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.

Sarah in Wonderland

Sarah in Wonderland

It seems incredible that the single nomination of a relatively unknown woman, governor of an enormous yet little populated state, who was mayor of a small town just a short while ago, could have had such a sweeping influence not only on her party but also on media perceptions of the presidential race. But John McCain's nomination of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate seems to have had generated a storm of popular interest, to the point where admirers and detractors alike call her “Hurricane Sarah.”

Trying to figure out just who Sarah Palin is, and what she stands for, much less how she might govern, is a bit like looking at someone in a fun house mirror. Every time you think you've focused on one aspect of the image, you realize that you're just seeing another distortion. To conservative women, especially white conservative women, Sarah Palin is the new Hilary Clinton, a “feminist” they can love because she's so “like them.” For conservative men, Palin seems to be the equivalent of the “trophy wife,” the vice-presidential arm-piece who makes an old and not very inspiring John McCain suddenly seem the man to be envied. And for women on the left who are used to having the “feminist” label to themselves, albeit at the price of being mocked as “feminazis,” Palin is a conundrum: a woman with ambition, drive, and charisma, but who also espouses policies and beliefs that most self-described feminists wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.

And then there are the women—of the left, right, and middle-- who don't necessarily want to judge Palin for her individual choices regarding work and family—but who find some of those choices disturbing, not just because Palin has a larger family than the norm but because she has a family with special needs running the gamut from the baby with Down's syndrome to the pregnant teen.

However, Sarah Palin does have a political record, if a brief one, and it tells a story of some interesting reversals and contradictions, especially if you hold it up against the image of Palin we see through the prism of her political handlers or left-wing bloggers or even her own convention speech.

I found it interesting that Anchorage Daily News columnist Michael Carey,who has followed Palin since she ran for governor, described her convention speech “very uncharacteristic” in it partisan attacks. In his judgment, these attacks on Democrats and particularly her attacks on Barack Obama were "probably inserted by some guys who think they're very smart and are from Washington.”

Noting that Palin's political battles in Alaska have been waged more within her own party than across part lines, he added: “People find... it hard to understand that her biggest problem in Alaska has been with the most conservative elite Republicans and with the oil industry. It hasn't been with the Democrats. She's worked well with the Democrats in the legislature. Legislation has passed that she wanted with their assistance, and it's crucial to her to have the Democrats up there,” (“Finding the Real Sarah Palin in her Convention Speech,” Weekend Edition Sunday, 9/7/08, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94365311).

Palin may compare herself to a “pitbull with lipstick,” but in fact her governing record on spending tax dollars has been less ideological than pragmatic. When it suited her interests to lobby for millions of dollars in earmarks, she did so, even as she now criticizes Obama for also engaging in earmark spending, something you'd be hard pressed to find any Congressperson not guilty of. The infamous “Bridge to Nowhere,” to which Palin claims she said, “thanks but no thanks,” was in fact a bridge that she supported during her 2006 campaign for governor. She only formally rejected the project after Congress deleted wording specifying funds for the bridge and when it was a political dead horse (see Politifact.com http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/680/).

What voters may want to consider in thinking about Palin is not just the relative brevity of her tenure as governor (18 months), but the fact that she has been governing a state with a substantial surplus and no major crises. Apart from her success in negotiating with oil companies and getting a new gas pipeline, Governor Palin has undertaken no other policy initiatives. Ironically, one of her biggest detractors is Republican State Senate Leader Lyda Green, who said she thought it was a joke when someone called her to tell her that Palin had been selected as McCain's running mate. "She's not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?" Green told The Anchorage Daily News (8/28/08 http://www.adn.com/politics/story/510249.htm). Green is also from Palin's hometown of Wasilla.

Finally, although Palin has been upfront about her pro-life ideology and open about her religious beliefs, she has yet to provide full disclosure of her views on the separation of church and state and to what extent her religious views will inform her public policy.

Many conservatives have condoned and even celebrated Palin's teenage daughter's choice to have her baby as palpable evidence of her pro-life credentials, even though the pregnancy also violates the conservative belief in abstinence before marriage.

But what does Palin think about teen pregnancy and public policy? Does she remain committed to abstinence only sex education in the face of this personal instance of its failure?

And what about her views of the Iraq war as a reflection of a divine plan? "Pray [for] our military men and women who are striving to do what is right also for this country — that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God," Palin told the Wasilla Assembly of God this past June.

Some might wonder about how this view of U.S. military policy would play in international circles, particularly in Muslim countries where an explicitly Christian rhetoric evokes fears of age old Western assaults on Islam as President George W. Bush found out when he used the term “crusade” to describe the war.

Before voters assume they know who Sarah Palin is, they should be asking some hard questions about Palin's past and contrasting her record in Alaska with the new political makeover of Sarah Palin as Vice-Presidential messiah to the Republican party.

Hillary's Tears

Hillary's Tears

The media has practically run amok analyzing Hillary Clinton's “emotional” moment captured on video and now playing at an Internet site near you. What did it mean? Was it scripted or spontaneous? Did it really have an effect on the upset of the polling projections in last Tuesday's New Hampshire primary? What does it say about women voters?

I think that what viewers, and by extension, voters, saw in Hillary's response to the inquiry: “How do you do it?” says more about us than it does about her.

We're not mind-readers, and we'll never know for sure how much of her response was sincere and how much was performative, the self-conscious reaction of a seasoned politician who has learned that she is always “on” whenever she presents herself to the public.

As gendered human beings, we always respond to some degree, in “scripted” ways to certain situations because we learn from infancy that the world sees us as “male” and “female” and automatically sets up certain expectations that frame how we behave and also how our words, gestures, and body language are perceived by others.

So in some ways, it doesn't matter so much what Hillary's “emotional moment” meant to her as what it meant to us and what it reveals about our own individual expectations of who she “really” is.

Rush Limbaugh predictably mocked Clinton, calling it her “waa-waa” moment, thus demonstrating his own bullying instincts and the schoolyard vulgarity that characterizes his Clinton shtick and makes “right-wing” and “rudeness” nearly synonymous among talk radio ranters of his ilk.

Katha Pollitt, veteran feminist in the trenches, saw the immediate stereotype of female weakness and noted that the video raised “the oldest dumbest canard about women: they're too emotional to hold power.” For her Hillary was not so much an individual woman, as a symbol of the double standards women still must confront in public life.

Most ordinary folks, without an ax to grind, saw Hillary's tears in terms of their already established expectations about her: “If she is breaking down now, how would she act under pressure as president?” grumbled one 52-year-old male on nytimes.com. Women could be equally harsh, as a 46-year-old female accountant demonstrated when she complained of Clinton's subsequent comment that “Some of us are right, some of us are wrong.” “This is exactly what is wrong with her campaign,” she wrote. “As long as she continues the 'I am right and you are wrong' mantra, there will be no collaboration, no cohesiveness, no unit.” One can fairly assume that neither of them were Clinton supporters to begin with.

But evidently, many other women, saw themselves in that moment of vulnerability: Those of us who call ourselves “feminists” and don't see it as the “F-word." Younger women who caught in Clinton's weariness the exhaustion of all the women before them who fought so hard just so a woman could run for President and not have her campaign seen as a joke. Women who were fed up with one moment of vulnerability being blown so out of proportion.

Primary season in a national election is not all the different from courting season. We project our deepest desires, fears, and aspirations onto individuals that we can never really know on a personal level and then interpret their behavior in terms of our pre-existing ideas about who they really are: white/black, male/female, Democrat/Republican, wife/husband, mother/father etc.

Any female candidate faces a double burden of conflicting and deep-seated cultural expectations about who she should be as a leader and as a woman. We expect her to be strong, but not too strong, vulnerable, but not weak. It's an exhausting balancing act for all professional women, and we hear women's awareness of that tension in the self-conscious laughter that arose immediately when another woman asked Hillary Clinton: “How do you do it?” It's a question that many women, struggling to balance children and career or the needs of a spouse or partner with their own individual aspirations, ask themselves all the time.

Maureen Dowd wrote in her New York Times op-ed that “in a weirdly narcissistic way, [Hillary] was crying for us” and for the country's failure “to grasp how much it needs her.”

I saw it differently, and like many of the women who witnessed her response to a crucial question – how do you do it ?– I believe many women saw themselves in that moment of vulnerability.

For women, Hillary's tears, welling but not shed, were those tears many women find welling up in such moments of fatigue and vulnerability when we reflect on just how hard it is for us to manage the juggling act that our society demands of us and that it often judges so harshly when we enter public life.

So before we ask ourselves what Hillary's tears meant for the voters of the New Hampshire primary, perhaps we might also ask ourselves what those tears meant for us as well. It could be revealing.