Important Post on the Struggle for Women's Rights by Martha P. Cotera

Martha Cotera (L) with Alicia Gaspar de Alba (Center)
and Angela Valenzuela (Right) at Alicia's May 2,  2019
speaking engagement at the UT Benson Library where
her archives were deposited.
View at: https://tinyurl.com/y3av23bd

I think the post below speaks volumes to young women who feel that the movement for women's rights is irrelevant to them: If you have time, read the post and consider that in 1975, I could not get a phone account for my business without my husband's signature; nor could women get loans for homes, get tubal ligations on their own, and in some cases, not even birth control, of course we had to fight for women to be hired as firefighters, police, and as principals, superintendents, city managers, bankers (basically most professions were closed to women).

These are our own heroinas: Margaret Munoz Simon, Gloria Anzaldua, Lena Guerrero, Isabel Mcgran Gonzalez, Emma Tenayuca, Luisa Moreno, Francisca Flores, Irma Rangel, Virginia Muzquiz, Margaret Cruz, Jovita Idar, Jovita Gonzalez and thousands others deserve our gratitude for their advocacy on our behalf.

-Martha P. Cotera

Women’s March, 2017. Philadelphia, PA

You Are Not Equal. I’m Sorry.
by Dina Leygerman | Medium
Jan 22, 2017
(A post is making rounds on social media, in response to the Women’s March on Saturday, January 21, 2017.
It starts with “I am not a “disgrace to women” because I don’t support the women’s march. I do not feel I am a “second class citizen” because I am a woman….”
This is my response to that post.)

Say Thank You
Say thank you. Say thank you to the women who gave you a voice. Say thank you to the women who were arrested and imprisoned and beaten and gassed for you to have a voice. Say thank you to the women who refused to back down, to the women who fought tirelessly to give you a voice. Say thank you to the women who put their lives on hold, who –lucky for you — did not have “better things to do” than to march and protest and rally for your voice. So you don’t feel like a “second class citizen.” So you get to feel “equal.”

Thank Susan B. Anthony and Alice Paul for your right to vote.

Thank Elizabeth Stanton for your right to work.

Thank Maud Wood Park for your prenatal care and your identity outside of your husband.

Thank Rose Schneiderman for your humane working conditions.

Thank Eleanor Roosevelt and Molly Dewson for your ability to work in politics and affect policy.

Thank Margaret Sanger for your legal birth control.

Thank Carol Downer for your reproductive healthcare rights.

Thank Margaret Fuller for your equal education.

Thank Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Shannon Turner, Gloria Steinem, Zelda Kingoff Nordlinger, Rosa Parks, Angela Davis, Malika Saada Saar, Wagatwe Wanjuki, Ida B. Wells, Malala Yousafzai. Thank your mother, your grandmother, your great-grandmother who did not have half of the rights you have now.

You can make your own choices, speak and be heard, vote, work, control your body, defend yourself, defend your family, because of the women who marched. You did nothing to earn those rights. You were born into those rights. You did nothing, but you reap the benefits of women, strong women, women who fought misogyny and pushed through patriarchy and fought for you. And you sit on your pedestal, a pedestal you are fortunate enough to have, and type. A keyboard warrior. A fighter for complacency. An acceptor of what you were given. A denier of facts. Wrapped up in your delusion of equality.

You are not equal. Even if you feel like you are. You still make less than a man for doing the same work. You make less as a CEO, as an athlete, as an actress, as a doctor. You make less in government, in the tech industry, in healthcare.

You still don’t have full rights over your own body. Men are still debating over your uterus. Over your prenatal care. Over your choices.

You still have to pay taxes for your basic sanitary needs.

You still have to carry mace when walking alone at night. You still have to prove to the court why you were drunk on the night you were raped. You still have to justify your behavior when a man forces himself on you.

You still don’t have paid (or even unpaid) maternity leave. You still have to go back to work while your body is broken. While you silently suffer from postpartum depression.

You still have to fight to breastfeed in public. You still have to prove to other women it’s your right to do so. You still offend others with your breasts.

You are still objectified. You are still catcalled. You are still sexualized. You are still told you’re too skinny or you’re too fat. You’re still told you’re too old or too young. You’re applauded when you “age gracefully.” You’re still told men age “better.” You’re still told to dress like a lady. You are still judged on your outfit instead of what’s in your head. What brand bag you have still matters more than your college degree.

You are still being abused by your husband, by your boyfriend. You’re still being murdered by your partners. Being beaten by your soulmate.

You are still worse off if you are a woman of color, a gay woman, a transgender woman. You are still harassed, belittled, dehumanized.

Your daughters are still told they are beautiful before they are told they are smart. Your daughters are still told to behave even though “boys will be boys.” Your daughters are still told boys pull hair or pinch them because they like them.

You are not equal. Your daughters are not equal. You are still systematically oppressed.

Estonia allows parents to take up to three years of leave, fully paid for the first 435 days. United States has no policy requiring maternity leave.

Singapore’s women feel safe walking alone at night. American women do not.

New Zealand’s women have the smallest gender gap in wages, at 5.6%. United States’ pay gap is 20%.

Iceland has the highest number of women CEOs, at 44%. United States is at 4.0%.

The United States ranks at 45 for women’s equality. Behind Rwanda, Cuba, Philippines, Jamaica.

But I get it. You don’t want to admit it. You don’t want to be a victim. You think feminism is a dirty word. You think it’s not classy to fight for equality. You hate the word pussy. Unless of course you use it to call a man who isn’t up to your standard of manhood. You know the type of man that “allows” “his” woman to do whatever she damn well pleases. I get it. You believe feminists are emotional, irrational, unreasonable. Why aren’t women just satisfied with their lives, right? You get what you get and you don’t get upset, right?

I get it. You want to feel empowered. You don’t want to believe you’re oppressed. Because that would mean you are indeed a “second-class citizen.” You don’t want to feel like one. I get it. But don’t worry. I will walk for you. I will walk for your daughter. And your daughter’s daughter. And maybe you will still believe the world did not change. You will believe you’ve always had the rights you have today. And that’s okay. Because women who actually care and support other women don’t care what you think about them. They care about their future and the future of the women who come after them.

Open your eyes. Open them wide. Because I’m here to tell you, along with millions of other women that you are not equal. Our equality is an illusion. A feel-good sleight of hand. A trick of the mind. I’m sorry to tell you, but you are not equal. And neither are your daughters.

But don’t worry. We will walk for you. We will fight for you. We will stand up for you. And one day you will actually be equal, instead of just feeling like you are.

~ Dina Leygerman, 2017

Excellent critique by Eric Levitz in New York Magazine of Jordan Peterson, as well as Ben Shapiro, who basically do not want to see inequality in society as a consequence of our tawdry, colonial history of racism, sexism, and classism—or how this history continues to inform the present.

The fact that the market delivers enormous rewards to people who design collateralized debt obligations — and piddling ones to those who care for the elderly — is a reflection of government policy, not metaphysical truth. Jordan Peterson owes his newfound fortune to the construct of “intellectual property rights,” and the willingness of nation-states to enforce such rights through coercion. A single mother raising four children — whose labor will one day help subsidize Peterson’s Old Age Security pension — receives no compensation for her efforts, because policy makers have chosen not to make a similar “intervention” in the market on her behalf.

For someone like Peterson who ostensibly cares so much about meritocracy and social utility and sets about this by championing “equality of opportunity,” this speaks volumes when he turns a blind eye to structural factors like institutionalized racism and patriarchy that limit it.

-Angela Valenzuela

Jordan Peterson Does Not Support ‘Equality of Opportunity’

When conservatives decry “equality of outcomes,” they’re usually evading a debate about structural inequalities in the distribution of opportunity

By Eric Levitz | New York Magazine May 25, 2018

In the United States today, the richest 0.1 percent of households command as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent combined; the average CEO collects 140 times as large a salary as his (or, very occasionally her) typical employee; the median white family is 12 times richer than the median black one; and the superrich can expect to live 15 years longer than the poor.

And North America’s most influential public intellectual has convinced himself that one our society’s biggest problems is its excessive intolerance for inequality.

Jordan Peterson believes that America is besieged by “postmodernists” who wish to build an economic system that will guarantee “equal outcomes” for all individuals. In his book, YouTube videos, lectures, and newspaper interviews, the Canadian psychologist — turned patron-saint of “failsons” — decries the notion that justice requires total economic equality with such fervor and frequency, you’d think he was speaking from a Stalinist gulag.

And yet, he is far from alone in this fixation. His fellow travelers in the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web” also believe that it is extremely important — and incredibly brave — to say that full communism is a bad idea in Donald Trump’s United States. Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan — and just about every other prominent critic of “social justice warriors” — regularly decry the left for abandoning the American ideal of “equality of opportunity” for the Marxist dream of “equality of outcomes.”

While wholly divorced from social reality, the origins of Peterson & Co.’s obsession with radical egalitarianism are plain to see. Progressive commentators (and social media users) routinely present racial and gender disparities as dispositive evidence of social injustice. When liberals do this, they do not (generally) intend to suggest that all human beings are equal in aptitude — or that fairness requires total equality in the material and social conditions of all individuals and demographic groups. I do not know any feminists who blame the patriarchy for the fact that no woman has ever played middle linebacker in the NFL. These days, most self-identified “socialists” in the U.S. seem to want little more than the same suite of social welfare programs enjoyed by their peers in capitalist Western Europe. And even those lefties who are genuinely committed to socializing the means of production are, typically, quite comfortable with the survival of material inequality within a narrow band (to incentivize and reward socially useful labor).

The reason (most) progressives posit the gender-wage gap — or racial disparities in incarceration, or income inequality — as self-evident testaments to injustice is not that they are committed to “equality of outcomes.” Rather, it is that they believe that in a society as racist, sexist, and economically stratified as our own, it is safe to assume that such inequalities are not solely rooted in meritocracy or social utility.

Jordan Peterson’s default assumption is that in “Western societies” such inequalities primarily reflect “hierarchies of competence” that redound to benefit of the public as a whole. The left, by contrast, assumes that the gender-wage gap (at least partially) reflects the fact that women have been so thoroughly and durably subordinated in the United States, men in Oklahoma and North Carolina still had the legal right to rape their wives as recently as 1993.

Progressives also feel it safe to say that the economic chasm between black and white households might have something to do with the fact that, for most of American history, chattel slavery, Jim Crow laws, and discriminatory housing policies barred the vast majority of African-Americans from the opportunity to accrue wealth. And liberals are also fairly confident that “hierarchies of competence” do not fully explain the disparate market incomes of the one percent and middle class, in a nation where beloved public school teachers live on the edge of poverty, and Donald Trump lives in the White House.

Is it plausible that, in conditions of total social equality, human beings with lower testosterone levels would be disproportionately interested in “care work” and child-rearing — while those with higher levels would be overrepresented among mechanical engineers? Sure. But that hypothetical isn’t terribly relevant to questions of social policy in a nation where women are still routinely subjected to domestic violence in their homes, sexual harassment in their workplaces, and gender bias at their schools.

Nor would such disparate preferences necessarily justify pay disparities, even in the absence of such social disadvantages. There is nothing natural about the price that markets place on different kinds of labor. Our entire economic system relies on women performing incalculable hours of reproductive work without receiving any formal compensation at all. The fact that the market delivers enormous rewards to people who design collateralized debt obligations — and piddling ones to those who care for the elderly — is a reflection of government policy, not metaphysical truth. Jordan Peterson owes his newfound fortune to the construct of “intellectual property rights,” and the willingness of nation-states to enforce such rights through coercion. A single mother raising four children — whose labor will one day help subsidize Peterson’s Old Age Security pension — receives no compensation for her efforts, because policy makers have chosen not to make a similar “intervention” in the market on her behalf.

Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro would be well within their rights to contest these premises. But instead of engaging in an honest debate about whether equality of opportunity exists in the United States, they chose to misconstrue their point-of-contention with “SJWs” — and proceed to delegitimize concerns over structural inequality by equating them with a totalitarian ideology (i.e. “cultural Marxism”).

The fact that they voice such unequivocal support for “equality of opportunity” while executing this move is, itself, a testament to their bad faith. In truth, these conservative thinkers do not actually believe that all citizens of a democracy are entitled to an equal opportunity at economic and social success. In fact, virtually no one believes that — because achieving such equality is impossible to literally realize, absent a degree of social engineering that would make Chairman Mao blush.

Even if we (arbitrarily) confine our concern to inequalities of opportunity rooted in the historic, de jure oppression of African-Americans, the degree of government intervention necessary to level the playing field is massive. Thanks to state-sponsored residential segregation, black children are far more likely than white ones to grow up in neighborhoods and buildings that expose them to hazardous concentrations of lead. And this exposure can do durable damage to a child’s cognitive faculties, including her memory, attention, reasoning, and motor skills. Which is to say: By the time they arrive at kindergarten, many black children will already find themselves at a (potentially permanent) cognitive disadvantage, as a consequence of the inequitable housing conditions that they were born into.

And then, such children will likely find themselves in an elementary school that has lower per-pupil funding — and a higher concentration of poverty among the student body (socioeconomic segregation has been shown to be detrimental to the educational outcomes of individual low-income students) — than their white peers. And those disadvantages are, themselves, products of residential discrimination that the federal government engineered.

One could devote (and many have devoted) whole books to further unspooling the structural disadvantages that African-American young people encounter as they come of age. But if we decide to stop the story here — and pretend that “equality of opportunity” can be established merely by providing all American children with equal access to housing that won’t poison them, and schools that are equally well-funded and socioeconomically diverse — the task before us is already immense. To establish even this impoverished form of “equal opportunity,” the federal government would need to execute a massive program of lead removal and public housing construction, and then radically restructure how the public education system is financed.

And yet, you will not find the Intellectual Dark Web’s many champions of equal opportunity clamoring for such intiatives. In fact, Ben Shapiro has argued that the “the idea that black people in the United States are disproportionately poor because America is racist; that’s just not true.” Peterson, meanwhile, believes that the following argument constitutes a bulletproof case that economic inequalities in the United States are almost entirely meritocratic:

Let’s say you want to determine what the best predictors are for lifetime success in a Western society. Well, what would you hope for? How about intelligence. There would be a good one: Let’s hope the smart people occupy more positions of complexity. Right, because they’re smarter? Would you want it any other way? The number one predictor of accomplishment in Western societies is intelligence. What’s the number two predictor: Conscientiousness. Well, what’s that? It’s a trait marker for hard work. So, who gets ahead? Smart people who work hard.

That the socioeconomic conditions a person is born into could limit her opportunity to develop such traits never seems to cross Peterson’s mind.

This oversight isn’t a product of the esteemed professor’s lack of intelligence or conscientiousness. It merely betrays the fact that, when Peterson champions “equality of opportunity,” he is not expressing a sincere desire to minimize the anti-meritocratic features of our political economy. Rather, he is seeking to naturalize those features by asserting, without evidence, that the absence of de jure discrimination renders them nonexistent.