One woman’s consequences are another man’s advantages
This day may be why the Equal Rights Amendment struggled for ratification. Opponents needed to keep it from becoming an obstacle to overturning Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe is an atrocity for women’s equality. By intention.
The American fringe right has longed to return to the halcyon days of the 1950s that never were. Of barefoot and pregnant and poodle skirts, but without all that bother about strong unions, a muscular middle class, and Brown v. Board. “Gee our old LaSalle ran great,” sang Archie and Edith.
What Dobbs will do for men anxious about their preeminence in a world of working women and brown-skinned immigrants is take half the population back there without needing a plutonium-fueled DeLorean. All it took were some Supreme Court justices nominated by a president who lost the popular vote in both his elections and attempted an insurrection.
If Associate Justice Clarence Thomas has his way, we’ll return to those days, too, by restricting access to contraception. The economic impacts on women will resemble the effects of red-lining on the generational net worth of Black families.
The New Yorker‘s Sheelah Kolhatkar writes:
The concept of providing support for working parents through paid family leave and affordable child care is already controversial. “We don’t support families. We don’t support people who are bearing children,” Khiara M. Bridges, a professor of law at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law, told me. Restricting access to contraception would “exacerbate inequality that already exists. The wealthy will be able to control the timing and spacing of their children, and those who are poor and working class will not. It’s folks who are unprivileged who will be forced to resort to unsafe methods of avoiding pregnancy or terminating pregnancy. Or be forced into a state of constant childbearing.”
Access to contraception was established by rulings in two Supreme Court cases, Griswold v. Connecticut, in 1965, which found that states could not restrict access to birth control for married couples, and Eisenstadt v. Baird, in 1972, which extended that same right to unmarried people. The contraceptive choices available then were somewhat different from what’s available now, but they gave women greater control over when they became pregnant and with whom, and that change had undeniable economic benefits. In the first major study of how the dissemination of the birth-control pill affected young, single women in college, Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, also an economics professor at Harvard, found that the education and career choices of women changed dramatically, and the average age of marriage jumped up, after the pill became widely available. In 1970, for example, women comprised ten per cent of first-year law-school students; in 1980, they made up thirty-six per cent. And almost fifty per cent of college-graduate women born in 1950 got married before age twenty-three; fewer than thirty per cent of women born in 1957, who would have reached adulthood several years after the Eisenstadt v. Baird decision, were married by age twenty-three. All of these factors contributed to greater earning power and financial resources for the women involved. A later study credited the pill with helping to narrow the gap in pay between men and women, decreasing it by ten per cent in the nineteen-eighties, and then an additional thirty-one per cent in the nineties.
Conservative legislators have already tightened access to contraception in several states. Science has nothing to do with why. The religious beliefs of a minority of Americans have replaced facts in law, says Wendy Parmet, the co-director of the Center for Health Policy and Law at Northeastern University:
“I don’t think whatever gains women have made in the workplace and in political representation are guaranteed. If the Court moved us back to the nineteen-fifties in terms of access to contraception and abortion, well then, I think we would have some of the same social and economic consequences we had then.”
One woman’s consequences are another man’s economic and social advantages. In Africa, in Asia, and in the Arab world, women still walk “two steps behind” men economically.
“There is no doubt that culture and religion play some role, but the fact remains that over the past 30 years, and particularly in the last decade, we have seen the rising tide of very conservative forces in [the Arab world] – largely supported by regional governments themselves – that are promoting a regressive agenda towards women,” says Sanam Anderlini, co-founder of the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN) and a senior fellow at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Here as well. Those suffering status anxiety support a revanchist movement intent on keeping this a man’s world. They now hold a super-majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.
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