As March marks Women's History Month, it's an opportunity to honor women's accomplishments throughout history. It's also a time to reflect on the progression of women's rights and contemplate the future we envision for women.
Women's Rights Timeline at a glance.
1, Passed by Congress June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920, the 19th amendment granted women the right to vote
2, In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was enacted. The FLSA contained a statement that with fixing wage orders, “No classification shall be made under this section on the basis of age or sex.”
3, The Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963 requiring men and women to be paid equally when doing the same work
4, In 1965, the US Supreme Court ruled that married couples could use birth control in Griswold v. Connecticut. This ruling paved the wave for reproductive freedoms and birth control legalization to extend to unmarried women, as happened after Eisenstadt v. Baird
5, In the United States, the 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade established the legal right to abortion.
6, It wasn't until 1974, when the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed, that women in the U.S. were granted the right to open a bank account on their own. Technically, women won the right to open a bank account in the 1960s, but many banks still refused to let women do so without a signature from their husbands.
7, On June 24, 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned 50 years of precedent, overruling Roe v. Wade.
In the U.S., merely a century ago, women were not allowed to vote. Just six decades ago, women didn't have reproductive freedoms, and half a century ago, they were not entitled to have their own bank accounts.
It's easy to forget that the rights we currently enjoy were not always guaranteed. I, too, took them for granted until the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade served as a stark wake-up call.
If the abortion right can be taken away, other rights could be too. Each of our current rights was hard-won by those who came before us, and we must remain vigilant in their defense. We owe it to ourselves, as well as to future generations, to safeguard and expand upon these rights for a more equitable society.
I would like to share an article that my friend wrote for The International Women's Day 2024.
The World is Moving Forward, But What About the United States?
It's International Women's Day on Friday.
Women's rights have made great strides from being essentially their father's and then their husband's property to having equal rights in most respects. However, in the US, women still don't have constitutionally guaranteed rights, as the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was never certified.
Equal rights for women is usually based on the 14th amendment, which also specifies that only males of age have the right to vote, thereby implying that women regardless of their age do not have rights as adults. (In some other countries women not having rights as adults means that their husbands have guardianship over them like parents here have over their children and that wifes have to obey husbands even to the point where rape in marriage is legal). With the 14th amendment the word "male" appears in the constitution for the first time. The 19th amendment specified that women were allowed to vote (wording it "on account of sex"). To this day the word female does not appear in the constitution.
Roe vs Wade was the landmark supreme court decision that allowed women to have abortions, because criminalizing abortion in most instances violated a constitutional right to privacy. Think what you want about abortion, but it has been said that the right to contraception and even the right of LBGTQ+ also hinge on this same supreme court decision, because it is based on privacy.
As late as 1965 did the supreme court rule that married couples only (not single women) would be allowed to use contraceptives for the purpose of preventing conception (as compared to using them to cure or prevent diseases). This was based on the privacy of married couples. This is less than 60 years ago. In 1972 it became legal for unmarried people to possess and use contraceptives the same way as married couples were (based on the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution). It is important to note that married couples got this right because of the concept of privacy in the first place.
With the legal ability to plan their families women increasingly entered the workplace, higher education, and public office. This was a huge win for women's rights. This benefitted men as well. For example, with women also providing, men would have more time to spend with their kids. Men would no longer be burdend with carrying sole responsibility for income. Men could take more risks with their own carriers with a second income through their wives.
With the reversal of Roe vs Wade, the principle of privacy as it applies to contraception, abortion, and LBGTQ+ has been taken away.
(This was supposedly to give decisions over these rights back to the states, but now the supreme court will make a ruling over mifepristone. We will see if abortion restrictions become federal. Now there are bills to introduce fetal personhood from time of conception in some states. At this rate I wouldn't be surprised if the word fetus will make it into the US constitution before the word female ever will).
There are a number of organizations that consider the rights to abortion care and contraception a human right. After Roe vs Wade was overturned, Human Rights Watch called it a human rights crisis. The United Nations also considers rights to abortion care and contraception a human right saying that restricting those rights is discrimination against women and girls, because restricting those rights is restricting a medical treatment to a medical problem that only affects on sex. The UN says it can even amount to violence against women and girls and goes so far as to say that it can even amount torture.
There are other organizations, for example Amnesty International and WHO.
There are other organizations, for example Amnesty International and WHO.
I don't know why this issue is not covered that way in the news very much?
The erosion of these women's rights seem to be driven by pro-life organizations that are more like special interest groups. For example, there are a number of states which don't even allow women and girls to have abortions in case of rape or incest. And some of the bills don't seem to be at all about perserving life. For example, even if the fetus has no chance of survival, women in some states don't have the right to an abortion. But abortion is safer than carrying a pregnancy to term and giving birth. Maternal morbidity and mortality are high in the US compared to other developed nations. And this is especially pronounced in states that have the strictest abortion (and contraception) restrictions. Should those states not be concerned about the well-being of the pregnant person? Incidentally teen pregancy is also high in the US compared to other developed nations and especially so in many states with the strictest restrictions. Also, unintuitively abortion rates are higher in places with stricter abortion laws.
This seems to be more driving to take women back out of the workforce (so that they won't have financial independence form their husbands anymore) and to take them back into the home.
Here is a quote from one such pro-life organization (regarding nation building in Iraq):
"They will inaugurate programs which will subject Iraqi children, especially girls, to graphic sex education programs."
It is well known that sex ed reduces teen-pregnancy.
"It gets worse. The “gender advisors” (this is what they are really called), will provide assertiveness training to Iraqi women, urging them out of the home into the marketplace. They will organize special courses (reserved for women, of course) in which they are urged to run for public office and start their own businesses."
Some of those organizations (pro-life organizations) even seem to compare abortion providers with organized crime.
I don't believe that the average pro-life person has this sentiment.
By the way, as per the Riverbend blog it appears that women were well of in Iraq compared to other Arab nations before the American invasion and occupation. Herself being a computer science graduate, who was working as a programmer/network administrator for a database/software company in Baghdad, she writes women in Irak were much better off than women in most other Arab countries and even some Western countries: Women made up 50% of the workforce (being lawyes, doctors, nurses, teachers, professors, dean, architects, programmers, and more) and got equal salaries. She writes women came and went as they pleased and wore what they wanted. But not anymore. She says that she was let go from her job, because her job "could not protect her" and she goes on to write that a prominent electrial engineer "one of the smartest females in the country" was executed after having been threatend by fundamentalists who told her "to stay at home because she was a woman, she shouldn't been in charge".
What is our vision for the future of women's rights in the US?
References:
2, Book, How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America - Cristina Page
3, https://www.npr.org/sections/
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/
4, https://en.wikipedia.org/
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/
https://www.hrw.org/report/
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/
https://www.hrw.org/report/
7, https://www.ohchr.org/sites/
https://www.thelancet.com/
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/
https://www.amnestyusa.org/
https://news.un.org/en/story/
https://www.who.int/news-room/
https://www.thelancet.com/
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/
https://www.amnestyusa.org/
https://news.un.org/en/story/
https://www.who.int/news-room/
8, https://www.kff.org/other/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.guttmacher.org/
https://data.unicef.org/topic/
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/
https://worldpopulationreview.
(https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/
https://www.nichd.nih.gov/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.
https://www.businessinsider.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.guttmacher.org/
https://data.unicef.org/topic/
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/
https://worldpopulationreview.
(https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/
https://www.nichd.nih.gov/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.
https://www.businessinsider.
9, https://www.
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