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    The Women of NOW review: superb history of feminist growth and groundswell

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    What do a bestselling author, a segregationist congressman and a Black legal scholar have in common? Through a series of serendipitous events, Betty Friedan, Howard Smith and Pauli Murray lit fires that ignited the largest social revolution of the 20th century.Friedan wrote the 1963 blockbuster The Feminine Mystique. Smith added “sex” to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In 1965, Murray wrote the first legal analysis comparing Jim Crow to gender discrimination. With the benefit of hindsight, this unwitting but timely partnership can be seen as the launchpad of the second wave feminist movement, a movement synonymous with the National Organization for Women, or NOW.Almost 60 years after its inception, we think of NOW as a mainstream national feminist group. But in 1966 it was founded on the radical idea, as Katherine Turk describes it, “to organize and advocate for all women by channeling their efforts into one association that sought to end male supremacy”.In a world where most women were denied credit cards and mortgages, entrance into marathon races, medical school and law school, jobs as bar tenders, editors, pilots, and factory managers, ending male supremacy seemed unfathomable.Turk’s The Women of NOW is a fascinating account of the foundational organization that for many decades served as the central tentpole of this multifaceted movement. Despite the hundreds of books that make up the rich cannon of modern women’s history, Turk has done a much-needed service, writing the first full history of NOW.A professor at the University of North Carolina, Turk devoted 20 years, beginning with her undergraduate thesis, to telling this complex story. With gumshoe reporting precision, she traveled the country, unearthing hundreds of boxes and thousands of files that had been collecting dust in library archives. Combining this detailed documentary roadmap with interviews, Turk weaves the root story of an organization that drove the most transformative mass movement of the modern age.Turk makes sense of NOW’s unwieldy geographic spread and 60-year history by telling it from the points of view of three very different leaders: Aileen Hernandez, Mary Jean Collins and Patricia Hill Burnett. Hernandez, an experienced Black union organizer, Collins, a young working-class political activist, and Burnett, a rich Detroit housewife and former Miss Michigan, personify the broad reach of the organization which tried, and sometimes failed, to represent all women.Collins, who became president the Chicago chapter in 1968, greeted her new cause with giddy enthusiasm, saying joining NOW was “like waking up from a dead sleep, like ‘this is wrong; and everything is wrong.’ And away we went.” Their goal was nothing short of reprograming American society; revamping the way people lived, worked and loved.Hernandez, the most professional of the three, was one of the first five commissioners of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. When the commission opened in 1965, its main mission was to strike down workplace race discrimination. To the surprise of its leaders, a third of complaints came from women. When the agency decided it would do nothing in response to complaints from stewardesses who were fired when they turned 32, and AT&T telephone operators denied higher-level jobs, it became clear to Washington insiders like Pauli Murray, Catherine East, Mary Eastwood and Sonia Pressman that the country needed a women’s version of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. On 30 June 1966, 28 women, with Friedan their fearless if flawed leader, created an organization to “bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society and in truly equal partnership with men”. NOW was born.Turk thoughtfully recounts the feminist groundswell and the growth of NOW. It counted just 120 members in 1966 but it grew to 18,000 members and 250 chapters in 1972 and to 40,000 members and 700 chapters in 1974. NOW took on big corporations like Sears, AT&T and the New York Times (over its gender-segregated classified ads). Covered by the mainstream press, lawsuits, protests and press conferences helped spread the word. But as grassroots chapters proliferated, so did different priorities.Growing pains started early and never really subsided. Riven by divisions over race, class and sexual orientation, the organization that aimed to represent all women would eventually sink from its own weight, if not before powering the women’s movement in the 1960s and 70s.Hernandez and Murray, two of the most influential and strategic members of NOW, winced at white women’s “racist slights and oversights”. Lesbians like Rita Mae Brown rebelled against homophobia. But on 26 August 1970, hundreds of thousands of women from all backgrounds took part in the largest nationwide women’s protest in history, the Women’s Strike for Equality. This was the moment the movement went viral.Two years later, when the Equal Rights Amendment passed the House and Senate with huge majorities, Now had enjoyed a five-year run of victories in its righteous and politically popular cause. Seeing the ERA as a one-shot inoculation against systemic sexism, NOW leaders made the fateful decision to double down on the amendment’s 38-state ratification, a single-issue mission that would alienate Black women and invite organized opposition. The effort to amend the US constitution ultimately foundered in the face of powerful conservative forces lead by Phyllis Schlafly and Ronald Reagan.As Turk deftly guides her readers through NOW’s roller coaster of victories and defeats, we come away with a clear blueprint for change – replete with cautionary tales – as we face new challenges to women’s freedom and equality. The Women of NOW can show today’s feminists the path forward. It is a must-read.
    The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

    Clara Bingham’s book The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Remade America 1963-1973 will be published in May 2024 More

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      in US Politics

      Feminism taught me all I need to know about men like Trump and Putin | Rebecca Solnit

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      Feminism taught me all I need to know about men like Trump and PutinRebecca SolnitLike all abusive men, dictators seek to control who can speak and which narratives are believed. The only difference is scaleAs the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfolded, I was reminded over and over again of the behaviour of abusive ex-husbands and boyfriends. At first he thinks that he can simply bully her into returning. When it turns out she has no desire to return, he shifts to vengeance.Putin insisted that Ukraine was rightfully part of Russia and didn’t have a separate existence. He expected his army to grab and subjugate with ease, even be welcomed. Now his regime seems bent on punitive destruction – of energy infrastructure, dwellings, historic sites, whole cities – and rape, torture and mass murder. This too is typical of abusers: domestic-violence homicides are often punishment for daring to leave.Everything I needed to know about authoritarianism I learned from feminism, or rather from feminism’s sharp eye when it comes to coercive control and male abusers. Sociologist and gender violence expert Evan Stark, in his book Coercive Control, defined the title term as one that subsumes domestic violence in a larger pattern of isolation, intimidation and control. (The book has been so influential that in the UK, coercive control is now recognised as a crime.) The violence matters, Stark writes, “but the primary harm abusive men inflict is political, not physical, and reflects the deprivation of rights and resources that are critical to personhood and citizenship”. This connects it directly to what dictators and totalitarian regimes do to the people under their rule – it’s only a matter of scale. And the agenda at all scales is to control not just practical matters, but fact, truth, history; who can speak and what can be said.The antithesis of this is, of course, democracy, which is likewise a principle that works at all scales. A marriage can be called democratic if both parties exercise power equally and are unconstrained and unintimidated by the other. Equally, a marriage can be a little tyranny in which one gains and the other surrenders rights and powers through the union, which was until recently how marriage was defined legally and socially. Likewise we call democratic those nations in which national decisions are (however imperfectly) made by representatives elected by, and accountable to, the public.At the very root of tyranny, no matter whether it’s personal or public life, lies the belief that the agency and agenda of others is illegitimate, that only the would-be tyrant should control the household or the nation. You can see this in authoritarian politicians’ rejection of the outcome of elections – Donald Trump, or in the Maga candidate Kari Lake’s unsuccessful run for Arizona governor, or the 8 January riot in Brasília to reject Lula’s victory.One term formerly used to describe relationships between an abusive man and a manipulated woman, gaslighting, became an indispensable word in public life when Trump became president. The gaslighting, the bullying, the fury to crush dissent, the assumption that he should be in charge of everything including facts, the rage, the insistence that every other power and voice is illegitimate: these are all hallmarks of dictators in the domestic and the political sphere. He began his presidency in the shade of a recording in which he infamously advocated grabbing women “by the pussy”; he ended it in the shadow of an insurrection that was a refusal to accept the verdict rendered by more than 80 million voters and the rules laid down by the US constitution.What’s striking about gaslighting is that it’s an attempt to push a lie or a distortion by using advantages of power, including credibility and social status, to overwhelm the gaslit person or people – or populace. It’s another kind of violence, not against bodies, but facts and truth. In stories of abusive households, the Trump administration and histories of authoritarianism, the men in charge regarded fact, truth, history and science as rival systems of power to be crushed or overwhelmed. And they are rival systems: a democracy of information means what prevails is what’s demonstrably true and substantiated, whether or not it’s convenient to whoever’s in power.That gaslighting was a staple of the Soviet Union is well known through the work of George Orwell and later historians (when I wrote about Orwell, I found a striking example cited by Adam Hochschild: that when Stalin’s demographers showed that the Soviet population was declining, he had them killed, causing the next round of demographers to offer more pleasing numbers). It’s also true in brutal households, where the first rule is that one must not say that it’s brutal, lest more violence transpire.Another way that studies of domestic abuse inform our political understanding is “Darvo”, an acronym that the domestic violence expert Jennifer Freyd coined in 1997 for how abusers respond in court or when otherwise challenged. It stands for deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. You insist that anyone mentioning what you’ve done is insulting you, is a liar, then insist that your accuser is the abuser and you are the victim, and keep shouting it until you believe it and maybe convince others. Freyd herself, with another psychologist, recently noted “a growing trend in the world of civil litigation: alleged perpetrators of interpersonal violence are filing defamation lawsuits against the individuals who have named them as abusers … For abusers, these lawsuits are an opportunity to enforce Darvo through civil litigation.”Trump is trying to make a comeback. It’s not working | Lloyd GreenRead moreDarvo happens all the time in political life. In the US, the Republicans have a pattern of claiming to defend what they’re attacking and to be the victims of what they’re perpetrating. Or as the New York Times columnist Charles M Blow put it in January, describing the agenda of the new Republican majority in the lower house of Congress: “Understanding that they can’t throw federal investigators off the trail of multiple conservatives – including, and perhaps principally, Donald Trump – they have decided to complicate those investigations by kicking up so much dust that the public has a hard time discerning fact from fiction.” The very mention of those crimes is treated as an insult and an outrage, with those complicit the offended parties, and so they shout down the evidence. Prolonged loud noise is an effective tactic.Blow mentions that the Republicans in the house are creating the select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, which will label the pursuit of Republican crimes, notably Trump’s around January 6, as baseless political vendettas. It’s, of course, a cover-up masquerading as a crusade. He continues: “The Republicans are using a fundamentally Trumpian tactic, accusing others of that which one is guilty of. It was Donald Trump, not the Democrats, who attempted to weaponize the federal government against his enemies.” That’s Darvo at its purest.Individuals can be bullied into silence and obedience. So can whole populations. And so can facts and truth. Democracy matters at all scales.
      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist
      TopicsDonald TrumpOpinionRepublicansVladimir PutinFeminismDomestic violenceUS politicscommentReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      The Persuaders by Anand Giridharadas review – why it pays to talk in a polarised world

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      The Persuaders by Anand Giridharadas review – why it pays to talk in a polarised world The US journalist and TV pundit has written an engaging and provocative study of the dangers of political purityIt is a mark of the problem that The Persuaders seeks to describe that I had to force myself to sit down and read it. Anand Giridharadas, well known in the US as a journalist and TV political pundit, has written a thinky book on a subject many of us may feel we’ve heard too much about already – namely, the feedback loops, filter bubbles and interference of Russian bot farms that have led to extreme polarisation in the US and beyond. Giridharadas describes this state of affairs as “Americans’ growing culture of mutual dismissal”, leading to a mass “writing-off from a distance” and the inability of anyone to change their minds about anything. In overview, it looks like a book borne of Twitter discourse, and who needs that?As it turns out, The Persuaders is, well, persuasive, with a mission to find solutions for all this by identifying strategists, activists and thought leaders who have broken through entrenched political indifference or partisanship to build bridges or win over new fans. If the understanding is that no one will cede an inch to the other side, Giridharadas seeks cheering counter-examples, from the coalition behind the 2017 Women’s March, to the explosion in mainstream support for Black Lives Matter, to the rise of figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – her modern campaigning style is studied usefully alongside the less flexible and successful style of Bernie Sanders. The book grapples with the dangers of political purity and how to persuade people from the centre right and flabby middle to the left without diluting the cause. Despite the occasional cuts-job vibe of books by busy media operators, I found it a useful, thoughtful and interesting read.Which is not to say it didn’t annoy me. That’s the point, I suppose. The clever thing about Giridharadas’s approach is that while dissecting the prejudices of others, he flushes out your own kneejerk reactions, a dynamic from which the author himself isn’t spared. In the chapter on the Women’s March, the Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, one of the organisers, describes how alienated she was by the movement’s roots in “white feminism”. There are readers who, presented with other names from the Women’s March leadership team, will have an equally forceful recoil, thanks to their perceived links with antisemitic figures.The concern around white feminism is given many pages of thoughtful discussion. The latter worry, triggered by support among some march organisers for Louis Farrakhan, the antisemitic leader of the Nation of Islam, is given half a sentence. One requires understanding; the other is largely dismissed. The effect of this, deliberately or otherwise, is to underscore the need for everyone to consider the alternative view. Multiple interviewees with decades of activism behind them express frustration at the present state of leftwing politics and its habit of either occupying a drippy middle ground or else digging into the narcissism of small difference. In the era of no microaggression going unpunished, the book makes the case through various veteran activists that not only is the purity spiral counterproductive to broadening the movement, it is, for those pursuing it, almost addictively recreational. As the author writes: “Social media rewarded the hunt for apostates more than the conversion of non-believers.”Loretta Ross, a pioneering activist and theorist in Black radical feminist tradition, puts it this way: “I think the 90-percenters spend too much time trying to turn people into 100-percenters, which is totally unnecessary.” She means those ostensibly on the same side who say: “If you’re not working on my issue from my angle, then you’re erasing my issue. If you’re championing economic justice, you’re problematic for minimising race. If you’re championing racial justice, you don’t post enough about the ills of capitalism. If you’re focused on long-term climate change, you’re neglecting the here-and-now needs of poor communities.” These fights only hurt the progressive cause. It’s OK to call people out, but understand what you’re reaching for, she says. “You can’t change other people. You can’t even change the person you’re married to. You can help people. You can expose people to different information and help them learn – if you do so with love.”What this means in some contexts, argues Giridharadas, is shelving what feels good for what actually works. One chapter studies a fascinating programme trying to stop rapists reoffending by educating them on feminism, which requires a huge emotional effort on the part of the female educators to overcome what Ross calls “the justified instinct to focus on those hurt by the problem, not those perpetrating it”. Who wants to put resources into engaging with a rapist at the expense of funding his victims? But if it’s the most effective way to reduce rape, it’s at least worth considering.The most skippable stretch of the book is a long, Wikipediaesque biography of Ocasio-Cortez, all well-rehearsed information by this point. And there are occasional, inadvertently funny passages. An account of a consciousness-raising group of white people trying to become better educated about their own race privilege contains a testy back and forth over whether the description “recovering racist” implies that they are, in fact, racist, that is pure Monty Python.By far the most fascinating and potentially useful case study is that of Anat Shenker-Osorio, the communications strategist for progressive causes, whose tactics, pegged to the data, have exposed a lot of shortfalls in leftwing political campaigning. Shenker-Osorio points out that when people get frightened, they skew right; when they feel compassion and common cause with their fellow humans, they skew left. The left has often made the mistake of tailgating on the right’s framing of a discussion, piping up “We too are tough on law and order!” rather than calling out the right’s way of sowing disagreement between groups. “What is it about winning that is distasteful to you?” she says drily to a campaigner fixated on small differentials in language. She also counsels the left to cheer up. “Many progressive and Democratic messages basically boil down to ‘Boy, have I got a problem for you!’” – proven to be a big downer at the polls. “You’ve got to sell people on the beautiful tomorrow.”Exacerbated by new technology, these are, nonetheless, very old problems. As Saul Bellow put it in The Adventures of Augie March: “That’s the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what’s real.” This enjoyable, helpful read may, paradoxically, suspend our solipsism for long enough to better prosecute that recruitment.TopicsPolitics booksThe ObserverBlack Lives Matter movementFeminismAlexandria Ocasio-CortezUS politicsreviewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      The Great Stewardess Rebellion review: stirring read of and for a post-Roe world

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      The Great Stewardess Rebellion review: stirring study of what Roe v Wade helped vanquish As the supreme court attacks women’s rights, Nell McShane Wulfhart’s story of ‘a workplace revolution at 30,000ft’ is timely In 1966, when America was still in the throes of the Mad Men era, when men were men and women were their secretaries, Martha Griffiths, one of a handful of women in Congress, wrote to the senior vice-president of United Airlines.‘A PhD in my brother’: Valerie Biden Owens on the Joe she knowsRead moreShe asked: “What are you running, Mr Mason, an airline or a whorehouse?”Charles M Mason had declared that a stewardess who lingered on the job for more than three years without finding a husband was “the wrong kind of girl”.Mason’s comment described not just the devalued status of stewardesses in the 1960s but the reality of most working women at the time. Mason’s “wrong kind of girl” (these “girls” were usually college graduates) was a woman who might not want marriage and children to be her only occupation, or might need to work for a living.As Nell McShane Wulfhart writes in her astonishing exposé of their long struggle for respect and equality, flight attendants were pimped out as sexual objects whose role was to serve, charm and entice male customers. TWA, United, Delta and other airlines argued that their bottom line depended on hiring young, beautiful women and firing them if they got married or pregnant, turned 32 or, God forbid, put on some pounds. Airlines were in the business of selling sex along with tickets, a very profitable Playboy Club in the skies.This largely under-chronicled aspect of recent women’s history is a valuable reminder of how far women have come. Those were the days when women couldn’t get credit cards or sign leases without their husband’s permission, sexual harassment and firing pregnant women was legal, only 3% of lawyers and 7% of doctors were women, and women earned 40% less than men for the same jobs. Women may have achieved the right to vote in 1920 but they hadn’t made many more strides towards equality until the second-wave feminist movement lit the fire in the 1970s.The recent bombshell draft opinion by the supreme court justice Samuel Alito, which would reverse 49 years of a woman’s right to control her body and life, only makes The Great Stewardess Rebellion a more relevant and urgent read. As American women stand on the precipice of revisiting their pre-1973 second-class citizenship, Wulfhart provides a stark reminder of how dark those days really were.In 1965, as many as a million women interviewed for 10,000 positions as “sky girls”. A stewardess’s globetrotting life trumped the few other options available: secretary, nurse, teacher. Those who made the cut were shipped to the “charm farm”, a stewardess boarding school where candidates were taught how to comply with strict hair, makeup, nails and clothing regulations. False eyelashes and girdles, yes. Glasses, no. Skills like mastering airplane safety came a distant second to physical appearance.As important as looking good was being svelte. If a stewardess stood 5ft 5 she could weigh 129lb or less, with three-pound overage once a month during menses. At the charm farm, “girls” close to the weight limit were pulled out of class for random weigh-ins. On the job, a scale was placed in the operations room, with stewardesses required to weigh in in front of their mostly male colleagues. Company doctors prescribed diet pills and many patients got hooked on Black Beauties. If a stewardess made the mistake of getting pregnant, she would have to quit, find a way to get an illegal abortion, or take sick leave to give birth in secret. At least six stewardesses who were fired after they turned 32 killed themselves.And then there were the “uniforms”. At first, the style was proper: hats, gloves, knee-length skirt suits and heels. But in the latter half of the 60s, the sex-kitten look prevailed. In 1968, TWA launched the “Foreign Accent” campaign. Each plane had its own theme and costume: a gold minidress for France, a toga for Italy, a ruffled white blouse for Olde England. American Airlines required tartan miniskirts, matching vests and raccoon fur caps.Braniff introduced the “Air Strip”, where stewardesses would slowly shed their Pucci-designed uniforms over the course of the flight. Madison Avenue ad copy boasted: “When she brings you dinner, she’ll be dressed this way … After dinner, on those long flights, she’ll slip into something a little more comfortable … the Air Strip is brought to you by Braniff International, who believes that even an airline hostess should look like a girl.”When the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission opened, after the passage of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, stewardesses were among its first customers. More than 100 gender discrimination complaints were filed by stewardesses in the EEOC’s first year and a half. The agency, set up primarily to battle race discrimination, did not take the stewardesses seriously at first. Nor did the unions, Congress or the courts, and it would be years until any semblance of real change could be wrenched out of the airlines.But when the women’s liberation movement erupted in 1970 it empowered stewardesses too. Mary Pat Laffey filed a class action discrimination suit against Northwest Airlines for violation of Title VII and the Equal Pay Act. Northwest appealed over and over but Laffey finally made history in 1984, when she won the largest monetary judgment in Title VII history: $63m in back pay.More importantly, the case forced other large corporations to settle EEOC cases and put affirmative action plans in place, paving the way for a workplace revolution. Laffey’s career lasted 42 years – enough time to witness the role of women in the workplace transform from servants and sexpots to partners and colleagues.Now we wait to see how far the supreme court will go to turn back the clock.
      The Great Stewardess Rebellion is published in the US by Doubleday
      Clara Bingham is the author of Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost its Mind and Found its Soul
      TopicsBooksFeminismWomenPolitics booksUS politicsAir transportUS constitution and civil libertiesreviewsReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      Madeleine Albright hailed as a 'trailblazer' by colleagues – video

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      Madeleine Albright, who fled the Nazis as a child in her native Czechoslovakia and rose to become the first female US secretary of state and, in her later years, a pop culture feminist icon, died on Wednesday at the age of 84, her family said. Colleagues across the US state department and the UN have remembered Albright as a ‘trailblazer’ whose impact is felt ‘every single day’

      Madeleine Albright, first female US secretary of state, dies aged 84
      Madeleine Albright obituary
      Madeleine Albright: ‘The things that are happening are genuinely, seriously bad’ More

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      in US Politics

      Republican senator Josh Hawley worries feminism has driven men to ‘pornography and video games’

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      RepublicansRepublican senator Josh Hawley worries feminism has driven men to ‘pornography and video games’Far-right senator from Missouri ridiculed for his homilies on ‘manly virtues’ Adam Gabbatt@adamgabbattMon 1 Nov 2021 13.14 EDTLast modified on Mon 1 Nov 2021 14.03 EDTThe effort to combat toxic masculinity in the US has led men to consume more pornography and play more video games, the Missouri senator Josh Hawley claimed in a speech to a group of Republicans.Speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, Hawley addressed the issue of “manhood”, which he said was under attack, and called for men to return to traditional masculine roles.The Donald Trump supporter who notoriously raised a fist in support of a mob outside the US Capitol on 6 January appeared to echo talking points made by the likes of the Proud Boys, a far-right group that opposes feminism and believes men are under attack from liberal elites.“Can we be surprised that after years of being told that they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness and pornography and video games?” Hawley said.“While the left may celebrate this decline of men, I for one cannot join them. No one should.”Hawley, 41, did not cite sources for his belief that men were watching pornography more frequently. Nonetheless, on Monday his speech was republished by the Federalist, a rightwing outlet. In the address, Hawley said he wanted to discuss “the left’s attempt to give us a world beyond men”.“The left want to define traditional masculinity as toxic,” he said. “They want to define the traditional masculine virtues – things like courage, and independence, and assertiveness – as a danger to society.”Hawley is the son of a banker who attended private school before studying at Stanford and Yale. He clerked for the supreme court’s chief justice, John Roberts, and later became a law professor.Given his background, he has repeatedly raised eyebrows for railing against elites. Hawley’s apparent claim to speak for all men, in the name of a return to a vaguely defined masculinity of old, swiftly became a new subject of ridicule on Twitter.If Josh Hawley is an expert on masculinity then I’d like to take a few minutes to share my thoughts on quantum physics.— Jason Kander (@JasonKander) November 1, 2021
      In the good old days, uncriticized American men fucked real top-heavy silicone queens and machine-gunned their way through actual space aliens on a daily basis. Also, don’t shake the junior Missouri senator’s hand until you see him wash it. https://t.co/VrN3irWqKy— David Simon (@AoDespair) November 1, 2021
      Josh Hawley says American men are “watching porn and playing video games because their masculinity is being criticized.” Mostly by their parents who keep asking, “Josh, when are you going to move out of our basement, stop picking your nose and get a job?” pic.twitter.com/NSY6sbo2aP— Paul Rudnick (@PaulRudnickNY) November 1, 2021
      Hawley, who was a staunch defender of Brett Kavanaugh when he was accused of sexual assault during his supreme court nomination hearings in 2018, claimed: “Boys are increasingly treated like an illness in search of a cure.”“Hollywood delivers the toxic masculinity theme ad nauseum in television and film,” he said, going on to link traditional masculinity as “vital to self-government”.“Observers from the ancient Romans to our forefathers identified the manly virtues as indispensable for political liberty,” Hawley said.As well as pornography, Hawley tied the supposed decline in masculinity to issues including unemployment, people marrying at a later age and the preservation of liberty.Hawley said: “For centuries, lovers of liberty have praised these qualities as the highest standard of manhood. That’s not to say that women don’t possess them. But it is to say that these virtues are the bright side of the aggression and competitiveness and independence that psychologists, no less than philosophers, have long observed in men.“Assertiveness and independence are strengths when used to protect and empower others.”Hawley offered few solutions to the problems he claimed to present. On Monday, he used Twitter to promote his new podcast, co-hosted with his wife.“In the second episode of This is Living, Josh and Erin Hawley share the story of how they met, what drew them to each other, and how two people so different decided to get married,” a blurb for the podcast reads.The Hawleys met while studying law at Yale. Erin Hawley also clerked for Roberts and became a law professor.TopicsRepublicansThe far rightFeminismGenderUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      It’s clear capitalism isn’t working when US politicians try to bring back child labor | Arwa Mahdawi

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      The Week in PatriarchyFeminismIt’s clear capitalism isn’t working when US politicians try to bring back child laborArwa MahdawiThere is something very, very wrong with a system that would rather recruit more kids instead of paying better wages and providing more benefits to adults Sat 30 Oct 2021 09.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 30 Oct 2021 09.02 EDTSign up for the Week in Patriarchy, a newsletter on feminism and sexism sent every Saturday.Build Back Better (with child labour)Back in the good old days American children didn’t sit around playing video games, making TikToks, and bingeing Netflix. They worked long hours in factories and sweatshops; they knew the value of hard graft. They didn’t take sick days either, they just died of diphtheria. It was a simpler time.Some US politicians, it would seem, are trying their best to return the country to a golden era of loose labour laws. The Wisconsin senate recently approved a bill that expands the working day for minors, allowing 14- and 15-year-olds to work until 11 pm on non-school nights. Must be fun being a child in Wisconsin! Not only do adults want to take away your free time, they also want to take away your free food. Over the summer school board members in the Waukesha school district made headlines after they voted to leave a federal free meals program because they worried it made it easy for families to “become spoiled” or develop an “addiction” to the service. Imagine if kids became addicted to the government ensuring they didn’t starve, eh? They might not be so keen to work for peanuts until 11 at night. Then you might have to start paying adults a living wage and the whole system would fall apart!As I’m sure you are aware, the United States – along with much of the world – is facing a dramatic labour shortage amid what has been termed the Great Resignation. Earlier this month the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that an unprecedented 2.9% of the workforce, about 4.3 million people, quit their jobs in August. Republicans have been doing their best to starve people back into the low-paid jobs that keep the economy running by cutting off pandemic unemployment benefits, but that hasn’t immediately solved the issue. So some bright sparks have been turning to child labour instead. Over the summer New Jersey passed legislation temporarily increasing the number of hours that kids aged 16-18 are able to work. Meanwhile, fast-food chains across the US have ramped up their efforts to recruit kids. Last month a McDonald’s in Oregon sparked headlines after it put out a banner urging 14- and 15-year-olds to apply.There’s obviously nothing wrong with teenagers getting summer jobs. But there is something very, very wrong with a system that would rather recruit more kids into the workforce instead of paying better wages and providing more benefits to adults. There’s something very wrong with a system where billionaires have seen their net worth balloon during the worst public health crisis in recent memory – and politicians seemingly have no desire to make them pay their fair share in taxes. There’s something very wrong with a system where minimum wage isn’t enough to afford a two-bedroom rental anywhere in the US. And, increasingly, people aren’t putting up with all this any more. They’re not swallowing the lie that if they just buckle down and work hard, they can achieve the American dream. They’re not quietly getting on with it, they’re organising: the past year has seen a wave of labour uprisings across America. Meanwhile, socialism (once an incredibly dirty word in the US) has been gaining popularity among young Americans. And that last bit should surprise no one. If politicians are trying to bring back child labour to plug labour shortages then I think it’s pretty clear that capitalism isn’t working.Kellogg’s to give staff in the UK fertility, menopause and miscarriage leaveThe company has said it is aiming to help staff feel “psychologically safe” at work. Not sure if that ethos extends to its employees in the US: 1,400 Kellogg’s workers recently went on strike to protest against poor working conditions.Women are better investors than menWomen’s investment returns were 0.4% higher than men’s, according to Fidelity’s 2021 Women and Investing Study. While that’s not a huge difference, it’s just the latest study to show that women tend to be better with money than men. Women tend to hold their investments for longer and are less prone to panic selling.Men are increasingly worried about their biological clocksSirin Kale profiles the men who are afraid they’ve left it too late to have kids.US tech investor Joe Lonsdale thinks men who take paternity leave are losersThe multimillionaire venture capitalist tweeted that men with important jobs shouldn’t be taking extended time off to spend with their newborns. “In the old days men had babies and worked harder to provide for their future – that’s the correct masculine response,” he tweeted. The father-of-three has refused to apologize for his comments. Real men don’t apologize, doubling down on looking like an idiot is the correct masculine response!Sexual misconduct complaint filed against Andrew CuomoThe former New York governor continues his dramatic fall from grace. Still, things aren’t too bad for him: at least he has that $5.1m payout from his book on leadership to fall back on.Polish parliament debates bill banning LGBTQ pride paradesPoland has become an increasingly hostile place for LGBTQ people in recent years.US issues its first passport with ‘X’ gender designationX-citing news for non-binary people!Study finds California condors can have ‘virgin births’Researchers believe it is the first case of asexual reproduction in any avian species where the female had access to a mate.The week in phonecall-archyLike every sensible millennial, I do not pick up my phone to unknown numbers under any circumstance. Nor, it seems, does a hiker who got lost in Colorado recently and repeatedly ignored phone calls from a search and rescue team because he didn’t recognize the number. I appreciate the dedication to avoiding spammers, but that was a very bad call.
      Arwa Mahdawi’s new book, Strong Female Lead, is available for pre-order
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