The Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act – A real victory for feminists and families everywhere

My family often remarks on my being a feminist as if I had some kind of slightly embarrassing disease. "You know Beth, she's a [pause] feminist." Frankly, I find this flattering and a bit funny. On the one hand, it's rather enjoyable for a middle-aged woman to be regarded as somewhat dangerous when I usually feel as if I should be labeled “mostly harmless,” like the Earth in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. On the other hand, feminism has fractured into so many factions --- radical, third world, postmodern, third-wave--- that the term is danger of meaning just about anything you want it to. That is, except for the negative connotation that equates “feminist” with “humorless man hater” – that association continues on as strong as ever, but I've never actually met a “feminist” of that description, and I've been happily married for over twenty years so I can safely assume my husband doesn't think of me that way either.

When I do think of myself as a “feminist,” it is usually in terms that are pragmatic rather than ideological. Feminism, for me, encompasses political and social responses to inequities between men and women, and the most serious of these are inequalities before the law and inequality in pay. That is why I am so thrilled that President Obama has signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law because it address both of these inequalities in the case of a true miscarriage of justice. “Equal pay is by no means just a women's issue, it's a family issue," the President said. "And in this economy, when so many folks are already working harder for less and struggling to get by, the last thing they can afford is losing part of each month's paycheck to simple and plain discrimination,” ("Obama signs first bill into law, on equal pay," AP).

Lily Ledbetter is not an ideologue, and it is questionable whether she ever thought of herself as a “feminist,” but she was dismayed to find that after working at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. plant in Gadsden, Alabama for almost twenty years, there had been a sizable discrepancy in pay between her and her male co-workers. Ledbetter pursued a discrimination case all the way to the Supreme Court where her case was rejected based on a catch-22 argument that she should have filed suit within 180 days of the first occurrence of discrimination even though she did not discover the injury until she reached retirement.

Lily Ledbetter will not receive one dime of the more than $200,000 in salary, pension and social security benefits she lost through the discrimination she experienced, but she was willing to fight for this legislation to ensure that our “nation's daughters and granddaughters will have a better deal.” To me the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act embodies the core of what feminism should be about, particularly in an age where Census Bureau figures show that women still earn about 78 cents for every dollar men get for doing equivalent jobs.

While much feminist rhetoric has become embroiled in stale debates over “politically-correct” terminology, this new law marks a real advance for women who face so many serious obstacles towards true economic equality. For example, women disproportionately bear the costs of child care and are more likely to need subsidized care in order to be able to earn a living wage; in many states women face discrimination in health care costs without any legal protection to prevent this from happening, and of course, women's longer life spans make it even more important that they save for retirement.

Women already face social and cultural barriers that make it difficult for them to ask for raises, and they also run the risk of being perceived in more negative terms when they are assertive about asking for more pay. There are many subtle forms of bias that women negotiate every day, including the social assumption that men “need” jobs more than women, or that women are more likely to give up their jobs to raise children, and therefore don't “deserve” the same career investment that male employees get.

What Lily Ledbetter has fought for, the rights of women to take instances of pay discrimination to court without facing unrealistic constraints on their ability to find out about and prepare evidence to support their cases, makes it much more likely that employers will think twice before paying men and women different compensation for the same work. For taking that important step towards a level playing field, Lily Ledbetter and the many women and men who worked to bring this legislation to Congress and fought until it reached the President's desk deserve our thanks for a truly “feminist” victory.

When Your Inbox Disappears

It's scary to think about how much “free” stuff we depend on: we watch network TV, and check out books from the library, and use coupons that promise “buy one get one free” – all on the assumption that we're getting something for nothing, when we really are paying, one way or another. The network takes our time (and hopes we watch its ads), the library stays open because of our taxes and donations, and the “free” sweater we got with our coupon is actually one-half of the total we spent on the first one.

But most insidious of all is our dependency on the “free” communication networks of the Internet. Take away Wikipedia or Google search, and I feel lost. Take away my free email, and I'm bereft, not just of my primary way of communicating with friends and colleagues, but also of all the information I've save in those messages: the instructions, the jokes, the stories, and of course, the contact information.

The fragility of this communication system came home to me in a very real way a few days ago when I was reading messages in my Yahoo Inbox. Suddenly, as I was in the middle of a reply, I received a server error message, and then another one, and as the little hour glass icon stubbornly turned round and round before my eyes, my email messages began to disappear.

Unable to find the scroll bar on the right hand side of my Yahoo window, I used my arrow keys to try to move to the next message. And then it was gone. I moved again, and another message vanished.

I tried to see if I was somehow accidentally deleting the messages, but my Trash box was empty as well. So I closed the window, and rechecked my mail. Now my Inbox was completely empty; every single message there, read and unread, had disappeared into the ether.

So I did what I always do when confronted by a serious technical glitch; I called my local IT guy, otherwise known as my husband. “What did you do?” he asked accusingly. “What did I do>” I answered indignantly. “What did Yahoo do to my mail? That's what you should be asking.”

Suffice it to say that despite “live” chat with two Yahoo customer service agents who asked a lot of questions and then disappeared, perhaps to take a tea break somewhere on the other side of the world where they are undoubtedly underpaid to provide minimal assistance to end users like me. After all, Yahoo Mail is a “free” service, and therefore Yahoo is not going to go out of its way to help those who get into trouble using it.

Still it was discouraging to wake up the next morning and find out that “Santi” had never reappeared in any form to answer my increasingly urgent queries: “Are you there?” “Hello, hello, hello.” “Please contact me at -------------- when you find out what went wrong” “Is there anyone else there who can help me?”

By dint of much searching, I finally found a link where I could request restoration of my email, which I did, not realizing that when someone finally set back the clock twelve hours, it would completely overwrite any messages that I'd downloaded in the interim. “We're not yet set up to support integration of messages. We regret the inconvenience” is the gist of the email message that arrived to inform me of this unfortunate side effect, well after I could do anything about it.

So here I am, a chastened user of the wonders of the Internet, rapidly transferring my most precious emails to my Gmail account. And why do I trust Google more than Yahoo, you might ask? Gmail is also a “free” service and one that is still in “beta” mode, at least officially.

Well, the truth is that there is one thing that trumps “free” on the Internet, and that is having “connections,” not in the sense of high speed access, but actually knowing a human being I can call on when I'm in trouble. Even in cyberspace, it's still worthwhile to have that human connection, and as long as I know I can reach a real person at Google, their “free” service offers me a lot more value than I can ever expect from Yahoo.

So caveat emptor, and while you take pleasure in the freebies of the Internet, don't forget that they can come with an unexpected price.

Change for Good

I still remember when I first heard the news that two planes had hit the World Trade Center towers on September 11th, 2001. I remember the overwhelming feelings of shock, horror, grief, and anger.

After that day, people said that the world had changed and that nothing would ever be the same again, and in some ways that prophecy has come true, at least in terms of America's innocence about its insulation from acts of international terrorism.

Tomorrow, Americans will again mark an occasion that some people claim will change the Presidency forever. No race to win the highest office in the land will ever be the same again.

On Tuesday, January 20th, 2009, a man of mixed African and American heritage, claiming both black and white parents, and embodying an ancestry unlike any other American president will take the oath of office and break a color barrier I never thought I would see breached in my lifetime.

This time the feelings that many Americans are experiencing run the gamut from joy to celebration to hope and perhaps to an underlying degree of anxiety, either on behalf of Mr. Obama's safety or out of personal concern about what a “black” presidency will mean for white America.

All eyes will be turned to Mr. Obama tomorrow, not just the eyes of Americans who will feel the direct effects of his Presidency, but the eyes of the entire world, who are watching with wonder and amazement at the improbable success of this unconventional candidate.

Barack Obama has captured the imagination of so many Americans and so many people around the world precisely because he represents so many things to so many different people.

He is an intellectual, educated at Columbia and Harvard and a professor at the University of Chicago. He is a member of an academic elite, but he is not an elitist, choosing rather to emphasize the opportunities that education offers all of its citizens.

Despite his academic background, he is also a pragmatist, a man who remains calm in the face of crisis, and who welcomes dissenting views, even as he remains confident in his own judgment.

He is a man on the very edge of the boomer generation, a man who only knew the Civil Rights movement, and women's liberation, and the Vietnam War from the perspective of a child. He is a product of its legacy without bearing the burden of taking one side or another during one of America's most turbulent periods of social change.

He is a man who has transcended class, race, and geographic boundaries. He has known poverty in his youth and witnessed poverty in Indonesia. He has refused to let himself be bound by race but has taken the unusual perspective, now shared by a growing number of Americans, that having parents of two different races gives to our understanding of racial difference and how it might be bridged. He is a citizen of the United States, but also a citizen of the world, having lived abroad and traveled to countries in Africa and Southeast Asia that have largely remained apart from the consciousness of most Americans.

He is a man who knows the Constitution intimately, having taught its legal history, but his interest in this seminal document exceeds the boundaries of the classroom and the courtroom to include his personal knowledge of what it means to fight for social justice and to survive the rough and tumble politics of Chicago.

He is a man who does not pay lip service to the ideals of community service but uses the day before his inauguration to call all Americans to participate in their communities by cleaning up parks, serving meals to the homeless, giving blood, gaining new skills through training, and sharing these experiences with friends and families.

There is certainly good reason to say that the world will have changed after Barack Obama takes office tomorrow, and given the fervent response of so many Americans to this historic occasion, we can also claim that this is change for good, a lasting change, and one that will benefit all those citizens who see in President Obama, a symbol of their dreams for their own future and the future of the nation.

The Invisible Bubble

Today George W. Bush gave the last press conference of his presidency, and it was a particularly painful one to watch. The joke about the press “misunderestimating” him fell flat, and even the President's small steps towards reflection were tempered by a rhetoric that was alternately passive (“I was told, “I was disappointed” ) and defensively aggressive, “I don't see how I can get back home in Texas and look in the mirror and be proud of what I see if I allowed the loud voices ...to prevent me from doing I thought was necessary to protect this country.”

The mistakes President Bush acknowledged were the same ones he's mentioned in the recent past: placing the Mission Accomplished banner on an aircraft carrier just as U.S. control of Iraq was unraveling and pursuing the privatization of social security instead of focusing on immigration reform. The Bush Administration has had few lucky breaks of late, but one could say that the social security “failure” was truly a blessing in disguise given the precipitous fall of the stock market in recent months.

Bush quickly recast other “mistakes” as “disappointments,” or even as “things that didn't go according to plan,” and there was a moment of inadvertent black humor when he stated that he was “disappointed” not to have found “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, and I could only wonder a) did he really want Saddam Hussein or any other dictator to have such weapons? Or b) did he want them so that he could justify one of the most ill-advised, costly, and destabilizing wars in U.S. history?

Wouldn't it have been more appropriate to respond to this discovery with a feeling of relief that Iraq did not pose such a threat to the U.S. or its neighbors, and then secondly, to feel and express some remorse for making such a momentous and far-reaching decision to go to war on a false pretext?

Perhaps the most telling moment occurred when the President insisted that he did not “live in a bubble” and did not feel “isolated” during his Presidency. For a White House whose main information source was Fox News, and given Bush's repeated boasts that he did not pay attention to polls or even pay much attention to the press, it stretches the imagination to believe that this administration or this President really wanted to hear any voices but those that echoed their own beliefs and reinforced their often smug sense that their world view was the right one.

But I felt a real sense of poignancy to hear a man who has been leader of the most powerful nation in the world for eight years remain so sublimely ignorant of or oblivious to the deep anger that many on the left and the right feel about the actions of his administration and the effects on the way the American government - not the American people or American culture--but specifically this administration is perceived around the world.

“I don't why they get angry. I don't know why they get hostile,” he said dismissively. Bush is so invested in his image of himself as fighting “the Enemy” that he has no means of seeing the world in any terms but the starkest black and white.

"You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror,” President Bush said in a joint news conference with Jacques Chirac in November 2001, and while the world and the American public have grown weary of such dogmatic pronouncements, President Bush seems unable to shift from this single-minded view of the world.

Thus while reflecting on what he could have done better in his response to Hurricane Katrina, Bush could only think in terms of the grand gesture: “If I had taken Air Force One to New Orleans or Baton Rouge, law enforcement would have been pulled away from the mission,” he protested, as if the citizens who suffered from the storm's aftermath were not more concerned about the long delays in receiving supplies, the inadequate evacuation plans, lack of replacement housing, and the actual failure of the city's levees.

Similarly Bush rejected outright any notion that the scandals of Gitmo and Abu Grahib had damaged America's “moral standing,” reducing the world's outrage at the photos and the reports of waterboarding to the voices of some malcontent “elites” in Europe.

So now George W. Bush goes back home to Texas, hoping that history will restore his reputation according to his simplified “good versus evil” narrative, and unaware that he is still living in a bubble--not one imposed by the isolation of the Presidency--but one he has created himself through his steadfast assertion that all of his actions have been taken in defense of the homeland and therefore are not open to question.

Bush claims that the so-called “burdens of office” are overstated because he perceives any form of introspection or self-examination as a form of self-pity, not recognizing that the most respected Presidents in our history, like Abraham Lincoln, became icons of Presidential greatness, not because they were once unpopular for making the “tough decisions,” but because they made those decisions, without a sense of absolute confidence, but rather with doubts, with regrets, and with a respect for and awareness of those who opposed them. No one living in a bubble will ever be able to make that claim.

Be It Resolved

I'm not a big believer in New Year's resolutions, but since I actually managed to keep two of them last year, I thought this might be a good time to take stock of how they affected me.

Last January I was feeling at a loss over what to do with myself. I knew that I could not teach at the University of New Mexico because I was taking a three week trip to Chile in the middle of the semester, but I couldn't imagine not working at all.

So I resolved to do something I'd never done before, and I began substitute teaching at my son's high school. The results surprised me: I had never taught at this level before, and I liked the rapid give and take of a high school classroom.

Unlike my college classes where students are often much shyer about speaking in front of people they don't know well, these kids had no problems talking, sometime too much. And they weren't shy about asking for a “study hall.” “No way,” I told them. “They're not paying me to babysit you.” There were groans, but they usually gave in with a good grace.

For a class on poetry, I started by asking the students to write down one thing they liked about studying poetry and one thing they didn't like. “Analyzing the symbolism to death,” was the consensus on the negative side. So I had them first study the meter and sounds of Emily Dickinson's “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” rather than looking for deeper meanings, and many of them were able to find the symbolism on their own.

At the end of the class, one girl looked at me in surprise and said, “No one's ever asked our opinion like that before. Thank you.” Those are the moments that make teaching a pleasure.

My second resolution was to start writing this blog, and that too has had surprising results. I hadn't done any writing for pleasure since I finished my book nearly ten years ago, and I was worried about not being good at it any more.

I also hadn't followed many blogs, and I had no idea what the “style” of a blog was supposed to be. So being the inveterate academic that I am, and I went to the library and checked out a book on the “best blogs” and found that it was pretty much the wild west on the blogosphere: hardly any rules applied.

Finally, consoling myself with the thought that probably no one was going to read it besides my friends and family, I put up my first post, “Why me?” followed by 66 more posts.

To my amazement, people actually read it. I received many comments (more offline than on) from friends, family, and people I've never even met.

Writing this often can be hard. I worry that I'll run out of things to write about, and then I read something, or hear a story on the radio, or my kids surprise or vex me, and there I am off again to my laptop to blog about it. Becoming a regular writer again has not only given me a voice, it's also brought me great solace and a deeper understanding of who I am.

So what lies ahead for 2009? Check out my next blog.