RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : October Interviews with Poppy Northcutt, Maneesha James, Seth Holmes, and Thomas Zigal

Frances "Poppy" Northcutt with Rag Radio's Thorne Dreyer in the studios of KPFT-FM in Houston, Friday, October 25, 2013. Photo by Guy Schwartz / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcasts:
Thorne Dreyer interviews Poppy Northcutt,
Maneesha James, Seth Holmes, and Tom Zigal

Our October guests address Texas feminist history, issues involved with death and dying, the plight of migrant farmworkers, and the post-Katrina craziness.

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / November 11, 2013

Thorne Dreyer's guests on Rag Radio in October 2013 included pioneering Houston feminist Frances "Poppy" Northcutt, president of both the Houston and Texas chapters of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and a historic figure in the women's movement; psychotherapist, meditation facilitator, and death and dying counselor Maneesha James; anthropologist Seth Holmes, author of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies about the plight of migrant farmworkers; and novelist Thomas Zigal, author of Many Rivers to Cross set in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Rag Radio is a weekly syndicated radio program produced and hosted by long-time alternative journalist Dreyer and recorded at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.


Frances "Poppy" Northcutt

Listen to or download the podcast of Rag Radio's interview with Houston feminist Frances "Poppy" Northcutt here:


Houston attorney Frances "Poppy" Northcutt is president of the Houston and Texas chapters of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Northcutt, who has played a central role in the women’s movement since the mid-Sixties, was the City of Houston’s first Women’s Advocate in 1974-75 under Mayor Fred Hofheinz. In that role she initiated legislative and executive proposals to eliminate sex discrimination in the police and fire departments and elsewhere in city government.

She was also the founding chair in 1974 of the Harris County Women’s Political Caucus. Northcutt was on-site coordinator for the historic National Womens Conference, sponsored by the U.S. State Department and held in Houston in November 1977, drawing 20,000 participants.

Northcutt first gained national attention during the Apollo missions in the mid-Sixties when, as a mathematician and engineer, she was the first woman to work in flight support at NASA’s Mission Control. In a September 1970 Life magazine cover story titled “Women Arise,” Northcutt was one of eight women profiled as "succeeding in a man’s world.”

She was singled out in a 1969 AP story about women playing key roles in the space program and was also featured in Mademoiselle, Ms. Magazine, and other publications. Northcutt won a number of awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom Team Award for work in the rescue of the Apollo 13 crew.

This episode of Rag Radio was produced in the studios of KPFT-FM in Houston with the assistance of KPFT news anchor Marlo Blue.


Maneesha James

Maneesha James with Rag Radio's Thorne Dreyer (left) and Tracey Schulz at the KOOP studios, October 18, 2013.

Listen to or download the podcast of Rag Radio's interview with death and dying counselor Maneesha James here:


Born in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, in 1947, Maneesha James offers "psycho-spiritual support in living and dying." She has a background in nursing (general, midwifery, and psychiatric) and is a psychotherapist and meditation facilitator. Maneesha, who lives in London, is co-founder and co-director of the Sammasati Project, which offers a vision of living and dying based on awareness and celebration.

Through her years of meditation and living in the meditation resort of the contemporary mystic, Osho (she was his chief editor), Maneesha has developed and facilitated workshops worldwide on a meditative way of living. She works with people who wish to go through the process of dying with as much awareness as possible -- working on an individual basis with those who are facing imminent death and in workshops with those who want to explore their issues with dying while they are still relatively healthy.


Seth Holmes

Anthropologist Seth Holmes in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, October 11, 2013. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Listen to or download the podcast of Rag Radio's interview with anthropologist Seth Holmes here:


Seth M. Holmes is a cultural and medical anthropologist and physician who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley where he is Martin Sisters Endowed Chair Assistant Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology. Holmes is the author of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States. The book, which “weds the theoretical analysis of the anthropologist with the intimacy of the journalist,” is an “ethnographic witness to the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants.”

The book is based on five years of field research during which time Seth lived with indigenous Mexican families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the United States, planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals, participated in healing rituals, and mourned at funerals for friends.

Holmes traveled with migrants through the desert border into Arizona, where they were apprehended and jailed by the Border Patrol. After he was released from jail, and his companions were deported, Holmes interviewed Border Patrol agents, local residents, and armed vigilantes.

Tom Philpott wrote in Mother Jones about Holmes' book: “Here in the U.S., we both utterly rely on immigrants from south of the border to feed us, and erect walls and employ militias to keep them out. In this groundbreaking new book, Holmes goes underground to explore what this bizarre duality means for the people who live it. A brilliant combination of academic rigor and journalistic daring.”


Thomas Zigal

Novelist Thomas Zigal in the KOOP studios in Austin, Friday, October 4, 2013. Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

Listen to or download the podcast of Rag Radio's interview with novelist Thomas Zigal here:


According to Kirkus Reviews, Novelist Thomas Zigal writes “page-turners with a conscience.” His latest book, Many Rivers to Cross, is set in post-Katrina New Orleans. The White League was also set in New Orleans, as will be a third novel to come. His three popular crime novels, featuring hippie Sheriff Kurt Muller, take place in Aspen. Author Jan Reid wrote that Many Rivers to Cross "is awe-inspiring. Thomas Zigal has entered New Orleans' heart of darkness after Katrina. His story is brave, frightening, and so dramatic that at times you have to get up and walk around the room."

Zigal was born in Galveston and grew up in Texas City where his father worked in an oil refinery. He graduated from the University of Texas -- where he was “an anti-war hippie and an avid reader of The Rag.” He got his masters in creative writing at Stanford and “hung out with writers like Raymond Carver, James Crumley, and Scott Turow.”

He published a literary magazine, The Pawn Review, and was an editor at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Zigal has served as a speech writer for one UT-Austin chancellor and four of the university’s presidents. He is a member of the Authors Guild, the Mystery Writers of America, the Texas Institute of Letters (of which he is a former vice president), and the Writers League of Texas.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement. Dreyer was a founding editor of the original Rag, published in Austin from 1966-1977. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is also aired on KPFT-HD3 90.1 -- Pacifica radio in Houston -- on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. (CDT).

The show is streamed live on the web and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, November 15, 2013: Staffers from the original Rag in '60s Austin: Doyle Niemann, now a leader in the Maryland House of Delegates, and poet/activist Mariann Wizard.
Friday, November 22, 2013: Empowerment activist Sam Daley-Harris, author of Reclaiming our Democracy: Healing the Break Between People and Government.

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Marilyn Katz : Hathaway's Nipples and a Congressional Primary

Anne Hathaway at the Academy Awards. Image from HaveUHeard.

Signs of the times?
Hathaway’s nipples and
a Congressional primary

Has the liberal media switched sides in the war against women?

By Marilyn Katz / The Rag Blog / March 27, 2013

CHICAGO -- I generally have ignored the growing number of articles raising alarm about a widespread war against women, comfortable in my confidence that women have long exercised power in this nation -- perhaps not as much as we should -- but increasingly at the ballot box, in the workplace and in the home.

I have had little interest in the debates about “leaning in or out” or whether the White House has a sufficiency of women. (Anyone who doesn't believe that Valerie Jarrett is among, if not the most powerful person in Washington should have their head examined.)

That said, comments not from the misogynist Right but from the liberal media about two successful women have made me reconsider my dismissive attitude.

The first -- while seemingly trivial -- is Anne Hathaway’s supposed nipple problem at the Academy Awards. Personally I neither noticed, nor would I have cared about being able to see the outline of her nipples -- I just thought it was a great dress worn by a woman with a really good back.

What I found disturbing was the ensuing media storm. Why were men looking at her nipples rather than listening to what she had to say? Why is this a topic for discussion? Provocative? Improper? According to whom?

The criticism was silly, but it also reminded me of my recent experiences in the Middle East. In the once-modern Egypt, where today women no longer venture onto the streets at night, and among even young college students are pressured to hide their hair under a head scarf, while others wear the hijab and gloves, in the name of modesty or because it makes them feel more secure and less likely to be verbally or physically attacked as a temptress.

And in Israel where, when I was there last year, I was shocked to find that in Jerusalem, women’s images had been forbidden on billboards, women’s voices banned on some radio stations and in certain neighborhoods women were literally relegated to the back of the bus -- all in the name of ensuring appropriate modesty.

The second instance, which would also be laughable in another era, concerns Robin Kelly, who won the Illinois’ 2nd Congressional District Democratic primary on February 26. News coverage in Chicago and across the country, and mostly written by progressive journalists with comments from progressive “reformers,” has asserted that her win was really not her own.

Usually spot-on writers like James Warren credit Michael Bloomberg’s $2.4 million expenditure on attack ads aimed at one opponent’s ties to the NRA. Well-respected election activist Cindy Canary agreed, telling Warren that Bloomberg’s money suppressed voter activity and turnout.

Yet the facts suggest otherwise. In the last Illinois special election, in 2009, when Rahm Emanuel resigned from Congress to join President Obama in the White House, there were 54,856 votes cast for the 12 candidates in the Democratic primary. Now-Rep. Mike Quigley won the primary with 12,100 votes -- or 22.1 percent of the total cast. In contrast, 59,593 votes were cast in the 16-person 2nd Congressional District Democratic primary this year, with Kelly garnering 30,872 or 51.8 percent of the vote, and Debbie Halverson coming in a distant second with 14,533 votes.

Looking through the archives, no one thought that a 50,000-person turnout in the 5th Congressional District was unusual. Why then did scores of reporters, along with such usually thoughtful people such as Warren, legal scholar Geoff Stone, and Canary, founder of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, parrot the line that participation was depressed?

Further, while we need look no further back than the November elections when Sheldon Adelson’s and the Koch brothers’ millions could not salvage a Romney victory, there are plenty of other examples, the most striking being the 1989 New York City mayoral contest in which Estee Lauder heir Ronald Lauder spent $14 million in his attempt to win the Republican primary. Despite the money, he garnered only 38,000 votes, at a cost of $363 each, and lost to Rudy Giuliani.

Anne Hathaway and all women have a right to dress as we like, for ourselves, knowing that we have good sense, and most of us good taste. If men are distracted, by the outline of a breast or excited by the shape of a hand, that’s their problem -- and perhaps they should try blinders.

Robin Kelly, like all women who take that treacherous path of running for public office, is a study in courage -- and most of all, a hard worker. There are no shortcuts to raising funds, learning the issues, building the organization necessary to get out the vote. Ask any woman legislator out there and she’ll tell you the same.

Women have to work harder, run faster, and make more calls than do their male counterparts for every dollar raised and every vote garnered. To ascribe her win to the largesse of a rich man or a depressed vote is an insult both to her and the voters of the 2nd District.

Are these aberrations or do they indicate a growing attempt to undermine the strides that women have made?

While many may have found Seth MacFarlane’s “boob song” amusing, seen nothing untoward in engaging in the Twitter frenzy about Hathaway’s dress, or felt all right about dismissing Robin Kelly, they are mistaken.

These incidents, while seemingly trivial, belittle women, their judgment, and their independent agency. Each incident echoes, in its own way, the more serious assaults women have endured this year -- from the congressional committee that had the chutzpah to disallow a woman to speak about restricting access to birth control -- saying she lacked expertise on the issue -- to the 19 states that voted last year to severely restrict women’s rights to make their own reproductive health decisions.

Last week the male-dominated state legislature in North Dakota authorized the use of vaginal probes to ensure that most pregnancies cannot be terminated after six weeks. To those who would without question object to the right wing’s intrusive mandates, I’d suggest perhaps it’s time to stop looking under our skirts to see if we’re wearing underwear or being held up by someone else’s strings.

This article was cross-posted to In These Times, where it also appears.

[An anti-war and civil rights organizer during the Vietnam War, Marilyn Katz helped organize security during the August 1968 protests at the Democratic National Convention. Katz has founded and led groups like the Chicago Women’s Union, Reproductive Rights National Network, and Chicago Women Organized for Reproductive Choice in the 1960s and 1970s, and Chicagoans Against War in Iraq in 2002. The founder and president of Chicago-based MK Communications, Katz can be contacted at mkatz@mkcpr.com. Read more articles by Marilyn Katz on The Rag Blog.]

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Marilyn Katz : Our Bodies, Their Politics

Image from The Raw Story.
Our bodies, their politics

The last few months have made abundantly clear what women must do: rid America’s capitols of misogynists.

By Marilyn Katz / The Rag Blog / April 24, 2012

In the first half of 2011, close to 1,000 measures related to reproductive health and rights were introduced into state legislatures.

The first “women’s group” that I was involved in was not born out of feminist theory or organized by intellectual women on campus. Rather it was in 1966 in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, and its members were poor African-American moms on welfare and thirtysomething (looking 50) Appalachian women, newly arrived from Kentucky and West Virginia.

Not much older than me, many of the women in the group provided physical testament to the possible effects of multiple childbirths while young and poor. The work of the group ranged from food co-ops to welfare reform, from rent strikes to learning to read.

The impetus for the group, however, was a clear-eyed view that welfare was a “women’s issue,” and the need -- among the Appalachian women in particular -- for protection and camaraderie in the face of their husbands’ explosive anger upon learning that “their” women were seeking information about birth control from government VISTA volunteers.

Back then the outraged cry from men was not about “religious freedom,” but about male prerogative and the duties of women.

I have been reminded of those meetings in recent months by the series of controversies surrounding the contraception mandate in the federal healthcare reform law -- from the exclusion of Sandra Fluke’s testimony at congressional hearings (GOP Rep. Joe Walsh said the birth control debate is “not about women”) to Rush Limbaugh’s virulent rant (and limp apology), to the barely audible denouncements of his statement by the Republican presidential candidates.

Contrary to the posturing of politicians and bishops alike, religious freedom is not the core issue. Consider, for example, the Catholic hospitals, schools and universities that have, for many years and with little fuss, provided insurance that covers birth control in the states that require them to do so.

The reality is, as it was 40 years ago in Uptown, that the debate about birth control is firstly and fundamentally about women -- their rights and their lives. From Biblical times on, women -- who bear the brunt as well as the joy of childbearing -- have struggled to curtail unwanted pregnancies, often resorting to extreme measures in the face of possible death or the poverty that another child might bring.

More than 500,000 women die around the world each year from pregnancy-related causes, according to the World Health Organization. A majority of those deaths occur in developing countries, but only a century ago American women faced similar fates.

It was not until the 20th century that pregnancy-related death rates in the United States declined -- a result of modern medicine, better sanitation and the advent of modern female contraception. According to a 2011 study, more than 99 percent of “sexually experienced” American women, including 98 percent of such Catholic women, use or have used non-natural (i.e., not abstinence or the “rhythm method”) birth control.

In the past year, as elected Tea Partiers have aligned themselves with religious fundamentalists, Republicans in the House have introduced eight anti-choice bills, each of which received the support of the same 225 GOP representatives. In the first half of 2011, close to 1,000 measures related to reproductive health and rights -- from those curtailing contraception to those mandating transvaginal ultrasounds -- were introduced into state legislatures.

Of the 28 states controlled by Republicans, 26 have passed laws that limit women’s reproductive choices. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 55 percent of American women of reproductive age lived in states characterized as “hostile” to abortion in 2011 -- up from 31 percent in 2000.

The danger is to women, but among us also lies the remedy. Perhaps we owe a debt of gratitude to the Limbaughs of the world -- they have brought to public view and hopefully to public attention the attack on women’s reproductive health and rights that has been steadily building over the past years.

And while it would be uplifting to get Limbaugh off the air, the real task is ridding our nation’s legislative bodies of misogynists. Women fought for and won a great deal in the last century. It’s time to say on the Web, in the streets, and of most importance and effect, in the ballot box: We’re not going back.

[An anti-war and civil rights organizer during the Vietnam War, Marilyn Katz helped organize security during the August 1968 protests at the Democratic National Convention. Katz has founded and led groups like the Chicago Women’s Union, Reproductive Rights National Network, and Chicago Women Organized for Reproductive Choice in the 1960s and 1970s, and Chicagoans Against War in Iraq in 2002. The founder and president of Chicago-based MK Communications, Katz can be contacted at mkatz@mkcpr.com. This article was also published at In These Times. Read more articles by Marilyn Katz on The Rag Blog.]

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Alice Embree : Women are 'Seeing Red' in Texas

"Seeing Red" organizer Marcia Ball, center, with Emily Haas, left, and novelist Sarah Bird at the Texas State Capitol. Photo by Susan Crews Bailey / Facebook.

'Seeing Red':
The Texas Taliban's war on women

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / March 21, 2012

"Reproductive health care for well over a hundred thousand women in Texas has just been revoked by the state legislature. They were egged on by the hapless Rick Perry in a move so dunderheaded and thick with ignorance that his performance in the presidential primaries looks studious and reasoned by comparison." -- Actress Beth Broderick, a participant in the 'Seeing Red' demonstrations at the Texas State Capitol, writing at The Huffington Post.

AUSTIN -- On Friday, March 2, Marcia Ball, singer-songwriter and blues pianist extraordinaire, sent an e-mail broadside out to friends: “Subject: I’m so mad I’m SEEING RED.”

“What the heck’s happening with our poor country?!" she asked. "Who knew that in 2012 in the USA we would be fighting about contraception and basic women’s health?”

Marcia Ball said she would be in front of the Texas State Capitol on consecutive Tuesdays, March 6, 13, and 20, to protest the “Texas Taliban’s war on women.” Marcia Ball also wanted to honor Marie Colvin, the reporter who recently died in Syria, and Molly Ivins, the Texas writer who mastered the art of lampooning “Governor Goodhair” Rick Perry before the nation was treated to Perry’s self-lampooning performance in primary debates.

“Spread the word,” Marcia Ball said. And indeed the word spread. A couple hundred people showed up in red shirts on March 6, and footage of the event aired on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show. On March 13, a group showed up at the noon hour and then swelled the ranks of a "Don’t Mess With Texas Women" rally later in the day. About 800 were present at the rally that featured Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood and singers Ball, Carolyn Wonderland, Jimmy Dale Gilmore, and Colin Gilmore.

Rag Blog contributing editor Alice Embree had an essay in the landmark 1970 women's liberation anthology, Sisterhood is Powerful. Photo by Leslie Cunningham / The Rag Blog.
The all-out conservative assault on Planned Parenthood and its many health services seems to be the “straw that broke the camel’s back” for women. We’ve become sadly accustomed to the mounting restrictions on abortions. The Republican-controlled Texas Legislature approved an abortion bill in its last session similar to the one now in effect in Virginia, requiring physicians to provide a sonogram before performing an abortion.

But the war on access -- particularly low-income access -- to contraception, pap smears, and mammograms is new conservative ground. Add to this mix the inflammatory statements of certain radio blowhards equating the use of contraception to prima facie evidence of sluthood, and we’re “seeing red.”

Although Marcia Ball will be touring and can’t be present next Tuesday, March 27, the sea of red shirts that she provoked doesn’t seem inclined to stay home.

[Alice Embree is a long-time Austin activist, organizer, and member of the Texas State Employees Union. A former staff member of underground papers, The Rag in Austin and RAT in New York, and a veteran of SDS and the women's liberation movement, she is now active with CodePink Austin and Under the Hood Café. Embree is a contributing editor to The Rag Blog and is treasurer of the New Journalism Project. Read more articles by Alice Embree on The Rag Blog.]

Sign the "Seeing Red" petition to "Save Women's Health Care in Texas," at change.org.

Photos by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog.
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Ron Jacobs : Women's Rights are Human Rights

International Women's Day 2012 poster from Public Services International, a global trade union federation.
Women’s rights are human rights

Besides the fact that it celebrates women in a society primarily controlled by men, it is the socialist roots of International Women’s Day that have discouraged its celebration in the United States.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / March 7, 2012

On March 8, 1997, workers at the University of Vermont were at the beginning of a struggle to unionize. The units of the workforce that were prime for unionization (and most likely to vote in a union) were those units that maintained the buildings and grounds of the university. These units were composed of a large number of new immigrants and women.

The union we were working with was the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America or UE. This union is one of the few U.S. unions that refused to kick leftists out of the union in 1948 and is therefore not part of the AFL-CIO. We held a rally that day at the university. We chose March 8 because of its importance as International Women’s Day. It was the first that many of the workers had ever heard of this day.

Unknown to most U.S. residents, International Women’s Day has its roots in a strike by female garment workers in New York City. On March 8, 1857, these textile workers marched and picketed to demand improved working conditions, a 10-hour day, and equal rights for women. The police attacked the march.

On March 8, 1908, women textile workers marched again, recalling the 1857 march and demanding the vote, and an end to sweatshops and child labor. The police attacked this march, also.

Two years later, revolutionary Clara Zetkin urged the international socialist Second International to adopt March 8th as a holiday honoring the struggle for women’s rights. The motion passed.

Besides the fact that it celebrates women in a society primarily controlled by men, it is the socialist roots of International Women’s Day that have discouraged its celebration in the United States. After all, this is a nation that created Labor Day to prevent workers from celebrating May Day, even though that workers’ holiday was established in the United States in the late nineteenth century.

The insistent capitalism of America’s ruling classes will not so much as even acknowledge a holiday determined by the workers that celebrates something besides the domination of Wall Street and Washington. Nonetheless, both holidays continue to be celebrated in the United States, albeit not on the same scale as elsewhere.

The first that many U.S. residents alive today became aware of International Women’s Day was in the late 1960s and 1970s. Thanks to the leftist foundations of the feminist movement that developed in those years, International Women’s Day was retrieved from the dustbin of history where it had been tossed. Since those days, it has been consistently celebrated by most women’s groups, much of organized labor, and even given a mention by some elected officials.

However, like so many other movements with their current roots in the struggles of the 1960s, the women’s rights movement is much more than a single holiday. Just like people did not protest, go to jail, fight the police, and even die so that school children can celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday every January, neither have women and their allies fought merely to wear a ribbon or attend a celebration of International Women’s Day every March 8.

German poster for International Women's Day, March 8, 1914. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Women’s rights have always been human rights. The very fact that this day has its roots in a labor struggle proves that. Women and girls comprise much of the workforce, the student population and, in some nations, the military.

In today’s world, where the wars and economic policies of neoliberalism force millions of people to leave their homes and countries, it is the women that make up the bulk of those refugees. Given that females continue to be the primary caregivers of the human species, it becomes even clearer that their struggle is synonymous with the struggle for human rights. Yet, every day the news is full of attacks on those rights.

In the United States, the right wing and many Christian churches are conspiring to deny easy and affordable access to an essential element of health care -- birth control. At the same time, budget cuts on both state and federal levels are targeting low-income children and women, leaving many of them without essential needs like food, shelter, and health care. These budget cuts are the direct result of polices that cut taxes for the rich, fund the war industry at ever greater cost, and attach more and more riders on the tax burdens of working people.

Meanwhile, unemployment maintains a relatively constant level of several million capable workers and real wages continue to sink. In other countries in the western neoliberal zone, like Greece, Spain, and Portugal, the situation is even direr.

Meanwhile, most women in countries that are part of what economists call the developing world are in even worse straits. Many of them have never lived in anything other than a refugee camp. Education is something not even considered for their male children much less for themselves or the girls in their families.

Tribal and ethnic wars that are exacerbated by the neoliberal economic crisis bring death and illness without warning. Other wars brought on by Washington and Wall Street’s perceived need for hegemony create their own havoc and death. Religious fanatics whose similarities with their kinsmen in the United States and the Vatican outweigh their differences do their best to insure women remain subjugated to their medieval belief systems.

The list continues. It is apparent that the need for a women’s movement as represented by those textile workers who took to the streets of Manhattan over a hundred years ago exists as much as it ever did. From Manhattan to Mumbai, from Beijing to Bagdad, the struggle for women’s rights and lives is the struggle for human rights and lives.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

Also see "Fierce Women March in San Antonio," by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / March 5, 2012

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Alice Embree : Texas Actions Mark 100 Years of Celebrating Women

More than 1,000 marched in San Antonio March 5, 2011, to observe International Women's Day. Photos by Susan Van Haitsma (top) and Alice Embree / The Rag Blog.
International Women’s Day:
100 years of celebrating women

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / March 7, 2011

See gallery of photos below.

SAN ANTONIO -- March 8th is International Women’s Day. CodePink and BookWoman are collaborating on an event in Austin to mark this day.

San Antonio observed International Women’s Day on Saturday, March 5, with its 21st annual celebration -- a march of more than 1,000 that embraced issues of reproductive rights, attacks on transgendered people, local union struggles for nurses and hotel workers, and women’s demands for peace and justice. The spirited march through San Antonio culminated with poetry, music, and speeches. CodePink Austin participated for the second year.

I was unaware of International Women’s Day and its roots in U.S. labor struggles until 1970. As the women’s liberation movement was beginning to reshape my consciousness, I participated in a small celebration in the basement of an Austin campus-area church.

The March 8 events gathered scope and were observed throughout the 70s with activities that included women’s theater, skits, and workshops on global struggles for women’s rights from Asia to Iran to Austin. Workshops highlighted gay and lesbian rights and the dual oppression experienced by women of color.

It was a period in which women challenged countless barriers, including those to employment. Women filed lawsuits, or threatened them, to become Austin bus drivers, emergency medical technicians, firefighters, and cable splicers. Out of Austin came the historic legal challenge to abortion laws, Roe V. Wade. Women set up peer counseling services and demanded services for victims of rape and domestic abuse.

International Women’s Day is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. In many countries, it is a national holiday, a time when women and men honor the struggle for equality, justice, and peace. The United Nations has observed March 8 as International Women’s Day since 1975, a year designated by the UN as International Women’s Year.

The idea of an international day for women was advanced by socialist parties in the United States and other countries and propelled by the historic struggles for women’s suffrage and workplace rights at the turn of the century. In 1911, more than one million people attended worldwide rallies demanding the women’s right to vote, hold public office, and organize on the job to end discrimination.

Less than a week after these rallies, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City took the lives of more than 140 women garment workers. It was a horrific fire with a devastating loss of life because women had been locked into the building. 100,000 people participated in the funeral march for the women workers. PBS has recently aired a documentary on this event.

In 1912, in the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, 20,000 workers walked out of the mills protesting wage cuts. Most of them were women. The strikers had a committee of 56 representing 27 languages.

The strikers -- mostly immigrant women -- won significant concessions and a placard, “Bread and Roses,” inspired a poem by James Oppenheim that was later set to music by Caroline Kohlsaat. The song, "Bread and Roses," captures the spirit of International Women’s Day.

In 1917, with two million Russian soldiers dead as the result of World War I, women chose the last Sunday in February to strike for “bread and peace.” Four days later, the Czar was forced to abdicate and the provisional Government granted women the right to vote. That historic Sunday fell on the 23rd of February on the Julian calendar then in use in Russia, but on March 8 on the Gregorian calendar in use elsewhere.

Fast forward to today. We can see the legacy of the second wave feminist victories from women’s leadership in countless progressive organizations to a woman president of the Texas AFL-CIO. But we are witnessing historic backlash with assaults on reproductive choice and funding for programs as important as domestic and international family planning.

At the University of Texas, the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies was singled out for severe cuts. In Wisconsin, we not only see an assault on workers’ rights, but on teachers -- a field in which women workers are the majority. It is my hope that this International Women’s Day will mark the beginning of an era in which progressive fights converge as effectively as Austin’s pro-choice rally merged with the Wisconsin workers support rally on Saturday, February 26.

The rising of the women is the rising of us all!

[Alice Embree is a long-time Austin activist, organizer, and member of the Texas State Employees Union. A former staff member of The Rag in Austin and RAT in New York, and a veteran of SDS and the women's liberation movement, she is now active with CodePink Austin and Under the Hood Café. Embree is a contributing editor to The Rag Blog and is treasurer of the New Journalism Project.]








Peeking through the pink peace symbol above is The Rag Blog's Alice Embree.
International Women's Day in San Antonio. Group of photos above by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.




Lower group of photos by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog.
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Tony Platt : My Friend Betita Martinez

Betita Martinez. Photo from SF Gate.
'The heart just insists':
My friend Betita Martinez

As the daughter of a dark-skinned immigrant from Mexico City and a blue-eyed North American, she felt racism in the air, 'but I did not have words for it then.'

By Tony Platt / The Rag Blog / December 27, 2010

I’m visiting my old friend Betita Martínez a few days before her 85th birthday. I bring chocolate chip cookies, and my laptop to show her photographs of a recent trip to Europe and Morocco. Our conversation is not the grand political discourse it used to be. It’s more of an ode to the everyday.

We’ve known each other for 35 years, from the time we worked together on a radical pamphlet about the police, through our years as comrades in a Marxist organization, and during the last two decades as leftists struggling to find our way through the dystopian gloom.

While most of us licked our wounds and picked up our interrupted lives, she protested with anybody who would march in the 1990s and was never without a sheaf of leaflets in the 2000s. She kept the faith, while mine wavered. “The heart just insists on it,” she once explained.

Betita looms large in my memory as a professional revolutionary who managed on a few hours of sleep and an occasional steak, with little time for small talk. This wasn’t always the case. At one time she was on the fast track to professional success.

Elizabeth Martínez grew up in the white section of Washington, D.C.’s segregated suburbs in the 1920s and 1930s. As the daughter of a dark-skinned immigrant from Mexico City and a blue-eyed North American, she felt racism in the air, “but I did not have words for it then.”

Her father, Manuel Guillermo Martínez, who had witnessed the Mexican revolution as a young man, worked his way up from a clerk in the Mexican Embassy to professor of Spanish literature at Georgetown; and her mother, Ruth Sutherland Phillips, got a master’s degree from George Washington and taught advanced high school Spanish.

Soon Betita was emulating her parents’ hard work ethic, joining the bridge club in high school and prepping for college and a career. She was the first Latina at Swarthmore, graduating with honors in history and literature in 1946. Here she began a lifelong friendship with fellow student (and later renowned economist) Andre Gunder Frank, a Jewish scholarship boy from Europe who, like Betita, knew what it felt like to be in exile, never feeling quite settled anywhere.

After college, using her mother’s vaguely British middle name, Liz Sutherland plunged into the post-war ferment of New York’s cultural scene. With her contacts from Swarthmore opening doors to institutions typically closed to women and Latinos, jobs came quickly and easily: as a translator and researcher at the United Nations (1947-1953), an administrative assistant in the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art (1957-1958), an editor at Simon and Schuster (1958-1963), and Books and Arts Editor at The Nation (1963-1964).

Betita Martinez. Photo by Margaret Randall.
For some 15 years Liz hobnobbed with cutting edge artists and literati, and married one, the writer-activist Hans Koning. She moved easily between the beat milieu of the Village -- hanging out with Diane Di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and other demimonde intellectuals -- and chic patrons at Fifth Avenue soirées. This ability to function in very different worlds would serve her well later in life when she had to fundraise for grassroots causes and translate radical rhetoric into palatable liberalism for middle-class audiences.

Among her friends were photographers Edward Steichen (her boss at MoMA) and Robert Frank, and the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. She could more than hold her own reviewing French new wave and English kitchen sink movies in the la-di-da Film Quarterly.

“If the film speaks its piece well, it lacks the magic of the unsaid,” she wrote in 1961 about Karel Reiz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. “There is nothing here to make you shiver, no awareness of ‘the million-eyed Spyder that hath no name.’ The characters are all there, but they are more recognizable than illuminating.”

Unusually for somebody still in her 30s, she had honed literary skills as an editor, designer, and writer. Most of us hope to be good at one of these things in a lifetime. She did them all really well.

In 1960, just two years into her job with a prestigious publishing firm, Simon and Schuster -- and already an editor -- she was assigned to work with the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman on the publication of Four Screenplays (including “Wild Strawberries” and “Seventh Seal”). She saw the landmark book “through from start to finish,” she told a reporter for Saturday Review. During a visit to Sweden to meet Bergman, they had lunch together on a set. “What was it like to talk with him, what’s he like?” I once asked her, wide-eyed. “He said I had nice legs,” she replied.

The following year she was off to Cuba, meeting with writers and filmmakers creating a “cinema of revolution.” That was her first turning point: “When Cuba declared itself socialist, so did I.”

In 1964, Liz served as go-between and editor for the militant black-led organization SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and Simon and Schuster, resulting in an extraordinary book of photographs, The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality. It opens with three tranquil, rural images of the Deep South, followed by a carnival scene of a lynching in graphic detail.

Lorraine Hansberry gets credited for the introduction, as do Danny Lyon, Roy de Carava, and others for their photographs, but Betita’s name is nowhere to be seen. (She was similarly unacknowledged for her editing role in Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power, another iconic publication.)

She finally gets her due years later for helping Jim Forman write one of the most significant memoirs of the civil rights movement, The Making of Black Revolutionaries. Holed up in a house in Puerto Rico, she helped him not only get his writing in shape, but also broaden his “understanding of the vast and deplorable role of the United States government in suppressing the rights of all nonwhite people.”

In the mid-1960s, now in the prime of her life, Liz Sutherland made the shift from publishing to joining the Movement, giving up a sure-thing life of privilege for long hours and low pay for the next 45 years.

She became director of SNCC’s New York office, getting the word out and raising funds from Jewish sympathizers when she wasn’t on the road in Mississippi and Alabama, or making overtures on behalf of black nationalists to the Chicano-led UFW organizing migrant workers in California.

“I did not grapple with my particular identity then, with being half Mexican and half white,” she recalls. “The work said who I was.” And the work was grueling, especially for a single parent. Her pre-teen daughter Tessa “endured many lonely hours and TV dinners” when her mother was interviewing civil rights workers in the South. “She understands about Mississippi.”

A few years later, three pivotal events propelled her political development in a new direction. First, SNCC had, as she put it, “an identity crisis” and decided it “should be an all-black organization.” Stokely Carmichael made clear in a speech given in Berkeley in 1966 that “we cannot have white people working in the black community.” No one “white-baited me to my face,” says Betita recently, but to most of the SNCC staff she was “classified as white.”

Secondly, Elizabeth Sutherland and several other refugees from SNCC contributed to “an energized convergence of women in New York City,” as one observer has noted, and were in on the ground floor of the women’s liberation movement. Elizabeth was a member of the New York Radical Women’s collective -- a group that included Joan Brown and Shulamith Firestone -- and contributed an article (with Carol Hanisch, instigator of the celebrated protest of the Miss America pageant in 1968) to the first issue of Notes From The First Year, a theoretical journal of radical feminism, priced 50 cents to women and one dollar to men.

The Hanisch-Sutherland essay, which follows right after Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal Organism,” is organized as a series of answers to typically asked questions about feminism. For example, don’t some women “naturally want to be housewives?” To which the authors of “Women of the World Unite -- We Have Nothing To Lose But Our Men!” reply: “Anyone who thinks she feels good as she surveys her kitchen after washing the 146,789th batch of sparkling dishes isn’t being ‘natural’; she’s literally lost her mind.”

As Elizabeth Sutherland became Betita Martínez, she made sure that issues of gender were not put on the back burner. In 1970, she contributed “Colonized Women: The Chicana” to Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Powerful, an anthology that became required reading for a generation of feminists. Today, Morgan quickly recalls Betita’s “intensely feminist intelligence and commitment. Her stubborn insistence on freedom and power for all members of communities of color -- including, surprise! women -- got her into a lot of hot water. But that never stopped her.”

Thirdly, a trip to Cuba in 1967 connected her with an inspirational gathering of Latin American revolutionaries that triggered her own identity crisis: “the ground of my life was shifting, stretching.” She took off for New Mexico in 1968, where she founded a Chicano movement newspaper, El Grito del Norte, and organized the Chicano Communications Center. “A voice inside of me said, ‘You can be Betita Martínez here. It feels like home’.”

It felt like home until the mid-1970s, when Betita left New Mexico and joined a leftist organization in San Francisco, hoping to be part of a movement that would transcend identity politics. Ten years later, after the Marxist left imploded, she returned to grassroots work, searching for ways to bring communities of color together, speaking out fiercely against racism, sexism, and war -- saying “NO to any definition of social justice that does not affirm our human oneness.”

While illness limited Betita’s mobility when she reached her 80s, she kept on writing, as she’d done all her life. Without a university base or philanthropic support, she has accomplished what most academics never do in a lifetime: written several books that have left a deep impact on readers searching for socially relevant, well researched, and thoughtful history and commentary.

Among her lasting contributions are Letters From Mississippi (1964), The Youngest Revolution: A Personal Report on Cuba (1969), 500 Years of Chicano History (1976), and 500 Years of Chicana Women’s History (2008), not to mention hundreds of journalistic essays. In 2000, she received an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, but not the private pension, home ownership, and other perks that typically crown an academic career.

Betita Martinez. Photo by Tony Platt / The Rag Blog.
Recently, Betita looked more deeply and honestly into the self-inflicted wounds that can’t simply be blamed on the Man, “the human toll of righting wrong.” It troubles her that for too long the Chicano movement was seen as a subsidiary of the African American movement; that women in SNCC and Chicano organizations were too often considered subordinate to “male warriors” and assigned housewifely duties; that in the name of fighting for a “humanist society,” Marxist organizations could treat its cadre so brutally.

And while she gave all to her extended political family, Betita “deeply regrets neglecting another identity: being the mother of a young daughter who needed much more attention than she received in those years.”

Now it’s the mother who needs and gets much more attention from her daughter. A stroke makes it hard for Betita to see, hear, and remember yesterday’s visitors, yet she insists on living by herself with her dog Honey in a small, rented apartment in San Francisco’s Mission district, surrounded by books, posters, mementos, and rows of filing cabinets. "I love all dogs and some people," she says. But she’s always delighted to see visitors, and disappointed when we leave.

Today, the talk is about a trip Cecilia and I took recently. Her eyesight is not good, so she sits almost on top of the screen of my laptop as I scroll through hundreds of photographs that for me are already in the twilight between just now and the past.

As she imagines the photos through a blur, I tell her stories to go with the images: riding a lurching camel through pillowy sand dunes in the Sahara, shopping in an outdoor market in Provence for just-picked fruits and vegetables, circling Jeff Koons' gigantic flowering puppy that sits calmly outside the Guggenheim in Bilbao, watching kids splashing through a swimming pool installation on the roof of the Hayward Gallery in London, and stumbling over memory plaques in Berlin.

She happily munches cookies, and lights up when I come to photos of our new dog. "You must bring Buster here,” she says. We must all go to Morocco to see the camels." She laughs at the absurdity and attractiveness of the possibility.

She’s thirsty and I look for a glass near her sink. "This one?" I ask. "Yes," she replies, "that one. It's a mere bagatelle." I do a double take and she laughs. "I haven't heard that in a long time," I say. "Me neither," says Betita. "How come I can remember that, but can't remember the name of the person who helps me every day?"

We stop for a moment, pondering the marvelous trickiness of the brain. Then, just as we have often done together, we muse about the meaning and origins of this trifle of a word. As I search her well-used English and French dictionaries, and read out aloud all the detailed information I can find, I am reminded of the many times that we have done this together, sharing our pleasure in words and language, and for this moment all is as it was.

Happy birthday to Elizabeth (Betita) Martínez, born 12 December 1925.

[Tony Platt is the author of 10 books and 150 essays and articles dealing with issues of race, inequality, and social justice in American history. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Truthdig.com, History News Network, Z Magazine, Monthly Review, and the Guardian. Platt, now an emeritus professor living in Berkeley, California, taught at the University of Chicago, University of California (Berkeley), and California State University (Sacramento). This article was also posted to his blog, GoodToGo.]

Thanks to Bernardine Dohrn /The Rag Blog

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FILM / Vanessa Carlisle : Berman's Doc Explores the Two Halves of Hefner

Thank you, Hefner...
We'll take it from here.

By Vanessa Carlisle / The Rag Blog / October 14, 2010

Brigitte Berman's new documentary, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, and Rebel, deserves attention. Read this great interview at Collider.com for more background on the process of the film and its conclusions. Go see it if you're interested in sex, law, social justice, censorship, publishing, and/or sexy girls.

On the movie's opening night, July 30th, I went to the premiere at LA's Nuart Theater. Both Hefner and director Berman were in attendance, and they did a brief Q&A after the film.

As inspiring as the film was, the way Hefner has had to live on the defensive his whole life made me sad.

At this point, he's no longer defending himself against the obvious enemies he had in the '60s. Then, it was the conservative Christians, the censors, the people who were out-and-out afraid of crass depictions of sexuality. That the feminists of the time (Susan Brownmiller and Gloria Steinem, famously) also vilified him is fascinating, since he thought he was working on the same project they were.

But it's even more complex now. The people who scoff at Hefner are people my age, who know little to nothing about his heroism of the '50s, '60s, and '70s, and only see the caricature of male sexuality he's become.

They don't care about the way he flouted racist convention, and in some cases actual law, to have black performers on his show and in his clubs. They don't care that he published Charles Beaumont's "The Crooked Man," a short story that questioned homophobia directly, when no one else would. He said during the Q&A that he thinks most people nowadays don't acknowledge "the other half" of his life.

The implication here is heavy: one half of his life is women/sex/silliness/parties and the other half is intensely focused intellectual, creative, activist work. Much like the way they were presented in Playboy, Hef thinks of the naked girls as a very separate experience from the writing.

This is such a puzzle to me. On the one hand, it seems like he should have the right to be a sexual adolescent, to love big boobies and blondes, and spend his time on that. He's a grown man with consenting women, after all. On the other hand, I agree with the criticism that Playboy became, in some very important ways, a dictator of sexual taste, and that it presents a limited view of what is sexy.

What's clear from the film is that this restricted taste that has become so ubiquitous is actually Hef's. It doesn't seem as though he had a mission to tell all Americans what they "should" like, in fact. It seems as though he was a brilliant business man who happened to know exactly what HE liked. That Americans are sheep, media consumers, and easily told what their preferences should be based on what they see around them, is their own fault.

Someone with Hugh Hefner's acumen for business and a different aesthetic might have changed the course of American sexuality. Maybe. Or maybe Hef's desire for a certain hour-glass gal is just so mainstream because it is also a basic biological imperative the way symmetry in the face seems to be in cross-cultural studies of beauty.

Certainly a particular waist-to-hip ratio (.7) has been theorized as a beauty ideal in many cultures. If Hef was just tapping into some heterosexual evolutionary biology, what exactly could the feminists expect?

What's beautiful about Hef's current incarnation as an 84-year-old business tyrant (he's buying the magazine back from stockholders to, one imagines, exert some more creative control), strangely self-effacing lover (see a recent LA Weekly cover story by Dennis Romero), and general eccentric is that he still seems happily committed to being authentic -- he really does exactly what he wants to do, no matter what.

This I respect I great deal. I don't share my generation's disdain for the grandfather-aged patriarch of The Girls Next Door, because the sheer volume of good he's done simply outweighs the potential done by his perpetuation of certain boring sexual aesthetics.

It's up to us to derail those aesthetics, offer alternatives in media, and so on. What is also up to us, and seems to be the next big project that Hef may never attempt, is to do real integration of the "two halves" -- to lift the barrier between sex and intellect. They existed side-by-side in early Playboy, but they didn't exist as integrated whole.

This is the ideal that excites me most: not just a culture that has stopped oppressing sexual expressiveness, but a culture that has no problem with sex and sexuality entering the ivory tower.

So overall I think we should see Hef as we see the early feminists or civil rights activists. We can never forget what they accomplished. We wouldn't even be able to think the thoughts we think now without them. But we can't pretend that the important fights have all been won, or we will be just a new generation of culture-slaves. There's always a new front for revolutionary thinking.

[Vanessa Carlisle is a writer, teacher, and performer who lives in Los Angeles. Now a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at UC Riverside, she studied psychology at Reed College, has an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College, and taught psychology at Emerson and Wheelock Colleges. She has danced with a neo-burlesque troupe and a Hawaiian lounge act. Her work has appeared in both literary and trade magazines, and her novel is A Crack in Everything. Her website is VanessaCarlisle.com and her blog is Gorgeous Curiosity.]

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Barbara J. Berg : Getting Real about Women's Progress

Women at work: White Oak Mill in Greensboro, NC. 1909. Photo courtesy of the National Museum of American History.
'A Women's Nation Changes Everything'
The (feel-good) Shriver Report

...instead of celebrating how far women have come, we should be asking why, after so many years, we still have so far to go.

By Barbara J. Berg / The Rag Blog / October 22, 2009

Maybe we’re all suffering from bad-news overload. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for the media’s uncritical embrace of the often erroneous feel-good Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, essentially declaring an end to “the battle of the sexes.”

Time magazine, writing about the report, claims, “the argument over where women belong is over.” Try telling that to Andrea Wolff-Yakubovich whose boss fired her from her position as finance director for a Denver-based John Elway AutoNation dealership when she disclosed she was expecting, telling her husband, “She should be barefoot, pregnant and at home.” (Really!)

And I seem to remember not too long ago a lot of angry GOP males urging General Stanley McChrystal to put Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi “in her place,” because of her statements about the war in Afghanistan.

Notwithstanding all the real gains we’ve seen from the second wave women’s movement of the 1970s, the United States ranks 27th out of a total of 130 countries, behind Cuba and Lithuania, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report of 2008.

We are the only industrialized nation that doesn’t offer paid maternity leave. And like Wolff-Yakubovich, hundreds of women, in stark violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, are being fired when they become pregnant. The United States is one of a very few westernized nations to leave day care almost completely to the unregulated private market. And a new study has just disclosed that more than a quarter of our nation’s schoolchildren are unsupervised and alone after the regular school day because of the scarcity of funded after-school programs.

Unlike some other 145 countries, the United States doesn’t assure all workers paid sick days for their own illnesses or to care for a sick family member, and women pay hundreds of dollars more than men for identical health insurance overage. Our infant mortality rate is appalling -- 29th in the world -- and although the American Academy of Pediatrics “urges mothers to breastfeed exclusively for six months,” we differ from 107 countries in not protecting a working woman’s right to breastfeed. In our nation’s capital the mortality rate is four times as great for black infants as for white ones.

Unfortunately, it’s not just at hedge funds, as Time suggests, where women are facing strong headwinds. At four year colleges across the nation, women make up 50% of instructors and assistant professors, but are only 27% of tenured faculty. They are 50% of managers and professionals and only 2.6% of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. The majority of working women in America still work in low-paid service jobs with little flexibility and few benefits. And thanks to the gender pay gap that starts right out of college and continues to grow, a woman working full-time her entire life makes on average $700,000 less than a man.

For the first time since 1918 women’s life expectancy is shortening. Women across the nation are dying from treatable chronic diseases. “[In no state] do women enjoy satisfactory health status,” according to the National Women’s Health Report Card issued by the National Women’s Law Center. Women present with different symptoms and respond to different medicines and therapies in a variety of diseases including strokes and heart attacks, but they are still not included in medical clinical trials.

Intimate partner assaults on women are soaring, yet everywhere we turn -- from advertising to electronic gaming -- we are bombarded with images of violence against women. We have the highest teen pregnancy rate in the western world and one out of every four adolescent girls has some form of STD.

Our reproductive rights are in jeopardy with the far right waging a quietly successful campaign to have fetuses granted personhood on the state level. If that drive succeeds, then Supreme Court or no Supreme Court, abortion will be declared murder under the U.S. Constitution and will be illegal throughout the land.

So -- instead of celebrating how far women have come, we should be asking why, after so many years, we still have so far to go.

[Barbara J. Berg, Ph.D., is the author of Sexism in America: Alive, Well and Ruining Our Future (Chicago Review Press, 2009).]

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