope marriage equality results in more equal marriages. I also hope it offers more opportunities for building meaningful adult lives outside of marriage.

Women in Congress bring home more bacon

As reported in Politico, a new study by researchers at Stanford and the University of Chicago have found that women in Congress do a better job than their male counterparts of bringing home money for their districts -

The study, which examined the performance of House members between 1984 and 2004, found that women delivered roughly 9 percent more discretionary spending for their districts than men.

For instance, during Rep. Judy Biggert’s first two-year term, Illinois’s 13th District received $382 million in federal funds, $70 million more than it received during the final term of her predecessor, Rep. Harris Fawell. Rep. Zoe Lofgren delivered around $859 million to her district, compared with $541 million brought in by her predecessor, Rep. Don Edwards, during his final term, the researchers said. And during then-Rep. Connie Morella’s first term, Maryland’s 8th District received $780 million, $183 million more than predecessor Rep. Michael Barnes brought in during his final term, they said.

While there are obviously variables beyond gender — seniority, party affiliation, majority/minority status and the differing priorities of a freshman and a veteran lawmaker — the researchers say they’ve accounted for those in making their male-to-female comparisons.

“You could easily make the argument that a politician who is on his way out, or someone who is sitting on a really powerful committee, is in a different position than someone just coming into office,” said Stanford researcher Sarah Anzia. “Not every example will cover every alternative explanation, but we control for all of those factors in the study.”

The researchers also found that women introduced more legislation than men who served in their same districts, often hitting the ground running in their first terms. “We find that, on average, women sponsor about three bills more per Congress per term than their male counterparts,” said Anzia. “They co-sponsor more bills than other members, and they also obtain more co-sponsors for their own bills.” 

...Researchers say the small number of female members may have something to do with their effectiveness. Women who run and win are likely the most politically ambitious and talented of their pool, having potentially overcome hurdles including voter bias and self-doubt about their ability to win. Female candidates also tend to attract more challengers. Politically eligible women tend to doubt their ability to get elected and raise money more than men do, multiple studies have indicated.

Once women get to Capitol Hill, those hurdles may drive them to perform better, on average, than male counterparts who have faced a less contentious road. “Research shows that even though women have similar success rates in primaries and elections as men, they are likely to face more challengers,” said Hartwick College political science department chairwoman Laurel Elder. “The results might be the same, but they might have to work harder to get those same results.”

Happy 89th birthday to women's right to vote

The Nineteenth Amendment - women's suffrage - was ratified on August 26, 1920, when Tennessee put the campaign to secure ratification of two-thirds of the states over the top. It seems like another world, until one realizes, as Hillary Clinton noted of her mother, that a fair number of little old ladies among us were born before women could vote.

Here's the NY Times coverage:

Washington, Aug. 26 -- The half-century struggle for woman suffrage in the United States reached its climax at 8 o'clock this morning, when Bainbridge Colby, as Secretary of State, issued his proclamation announcing that the Nineteenth Amendment had become a part of the Constitution of the United States.

The signing of the proclamation took place at that hour at Secretary Colby's residence, 1507 K Street Northwest, without ceremony of any kind, and the issuance of the proclamation was unaccompanied by the taking of movies or other pictures, despite the fact that the National Woman's Party, or militant branch of the general suffrage movement, had been anxious to be represented by a delegation of women and to have the historic event filmed for public display and permanent record.

Secretary Colby did not act with undue haste in signing the proclamation, but only after he had given careful study to the packet which arrived by mail during the early morning hours containing the certificate of the Governor of Tennessee that that State's Legislature had ratified the Congressional resolution submitting the amendment to the States for action.

None of the leaders of the woman suffrage movement was present when the proclamation was signed. "It was quite tragic," declared Mrs. Abby Scott Baker of the National Woman's Party. "This was the final culmination of the women's fight, and, women, irrespective of factions, should have been allowed to be present when the proclamation was signed. However the women of America have fought a big fight and nothing can take from them their triumph."

Leaders of both branches of the woman's movement- the militants, headed by Miss Alice Paul, and the conservatives, led by Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt -- some of whom had been on watch nearly all night for the arrival of the Tennessee Governor's certification, visited the State Department, and the militants sought to have Secretary Colby go through a duplication of the signing scene in the presence of movie cameras. This Mr. Colby declined to do, on the ground that it was not necessary to detract from the dignity and importance of the signing of the proclamation by staging a scene in imitation of the actual signing of the proclamation....

At the same time Mr. Colby congratulated the women of the country on the successful culmination of their efforts in the face of discouragements, and declared the day "marks the opening of a great and new era in the political life of the nation."

"I confidently believe," said the Secretary, "that every salutary, forward and upward force in our public life will receive fresh vigor and reinforcement from the enfranchisement of the women of America. To the leaders of this great movement I tender my sincere congratulations. To every one, from the president, who uttered the call to duty, whenever the cause seemed to falter, to the humblest worker in this great reform, the praise not only of this generation but of posterity will be freely given."...

Late this afternoon Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, head of the National American Suffrage Association, and Mrs. Helen H. Gardiner, another active worker in that organization, were received at the White House by President and Mrs. Wilson. The National Woman's Party, known as the militants and a rival organization to that headed by Mrs. Catt, was not represented.....

A mass meeting [and jubilee at Poll's Theatre tonight] was attended by women from every section of the country and a number of officials of the administration, including members of the Cabinet, were present.

European Court of Human Rights: failure to protect women from domestic violence can be human rights violation

In Opuz v Turkey, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously found that a state violated the human rights of the applicant and her mother in failing to protect them against domestic violence.  The applicant had alleged that the state bore responsibility under the European Convention on Human Rights for its failure to take action against her violent husband who repeatedly attacked her and killed her mother. For the first time in a domestic violence case, the Court found violations of:

• the right to life (art. 2) "in respect of the death of the applicant's mother"


• the prohibition of torture (art. 3) "in respect of the authorities' failure to protect the applicant against domestic violence perpetrated by her former husband"


• and the right to non-discrimination on the basis of sex (art. 14). It explicitly recognized domestic violence as a form of gender discrimination that gives rise to state responsibility.

Regarding the sex discrimination claim, the Court found:

the existence of a prima facie indication that hte domestic violence affected mainly women and that the general and discriminatory judicial passivity in Turkey created a climate that was conducive to domestic violence ... the criminal-law system, as operated in the instant case, did not have an adequate deterrent effect capable of ensuring the effective prevention of [domestic violence] ...

Bearing in mind its finding above that the general and discriminatory judicial passivity in Turkey, albeit unintentional, mainly affected women, the Court considers that the violence suffered by the applicant and her mother may be regarded as gender-based violence which is a form of discrimination against women. Despite the reforms carried out by the Government in recent years, the overall unresponsiveness of the judicial system and impunity enjoyed by the aggressors, as found in the instant case, indicated that there was insufficient commitment to take appropriate action to address domestic violence.

HT: IntLawGrrls

Sotomayor: "The facts that judges choose to see"

The following excerpt is from the infamous speech that Judge Sotomayor gave at Boalt in October 2001, later published in the La Raza journal, and which now has been demagogued endlessly by rightwingers desperate for a way to stop her appointment. In my view the speech offers not just a solid defense against charges of racism (it makes me choke even to write that), but a set of perceptive insights into the process of judging. Judge Sotomayor obviously has thought deeply about the tensions with which she must live and work as a Latina judge. I will be thrilled if she becomes a Justice of the Supreme Court.

... Professor Judith Resnik says that there is not a single voice of feminism, not a feminist approach but many who are exploring the possible ways of being that are distinct from those structured in a world dominated by the power and words of men. Thus, feminist theories of judging are in the midst of creation and are not and perhaps will never aspire to be as solidified as the established legal doctrines of judging can sometimes appear to be.

That same point can be made with respect to people of color. No one person, judge or nominee will speak in a female or people of color voice. I need not remind you that Justice Clarence Thomas represents a part but not the whole of African-American thought on many subjects. Yet, because I accept the proposition that, as Judith Resnik describes it, "to judge is an exercise of power" and because as, another former law school classmate, Professor Martha Minow of Harvard Law School, states "there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives - no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging," I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that--it's an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others. Not all women or people of color, in all or some circumstances or indeed in any particular case or circumstance but enough people of color in enough cases, will make a difference in the process of judging. ... As recognized by legal scholars, whatever the reason, not one woman or person of color in any one position but as a group we will have an effect on the development of the law and on judging. ...

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, ... our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O'Connor is the author of that line, since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Minow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

... I, like Professor [Stephen] Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. ...[N]ine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown [v. Board of Education].

However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept ... [that] the presence of women and people of color on the bench [will make a difference]. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage....

Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely, and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me require. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences, but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate....

[Full text of speech here]

Soccer moms with vodka - the new bad mom blogs

From The American Prospect, an essay on the trials of making space for real mom moments in an apple pie culture:

A mother tells her child that Häagen Dazs is a special medicine for mommies because she doesn't want to share. Another purposely ruins her daughter's favorite T-shirt with red nail polish. One joins Weight Watchers so she has a place to go by herself once a week. Another mom admits, "I can't wait to wean my daughter so I can get stoned again."

These are some of the "mommy misdemeanors" revealed in the book True Mom Confessions, published this month. In the introduction, author Romi Lassally explains that she launched TrueMomConfessons.com in 2007 as a forum for women to share their transgressions. "Online, under the veil of anonymity and with 24/7 accessibility, I believed that the conversation about the REAL and not the IDEAL of motherhood could flourish," she writes. The book is a compendium of Lassally's favorite admissions, which pour in daily from all over the country.

Welcome to bad-mom culture, in which women don't just own up to their maternal shortcomings -- they flaunt them. Moms have been publicly admitting to their mixed feelings about motherhood at least since 1976, when Adrienne Rich compared herself to a monster in the feminist classic Of Woman Born. ...But with the advent of confessional culture and the ascension of blogs and virtual message boards, bad-mom culture and its gleeful impropriety have flourished.

This is evident even from the names of the Web's many mommybloggers. With their almost macho grandstanding, each one is more rebellious-sounding than the next. A Suburban Mom: Notes from an Asylum and Psycho Supermom make much of their own craziness. Other mothers tout their questionable habits, as with Adventures of Leelo and his Potty-Mouthed Mom and Martini Mom (tagline: "Like a soccer mom ...with vodka"). A recent post on Bad Mom -- not to be confused with Bad Mummy or Bad Mutha Blogger -- states, "It seems like my house will never, ever be completely clean & orderly," requests, "Call me in for dinner when you're done, please?," and features a photo of a coffee mug next to a beer.

In some ways, these maternal rebels are simply reacting to the very real anxiety that women have always felt about being perceived as bad mothers. Though there is a smattering of bad-dad Web sites, the idea is practically redundant: Most any sitcom father makes clear that paternal figures are supposed to be a little bit bad, an antidote to the steadfast mom. A bad mother? Now that's a scandal.

Second wave feminists stuck in the first stage of grief: "is there a future for our so-called movement"?

The American Prospect has just posted this perceptive essay by Courtney Martin, a daughter of 70s feminism, inspired by a speak-out in New York on the "Unfinished Business" of the women's movement:

... Most of the voices from the audience sounded eerily similar. They spoke longingly about the exuberant past, characterized by abundant energy and "sisterhood." They lamented that no locatable movement exists anymore, that no one is organized, that no one is out in the streets. At one point, [Esther] Broner even admitted, "I interpret everything through that time."

With the utmost respect for Broner, whom I found refreshing and radical, I think that this approach is at the center of contemporary feminism's biggest challenge. We are intergenerationally fractured, right down to the most foundational of questions: Is there a formal feminist movement anymore? Does there need to be?

Members of the second-wave generation developed their feminist identity during the heyday of direct action. They had ecstatic, very physical experiences of feminism. They went to meetings -- so, so many meetings. They pounded the pavement. They participated in direct-action spectacles like taking over the offices of The Ladies Home Journal. They yelled until their vocal chords were raw.

Now these women are older, many of them happily shifting into what Jane Fonda calls "the third act" -- a stage of life when they don't give a shit what anyone else thinks, and they want to see the world live up to its God damn potential, once and for all. They start dying their hair funky shades of red. They urge their husband to get a hobby as they head out for another expletive- and laughter-filled lunch with their friends -- other women who are funding feminist causes, editing feminist publications, and leading local feminist efforts. In some ways, it's a return to their earnest youth -- a time less fraught with the compromises that come with juggling families and careers. They're prioritizing changing the world again. And as such, they seem to experience an old hankering for an unapologetic women's movement that they can see, hear, and touch.

I don't blame them. All of their stories -- about marching in the streets, about taking over offices, about riding around the country in vans, falling in love – not only sounds like they had a whole lot of fun, but also managed to make some profound political changes. But I also recognize that it is a time that has passed. Not only is the women's movement -- as it was known in the 1960s -- over, but women my age don't even agree on what a "woman" really is.

Sometimes I feel as if my generation -- women in our 20s and 30s -- are feminism's Frankensteins. After all, Broner herself was responsible for building some of the first women's studies programs in the nation. Now a generation is graduating from them using words like "genderqueer" -- meaning that one doesn't identify exclusively as male or female. We generally aren't down for the subtle messaging by many older women who believe that females in positions of power are inherently less violent or more community-minded than their male counterparts, a view that Bitch magazine founder Lisa Jervis hilariously called "femmenism."