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YOU CAN KEEP A GOOD WOMAN DOWN- but not quite forever

 

historical battles addressing inequality – written in 2003

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This past month we have seen in Canada a budget announcement targeting nearly a billion dollars to children cared for in regulated daycare, incentives to women to work outside the home, glowing bubbling statements of choices and productivity and valuing our children. It was a short  announcement, made with a splash of hurrah from all those who lobbied long for it, and carefully failing to mention all kids not in daycare, all parents using other informal care arrangements, all women doing unpaid caregiving work, in fact ignoring over half the nation.  It was a model of most of the clever ways governments has used for centuries to help some of the people some of the time.

 

But I am not as shocked as I would have been 30 years ago not just because I am aware of the tricks but also  because I really feel that in the movement to recognize the part of the economy such budgets always ignore- unpaid work – we are well along towards succeeding anyway. For we are near what Malcolm Gladwell might call’ the tipping point’.   In any movement of vast social change there are stages, and I believe we are well into stage 3 of the 4 stages. 

 

Gandhi once said there were four stages to social revolutions.. First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.

 

Most human rights were won by this long process. The UN lists basic rights such as the right to not be forced to do child labor, the right to not be slaves, the right to not have extrajudicial disappearances, to not be tortured, to not be detained without charge, to not have compulsory religion, to not have mail censorship, the right to vote, the right to independent newspapers, the right to a quick appearance before a judge or court, the right to interracial marriage, the right to equality of the sexes. And blood has been shed to win most of those rights.  And I think that however smug western industrialized nations may feel now, there are still a few equality rights not yet won. One is to recognize unpaid caregiving, the mundane care of the sick, young, elderly, handicapped and dying that has been traditionally female work, unsung and unpaid.  It was this work that was the focus of the UN Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995.

 

And I believe we are well along in this movement.. Polls show it and the politically correct terminology used even by government adopts the language of the movement- choices for parents, best interests of the child, attachment. So though the Canadian budget ignores the value of such work, still, it uses terminology of choice the movement uses.  

 

 

Some have likened any big social movement to a river.  It starts with a few droplets coming down off the icy mountain, single droplets, individuals acting nearly alone.

 

a. First they ignore you

 

The first stage of any movement is easy to ignore. Each droplet seems insignificant.  It starts in the log cabin of Abraham Lincoln, in the poverty of Gandhi or Mandela or Rosa Parks. It starts small.

Often it is linked to poverty. Henrietta Muir Edwards in Canada  sold miniature paintings she made just to raise funds to cover costs of running a small periodical about women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1848 held the first woman’s rights convention in  America, in her home.

 

In my work to get the state to give tax recognition to caregivers such as homemakers, I was as if my letters had wafted away with the wind. It took months to get an answer if I ever got one, and usually it was a form letter saying ‘Thanks for writing. Be sure to write again”

 

Being ignored is actually a kind of good sign because it means the overclass has no good answer- it is a quiet admission that logic is on your side.  But of course we don’t read it that way.  The state chooses to ignore a movement as a first line of defense. Even today it is common to put an issue out of the public eye simply by the state convening a committee to study your issue, with an indefinite time frame. When I made a complaint at the United Nations in 1997 that Canadian law ignored homemaking functions, for two years Canada ignored my complaint which I suppose if nothing else, proved my point.

 

There are many ways to ignore people. Ancient Rome ignored most adults by  denying them citizenship. Blackstone’s 1765 Commentaries on the Laws of England said women were nonpersons. Blacks were not on the radar screen of those with rights because in social Darwinism it was deemed biologically evident they were not fully human anyway.  A Philadelphia newspaper assessed women suffragettes briefly saying’ A woman is a nobody” Susan B.  Anthony observed that woman has never been thought of other than a piece of property. Married women disappeared in identity when they were required to take the name of their husband. In Canada women were not considered “persons’ under the law. Black slaves were property not human, and they could be traded. They had no rights to a free trial if they ran away and were caught.

In South Africa Nelson Mandela noticed that being black reduced a person to the status of nonperson.  Jews were considered subhuman,  inferior to the master race in Hitler’s philosophy. And once you consider the ‘other’ unlike you significantly, it becomes much easier to live with your conscience and keep him down.

 

Being ignored is a well-known state strategy – ‘the silent treatment’- but I always felt their silence was not golden.. It is yellow.

 

b. Then they laugh at you

 

Stage two of the movement requires courage.  Those who raise their voices in a way  too noticeable to ignore because it is somehow public, are t hen exposed to the next defense the dominant class has – to mock you. Fannie Lou Hamer charged into the US Democratic National Convention in 1864 saying that the all white delegation there from Mississippi should not be seated because it was elected without the input of the huge black population in the state. She got live TV coverage but  then endured lost her job.

Susan B. Anthony, spoke up at a teachers’ convention in 1853 in the US saying the low salaries were because of the assumption women had few brains. Some women thanked her for her comments but others drew aside their skirts and turned their backs. As she spoke up for women’s rights later she was attached, threatened, burned in effigy, had acid thrown on her dress and was called a “brawling woman’ by the Syracuse Star newspaper. A 55 year olds man said to her “ I would rather see my wife or daughter in her coffin than hear her speaking as you did before a public assembly” 

 

Sometimes the weapon to mock others is words. The terms ‘nigger, faggot, fairy, blackie, darkie, bitch’ are no accident in our culture for they are barbs to keep an underclass down.

 

Nowadays however the mocking is more subtle – in a gush of caring reaction, the dominant class may take a medical view, saying the upstart is unbalanced and needs medical care. So in the 60s women who were not allowed entrance to corporate boardrooms, colleges or  private clubs were medicated to calm them.  Even today women’s hormones are used to suggest women are not rational– during PMS or during ‘pregnancy fog’ or post-natally.  It was not much different when Premier Duff Roblin of Manitoba said women should not be allowed to vote because they were too emotional. Willard Eugene Allen in Florida was confined to a mental hospital for 16 years because he was homosexual. To be different was rated as insanity.

 

One of the reasons this mental labelling works is that it makes the person doubt himself and even seek out the treatment, believing thoughts the present system is unfair are aberrant thoughts.

 

And those in power often can make their mocking sound scientific and  cleverly logical to some listeners . Elizabeth Cady Stanton quoted state policy - ‘the negro’s skin and the woman’s sex are both prima facie evidence that they were intended to be in subjection to the white Saxon man’ Indians in North America  by their race and color were considered subhuman ‘savages’.

 

Women entering abortion clinics have been physically or verbally harassed as ‘baby killers’.  Their decision is labelled’ anti-life’ even though they may very much feel suicidal without the procedure so are actually very much pro-life.


The power of mocking is not just that it unsettles and demoralizes the lone droplet trying to flow. It also embarrasses those around her or  scares them.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s father disinherited her for a time for becoming a feminist lecturer.  In Canada Emily Murphy in the late 1800s wrote novels but to keep from family embarrassment used a pen name, Janey Canuck. Olive Schreiner in 1911 wrote “It is the swimmer who first leaps into the frozen stream who is cut sharpest by the ice. It is the man or woman who first treads the path which the bulk of humanity will ultimately follow who must find themselves at last in solitudes where the silence is deadly”

 

Mary Wolstonecraft in 1792 in “A Vindication of the Rights of Women’ had anticipated such criticism. She wrote that women bold enough to throw off prejudices “must learn to brave censure”


Even from my corner when I spoke on national radio in 1984 about the ways homemakers were kept down in society, I was understandably nervous, but the radio host told me to put my head between me legs so I would not faint, a provision I did not feel necessary. And when I had finished he said to me “Well I hope you learned your lesson and you never do that again’

 

Mocking the objector makes like-minded people afraid to speak up too and many who one might assume would be grateful someone is finally arguing in their favor, are scared to speak up and some have even convinced themselves they don’t deserve equality. Women were embarrassed at suffragettes initially and felt they did not ‘know their place’. One woman was told she was acting ‘outside her sphere’. So we have the irony that those who try to object are sometimes not only scorned but even punished by some on whose behalf they are arguing. A sad fact little noted is that after women did win the vote in Canada in 1918, few used it the first round they could.

 

Kate Millett said ‘Many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against. No better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning” Shirley Chisholm in 1970 said ‘Women should perceive that the negative attitudes they hold towards their own femaleness are the creation of an anti-feminist society , just as the black shame at being black is a product of racism “  Nellie McClung said “Women who set a low value on themselves make life hard for all women” 


But there is a sad consequence of the movement that is fairly personal.  Carol Lees admitted in an 1999 article that for most of the 10 years of her activism to get rights for homemakers, her husband did not actually side with her and several of the senior females in her family, many of them homemakers,  encouraged her to stop this women’s stuff.  It may well be that family is not out so much to criticize the activist as to protect him from hurts by others, but the nonsupport can be hurtful.  In my own experience I had married a man with a very unusual last name and I wanted to protect our 4 children from any stigma from any association there might be with my work, so I used and continue to use my maiden name.  For twenty years few media outlets knew and most still do not make the connection, mercifully.

 

Another strategy is to exaggerate the view of the objector. In logic we would call this a red herring argument but it can work marvelously well. Because Susan B. Anthony advocated votes for women she was accused of advocating polygamy and free love.   Gays are deemed not to just want a marriage between each other but to want to upset the whole world, to destroy all that is sacred in marriage itself, to corrupt children and to one day lead to polygamy.  When Roblin denied women the vote he said that it would lead to anarchy and women would neglect their homes and children.

 

It is the mocking by exaggeration that is hard to pin down because there are currents in society that like a simple answer.  When the media wants a quick 15 second clip about a news item it is easier to express it dramatically but over simplistically.  Mandela is against whites.  Homemakers are against women who work outside the home. In fact Mandela said “ I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination”   In my own work to get caregiving valued, the media time and time again has interviewed me as a counterpoint to daycare users, and told the audience I was anti-daycare. One TV interviewer even suggested that I was acting too calm and I should not be afraid to get angry because it would up her ratings. But I am in fact not against daycare – I am prochoice. I want all ways to raise kids funded equally. But the media media tends to think in opposites.  A movement for equality does not fit into that paradigm.

 

Mocking the objector has another advantage for the state – it divides the enemy. In  South Africa for a time there were levels of blacks in law and levels of privilege. In the movement to recognize the value of caregiving, women who get maternity benefits and child-care expense deductions because they work outside the home are understandably threatened if they fear someone is going to take those away and yet the caregiving movement is about simply extending those benefits to all parents.  But fear of the ‘other’ view creates dissension and in the caregiving movement this dissension, the ‘mommy wars’ nicely blocked any progress because women could not agree.

 

Sometimes even activists disagree amongst themselves, sometimes violently.  Sometimes it is a m ember of the oppressed group, angry with the spokesperson, who kills him.   Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were killed by black men not white men. Gandhi was assassinated not by an outsider to his cause but by a Hindu unhappy with how he was advancing it.. Some suggest that Judas Iscariot, a supporter of Jesus, betrayed him mainly out of impatience and wanting a more dramatic approach.

 

Supporters often agree with the need for change but disagree about the means. That is what Gandhi was all about-  for he advocated peaceful means while others wanted a violent uprising.  Some women fought for the right to vote by chaining themselves to telephone polls. In the seventies some women burned their bras while other women looked on aghast

 

In the movement to value caregiving, women diverged in the seventies, some feeling women could achieve financial independence only if they left the home. Others believed that it was gutsier to ask for money for the role in the home. And these debates got nasty, I have been physically grabbed and pushed out of the way at a woman’s meeting to keep me away from talking to a finance minister. Colleagues of mine have been seated at a low table in a corner at a women’s meeting, and no one would talk to them because they represented women in the home.


The state is well aware of the power it can wield to capitalize on the fear of the potential –supporter.. Those who harbored runaway slaves were themselves punished in the US. John McNeil was expelled from the Jesuit order just  because he ministered to gay people. Built by association. Those who helped Jews during the Holocaust were also enemies of the state.

 

It has been noticed ironically that when pregnant women are crossing a street, the driver who cuts them off is usually a woman driver.

 

This has meant however that a first stage of arguing for any vast social change has been to educate the oppressed group itself, to try to give them information and nerve to dare to object and to not feel alone. Yet this ‘consciousness raising’ is a long road. Black slaves mostly did not run away.  It took not decades but centuries before blacks were able to convince enough of their members that they were not second-class, that ‘black is beautiful’ for them to reach a boiling point, a threshold, a critical mass, to carry the movement forward.  And the obstacle was partly  the inertia of undergroup itself. For the cruelest part of any oppression and its biggest secret of success is that it also convinces the victim he does not deserve better. In the caregiving movement we see this also - women who put in 18 hours a day in the home caring for young children, often still say ‘Oh me, well I don’t work’ just like the oppressor has taught them.

 

Intentionally misunderstanding and misrepresenting the objector is par for the course. When I raised an objection at the UN that single income Canadian household was taxed sometimes twice as much as the dual income family on identical total household income, the eventual Canadian government response was to conjure up the scenario of the ‘rich banker’s wife’, implying that I was rich and lazy and not to be encouraged in my sloth. Statistically the single income family is poorer than the dual but the government chose to focus on one of the few exceptions to the norm.  Such is the perpetuation of stereotypes. 

 

Sometimes the misunderstanding of the objector’s case is not even sinister. It may just be that the person has never walked a mile in their shoes. During the bread riots of the French Revolution Marie Antoinette could not understand what the problem was about. If they were out of bread, she suggested Let them eat cake” 

 

c. Then they fight you

 

When ignoring the objector does not work and laughing at him does not satisfy enough the desire to ‘win’, sometimes people move up to a more aggressive stage –to fight

And the state can fight the objector with violence, or more subtly in the pocketbook, dramatically be legally excluding the other or subtly by depriving the other of access to education and legal help.

fighting physically


The most dramatic way to fight is of course to kill the objector.  Black slaves who were strung up for daring run away in the US left a double impact – first to those who killed them to give them the smug sense they had won, but also to fellow slaves by instilling fear. And fear is a powerful tool to keep others quiet. The first openly gay mayor, Harvey Milk in San Francisco was shot to death. When the US police arrested a gay Houston man, Fred Paez, he was ‘accidentally shot in the head while in custody.

In Sharpeville , South Africa black demonstrators were massacred in March 1960. Hundreds of demonstrators were shot in Tiananmen   Square in 1989. Three million Cambodians were killed during the Pol Pot regime.  Abortion doctors have been shot at and some were killed.  In Tibet 6,000 monasteries were destroyed and 1.2 million Tibetans were killed for trying to get civil rights.

 

The problem with such violent suppressions is that they can backfire by creating  a public sympathy. South Africa was boycotted by the world when its policies came under public notice. Martyrs tend to make a cause more noble so the last thing the oppressor wants is to make the dissident a hero.

 

So there have been ways to do the killing more quietly such as dragging Jews off in the dead of night in Hitler’s Germany, the sudden ‘disappearance’ of dissidents who are just never heard from again. There is also forced servitude-Chippewyan First Nation member Thanadelthur was captured by Crees and forced into slavery


And sometimes it is hard for the oppressed to respond to anger heroically, so that also works in the favor of the rulers. For if the oppressed gets angry, whatever he does will seem irrational and unreasonable and violent – so he can be condemned for that. Aaung Sann Suu Kyi in Burma, the Dalai Lama for Tibet, Nelson Mandela for South Africa have likewise resisted the temptation to violent response to the putdowns and have worked  patiently  and peacefully in nonviolent protest.

 

fighting by poverty

 

But fighting the upstarts can be more subtle- hit the person in the pocketbook with job loss and poverty. In 1983 Linda Conway, a West Virginia kindergarten teacher was fired because her superiors felt she looked like a lesbian. Samuel Dorr lost his job in 1981 in Kentucky because he would not promise to end his membership in gay groups.

 

And it need not be job loss. Poverty itself often  disables the objector. The poor cannot afford to travel to organize, cannot afford slick ad campaigns to spread their message, cannot afford lawyers to fight for their rights. It has been estimated for instance that it costs half a million dollars to take one case to the Supreme Court.  The poor don’t have this kind of money. In the caregiving movement in Canada we actually did have a challenge in the Income Tax Court of Canada in the mid 1990s –and the judge admitted there was a discrimination in the law. But we were out of money to appeal to a higher court that could overrule the discrimination.

 

  Poverty also eats away  at self-esteem.. Living in slums, ghettos, shanty towns, run-down housing, works to the oppressors’ advantage because it keeps the underclass feeling they are failures and demoralizes them.

 

Poverty has the added advantage that it tempts people to acts of desperation. Drug use, alcohol abuse can be used to lull the poor into not rebelling. And traffic in drugs can create a culture of crime that perpetuates negative stereotypes of the poor.  So the poor dare not object because now they are so drug-addicted or miserable they no longer seem to be defending something noble. White explorers knew this trick when they traded whisky to the Indians for beaver pelts.

 

In my experience, going from being a dual income family with a BMW and two small homes to being a single income family with a ten year old car spewing smoke whose front seat was propped up by boards was a shock. Having children and opting to raise them at home, deprived us not only of my salary, which was not a surprise,  but also of all the tax perks the state was giving to those who had two pay cheques.I shopped at discount stores and felt-penned the fading knees of my pants and was spurned by one fellow shopper once for wearing a satiny looking blouse because she assumed then that I was rich.  Poverty changes you.

 

Poverty has been a clever way historically to keep women down because it forces a financial dependency /Slaves needed to do the work in order to feed their families and knew that if they objected, not only would they get beaten, but their families might starve. .

 

In addition, when the media shows abject poverty, there is for some viewers a revulsion. I have been photographed in my tiny 900 square feet home by several national  photographers over the past 5 years, and sometimes the shots they capture emphasize poverty.  A TV reporter during my run for parliament to speak for women’s issues, called me a ‘fringe candidate’ with no hope of winning, and focused clearly on part of the exterior of my house where the cement was peeling off.  

 

Sometimes formal laws ensure the poverty. Married women had to quit their teaching  or stewardess jobs.  Women with children were no longer allowed to work outside the home. In 1981  US congressman Roger Jepsen introduced a bill to withhold social security, welfare and veterans’ benefits from homosexuals and though his bill did not pass, a similar one . Often however the disemboweling is more sly, Ensuring pay for the underclass remains low, forces them to have two minimum wage jobs and precludes social activism. American blacks  during the Vietnam War were more likely than whites to be drafted because, being poor, they were less likely to be able to afford some of the reasons to not be – such as being in university.

 

Depriving the objector of material assets keeps him helpless. In Canada women raising children are not even allowed to use their own money to save for a registered pension plan. They are forced to live off the pension of another.  Keeping women poor is a subtle way of penalizing them for taking time to do caregiving.

 

But leaders born in poverty like Lincoln or Walesa or Gandhi sometimes remember their roots. Gandhi all his life identified himself with the Indian untouchable class, the Harijan. He became the voice of the masses and spoke for their suffering.

 

fighting  the objector by passing laws to deny participation

 

 Formal denial of participation in the process of government also keeps people down. That is why getting the vote was so important for underclasses.  The Dominion of Canada law book of 1880 said “No woman or lunatic shall vote:”  Women did not have the vote in Canada till 1918, in the US till 1920 and in Monaco till 1962.  And married women got the vote later than single women did in Canada for even among the oppressed there was deemed a hierarchy.

 

Laws to keep people from making their own decisions have  existed for decades. In ancient Rome women were simply legally subordinate to men – even to their own sons and could not take part in legal action or government  Though abortion was legal in the US till about 1820 it was made illegal and remained on the books as a criminal act until Roe v. Wade.  It was legal to discharge Marine Robert Farley from the US Marines in 1984 because of homosexual tendencies.  Women were not allowed to inherit property, to have a bank balance of their own a few hundred dollars and even at one time women were not considered the legal guardians of their children- the dad was.

 

And the laws can be quite subtle. In Florida in 1981 colleges that allowed gay student groups simply lost state funding.

In 1952 homosexuals were banned from emigrating to the  US as ‘sexual deviates’
 When white settlers came to North America they whisked away native Indian children to residential schools thinking they were helping them but they thereby deprived them of heir own native language and culture.

 

And another way to keep down the objector is to deprive him or access to a lawyer . Historically it has often been training in the law that has crystallized for someone where the objection was needed. Gandhi and Mandela were lawyers, Mabel French who lobbied to get women allowed to serve in the Canadian Senate, was a lawyer.

 

In the caregiver movement, the exclusion from participation is more subtle for homemakers can vote. However in  1981 when  tried to write a cheque I was told it would not be honored because I ‘did not work’. I tried to use a credit card off our family bank account and was told by the store I could not because I did not have a note from him. When I tried to help my 12 year old son open a bank account, I was not allowed to be the adult helping him register because I had no income. In Canada homeakers do not get a full deduction any other adult gets in the tax plan. but instead, a lower, ‘spousal’ deduction’.

 

-fighting by depriving of education

 

Education –the ability to read and write –was denied black slaves.  Yet Frederick Douglass escaped such slavery, taught himself to read and later Lincoln requested him as an advisor during the Civil War. In Africa keeping women from education has been a clever and effective way to keep them out of the loop, not knowing how things are done elsewhere and not aware they have rights.

 

 Sometimes it is deemed for the good of society to not let them be equal. Massachusetts decided in 1983 that gays could not be foster parents.

The education is not just of the underclass to understand their rights though. It is also of the ruling class to realize the oppression, for it has been shielded from their eyes. There is a current of fairness even in the rank and file of the ruling class and what it takes for them to create fairer laws is often to let them know what is really happening

 

When Harriet Beecher Stowe found out how slaves really were treated and wrote’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ she had hoped the book would help bring north and south together. For the first time the main character in  an American novel was a black man, and a slave. But the book raised the ire of many who wanted to deny such situations existed and Stowe received threatening letters and was even mailed a human ear, cut off a slave’s head. But her book opened eyes. Whites who in the North before had been predisposed to turn in run away slaves from the South, stopped doing it. And Lincoln said to her during the Civil War “So you are the little woman who made this great war:”


 

The secret of education was well known to Mandela who made the prison island where he and his colleagues were jailed, an oasis of learning, even dubbed the Island University. Each team gave itself an instructor in history, economics, politics, philosophy.

 

When people want more rights one of the first replies of the ruling class is to say that they don’t know what they’re asking for, that they don’t understand the situation. When Carol Lees in Canada confronted Statistics Canada about why homemaking and care of children were not defined as useful ‘work’, one official said to her ‘We know what work is and  you don’t”.  When I in 1997 talked to a senior tax department official about why I thought it fairer if the state would let all parents deduct equal costs of child-rearing, not just daycare parents, the official’s first response was that the Income Tax Act was very complicated and occupied several volumes and was arrived at after many decades of work – i. e. that it was a done deal, already the best of all possible worlds.

 

Knowing the law has been a key element of the struggle for gay rights. Chipping away at individual instances of discrimination rather than the whole gamut of areas at once, has been successful for gay rights activists and their lawyers. In 1983 getting inheritance rights in California after the death of a partner, in 1981 in Virginia getting visitation rights of a lesbian mother with her son, in 1977 getting equal rights to employment hiring in the US State Department. Gays only won the right to file a joint tax form as other couples could, in 1975 in the US.  In Canada the right to inherit, the right to contribute share medical benefits, the right to adopt, the right to have a registered domestic partnership were each won separately, because the lawyers knew how to address a problem one step at a time.  But it is hard for an underclass to afford lawyers.

 

-fighting by exclusion

 

 When a movement is gaining power and the rivulets are joining to form a stream, another strategy of the state is to create dams. Avoid strength in numbers and exclude, isolate, ostracize, remove from society the dissident – to keep them away from those who might be convincible.

 

Prison sentences for dissidents are a mainstay treatment. Mandela was in prison, Gandhi was in prison. Martin Luther King, Steve Biko were jailed to get them out of the way.  Aung San Suu Kyi was put under house arrest and even though she won a landslide election victory in  Burma while arrested, she was not allowed to take power. Lech Walesa was jailed for promoting trade unions in Poland. Nelson Mandela’s party was banned in 1960. Susan B. Anthony was arrested and jailed for registering to vote and voting. When Canadian Carol Less in 1991 refused to sign the census because it said as a homemaker she’ did not work’, she was told she would be liable for a $500 fine, or jail term.

The exclusion can be formal. The Dalai Lama was exiled from Tibet in 1959 and denied the privileges of a political leader though he had been installed on the Lhasa throne at age 4. Until 1988 in Ireland the penalty for homosexuality was life in prison


The exclusion can also be more subtle.  Make it hard for a dissident to get a publisher. Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own wrote’ I would venture that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was a woman”


The keeping apart not only is designed to keep the dissident from supporters but to keep the dissident from the ruling class that might start to sympathize. In the US and in South Africa intermarriage between blacks and whites was not permitted and even when it became legal it was still looked down on socially.  We had apartheid in South Africa from 1948 to 1991,  and segregation in the US that meant the color of your skin determined where you sat on the bus, in the restaurant, which fountain you drank out of, which washroom you used, and which school your children attended.

 

Another subtle way to exclude the subclass is to take whatever they genuinely are good at, and then claim only the ruling class is expert in this area. So though women raised the children and cooked the meals, for centuries doctors advising women how to do their job were male, and the world’ s famous chefs were male.  In the same way in the caregiving movement, though women for centuries have taught kids to talk and walk and use a spoon, the state now has a term of ‘early childhood educators’ who are deemed experts in child-rearing simply because they hold a certificate. Canada advocates for ‘high quality’ early childhood care with early childhood professionals, but excludes mothers from that designation.

 

When Carol Less laid a complaint that the unpaid labor of women was ignored in the Canadian census, she was not informed that Statistics Canada was holding a conference on unpaid work soon after. When she did find out, and asked to be included, she was told it was a gathering of experts so she would not ‘fit in’. 

 

 

When I made my complaint at the United Nations that Canada’s tax laws were not fair to those who cared for someone in the home, I was both upset with my country and proud of it because I was never in any danger of being jailed for what I said. That is I think what makes it  a beautiful country.  But it did not fix the problem.

 

Exclusion can be more subtle. Meetings  of Christians in ancient times, cells of Jews during Nazi Germany, were not allowed. The overclass can simply forbid the underclass to meet. Freedom of assembly was an important right to ask for because otherwise, even a small gathering of the underclass seemed suspicious to the state and could legally be forbidden.

 

A legislator facing the embarrassment of a huge rally or demonstration is in a quandary – for now the unpopularity of his policies is laid bare before the media. How can he react and still keep the underclass down? One strategy is simply to refuse to meet with them, to make them go home empty-handed and feeling foolish, deprived of the verbal battle they wanted.  Ralph Klein in Alberta has a policy of simply refusing to talk to demonstrators. 

 

-fighting by denying access to those who can help

 

Access to lawyers is a solution for an oppressed group so keeping them from lawyers is a clever ruse.  Lawyers are expensive and even if one agrees to work pro bono, a human rights court challenge can take years, and the lawyer does have to eat. Sometimes the solution has been for the underclass to have one member become a lawyer, but there again, the underclass did not used to be able to get in. A few have however and it is no coincidence that great strides were made in human rights movements by members of the underclass who became lawyers.  Occasionally too, in fair democracies, some funding is available for just such court challenges. In Canada the Court Challenge program was designed specifically to help underclasses get legal representation. However there is a glitch. The funding is not much and it has to be approved by people who are quite firmly linked to the status quo.

 

 But I have noticed an irony that is common and it is this – that sometimes a lawyer can be found whose professional ethic for fairness is so strong that he or she  is willing to fight for an underclass anyway.

 

I suspect a movement cannot reach the tipping point until that happens. No matter how hard the poor fight, they really can’t change the world until some of the rich agree they should come in. Robert Orben once said  ‘Don’t mock the rich. When was the last time you were hired by someone poor?


Major  advances in social change for an oppressed group came when a member of the ruling group helped out. So Nelson Mandela did not win the Nobel Peace prize alone, but along with white leader de Klerk who agreed with him.. And it was white women who often helped run the underground railway to free black slaves.   Female suffragettes also argued against slavery.


And it was middle-class white women who won the vote for poor women. It was not the poorest who had the leisure time and education to do it. Nellie McClung and Parlby were actually quite well off. They were educated enough to know their rights and confident enough in the worth of their work to hang in their to fight for declaration of women as persons.  So ironically a liberation movement sometimes advances with the help of those not directly affected by the problem, or affected less.

 

In the theory of the tipping factor, someone spreads a message of need for change, like Paul Revere riding horseback to warn others the Redcoats were coming,  but there also has to be someone to promote the message, to convince others it matters.  So Clarence Darrow fought in court for the right to teach about evolution, even though he may himself have believed in creationism. Sometimes it is lawyers who sense a professional ethic obligation to listen to both sides. Voltaire did not agree with what one dissenter said but added “I’ll defend to the death your right to say it’”.

 

There had to be a man to open for women the door to the corporate office, to believe it was OK if women were allowed to be engineers or doctors. In fact in the House of Commons in 1907 it was a man, Sir Richard Cartwright, who first argued, unsuccessfully, that women should be allowed to contribute to the pension plan.

 

Ironically though ,access to talk to those in power can be denied. Even the few of the underclass able to access power themselves, often are then pressured to ‘get with the program’ and put their causes on hold if they want to retain power.  In 2000 a female candidate to a Canadian political confided to a reporter that in the pre-election candidates’ briefing she had been told that her own personal views were to be laid aside and during the campaign all she was allowed to say was the party platform.  In 1915 the Tory party election platform stated “the vote for women will degenerate true womanhood, emotionalize balloting and be illogical and absurd” So some are said to have ‘forgotten their roots’’  But not all.. Some consider it their mission still.

 

 Clarence Darrow became champion of factory workers like coal miners. He said’ I speak for the  poor, for the weak, for the long line of men who in darkness and despair have borne the labors of the human race”  Gandhi dressed during his presidency in the garb of the poorest in his nation. These are however high risk choices for a career.  When MP Agnes MacPhail promoted women’s causes she lost the 1940 election and said “I told them the truth.. They say the truth shall set you free. It’s certainly set me free”

 

Activists for one equality sometimes notice other just causes and fight for them too In Canada Agnes MacPhail who is known mostly historically as an activist for women’s rights began fighting  for prairie farmers, was a life-long pacifist, and promoted prison reform.

 

In my own work, to get caregiving recognized, it was necessary to get to talk to what in the ‘Tipping Point’ theory are called the Connectors. The people who know people, the people who by the six degrees of separation can link to power or have power. Yet getting to meet the highest connectors can be subtly withheld from the underclass. For months I have sat on waiting lists requesting meetings with ministers of health,  human resources, and I could paper a wall with letters of refusal to meet with me. The minister is unable to meet with you in the foreseeable future, ever, till the end of time, OR the more optimistic note thanking me for my letter and assuring me it would be brought to the minister’s attention. I was for two years on the short list to see the Prime Minister and then was taken off it. My own MP, who is a former prime minister, for 3 years has refused my request for a chat. It is that subtle denial of access that has power.


And yet there have been a few willing to open that door and at least fairly hear. I was surprised after my UN complaint in 1997 and my requests to meet ministers, that Paul Martin Finance Minister actually agreed to a phone call. And at the end of the call, he said he’d be happy to meet with me any time and when I tried to set up a time for the meeting it was not just a stage gesture. He gave me an appointment and then, and this is where optimism about human nature does surge forward, before the meeting his office called me to ask if the meting could be extended from half an hour to one hour.  This I  think was near the tipping point.

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I sat outside the office of one Senator for an entire hour, having flown all the way to Ottawa, and to this day she denies there was an appointment for that hour and her advisor eventually came down to take my documents but would not let me into her office. Access.  Hard to get.

 

But there is a sense of fairness in some with power, and that is a sign of hope. When in 2002  I asked for a meeting with the Attorney General to discuss my request for a Supreme Court reference on caregiving issues, he not only refused the reference but refused to meet me to discuss my request. But I made a few phone calls to his colleagues and MP Jim Peterson got me that meeting. He did it I think because I said to him’ It’s not even whether or not he agrees with me. It’s about openness to hearing the case”  It is I suspect the conscience of some in the ruling class that is a key to the tipping point.

 

Albert Schweitzer said “A heavy guilt rests upon us for what the whites of all nations have done to the colored peoples. When we do good to them, it is not benevolence – it is atonement”

 

In the movement for caregiving one of the problems with trying to keep down mothers has been the intermixing of mothers on any given household street. Over the back fences of the nation women who worked outside the home, women who work in the home and those who part-time did each,  found a common ground, babysat for each other and understood that each one had genuine guilt, conflicts and parenting dilemmas that made neither road easy.   And eventually a few women who had known both worlds did get power, and remembered. Sandra Day O’Connor and Madeleine Albright, two of the most powerful women in the US were at one time mothers in the home. And this intermingling, this lack of segregation, bodes well for eventual fairer laws.

 

Nowadays exclusion works less well as a weapon because of a free press, and modern technology Clarence Darrow who argued the death penalty was inhuman for two teens accused of murder, got national notice at a public trial.. It was TV broadcast of Tiananmen Square that horrified the world. It was getting the word out to other nations about massacres in South Africa that led to an international trade  boycott of that nation until it changed its race policies.

 

And on my own issues, access to the Internet has been a shockingly effective tool. Because of faxes I was able to contact the Vatican, and human rights groups in Brussels, Paris, Rome, Australia and Boston. And over the Internet I operate a newsletter that goes around the world.   Movies have made the general public aware of the mistreatment of gays, in ways few of us had known of . “Philadelphia’ showed the world anti-gay bias. movie  “Cry Freedom” about ‘Steve Biko’ in  South Africa made real for western viewers what was going on in South Africa.

 

So like a grass that insists on growing through the cracks of sidewalks, the power of free speech subtly but relentlessly keeps coming back – and the droplets of water become a rivulet and then a stream, and then a river.

 

It does take patience, for sure, sometimes more than a lifetime. Martin Luther King Jr. did not live to see equal rights for blacks. The rocky road to success has had huge seemingly impossible disappointments. The court  case to have women declared persons in Canada was lost, and did  not succeed until it went into appeal by the Privy Council in England.  When Susan B. Anthony petitioned her government with 10,000 signatures to get women the vote, both houses rejected her six times. But she said: “We will be back again and again until the laws are enacted giving women their due rights’ In Canada cancer runner Terry Fox died before he was able to complete his fund-raising run . We are told he loved the song: ‘The dream never dies, just the dreamer’. And his dream did not die . It is the power of the people, of free speech, of the surging of a wave.

 

And what does a ruling class do when the polls show ordinary people support the idea, when phone-in talk shows and letters to the editor show overwhelming support, when there is a huge march proceeds on Washington or Ottawa or London?

 

Once a movement has been noticed by mainstream society, and mocking no longer works, when  segregating and punishing have not worked, the state still has one more weapon in its arsenal – make the underclass feel it won, by conning them

 

fighting by conning

 

The state can go with the flow of public tone change and now use the new terms of equality, even offering token recognition or some small award to the upstarts but the new positions and awards must be inconsequential. So to give the impression the state was open-minded  it became ‘in ‘ to have one black friend employee in the department, , or one Jewish person or one handicapped person or one gay person on staff. .This showpiece person could be trotted out to show the state was an equal opportunity establishment.

 

Motherhood has gotten a token recognition for centuries, placation attempted by having a day named after Mothers..

 Oscar Wilde said  “Women are the decorative sex. They never have anything to say but they sway it charmingly’ Early feminists ran into this also when men tipped their hats to them  to which Nellie McClung said once “I don’t’ want him to tip his hat to me. He should pull it down over his head’.  When Agnes Macphail was told women should be happy enough to be in the home because their role there was angelic, she said “I do not want to be the angel of any home. I want for myself what I want for other women, absolute equality”

 

Yet it was hard to politely see through the con.. Emily Murphy, first woman magistrate in the British Empire urged people however  to not be satisfied with such tokenism. ‘The world loves a peaceful man, but gives way to a strenuous kicker” Nellie McClung in Canada said “Human justice does not come ready-made. ‘We have to fight for it”

 

Sadly the con job does work sometimes.  The underclass, by definition more likely to withdraw, to have low self-esteem, to not dare to ask for much, is only too likely , when given a small advance, to withdraw now and be grateful for small mercies.  Mrs. Thomas Carlyle said “When one has been threatened with a great injustice, one accepts a smaller as a favor’  And with that strategy, it was possible to quiet women, buying them a new dress, letting them have their social clubs with pseudo-political  status in the 1920s. And in the year 2003 this trick is still being played on women, giving them maternity and caregiving benefits and child-care expenses deductions as if the state finally does value time spent with kids and the sick and giving birth. And in the fine print this is not a big gift after all for in Canada  and Australia those benefits are conditional on women earning money.


The underclass, used to making do with little cash at all, is the most receptive to the state’s claiming it can’t afford to help them.  And yet the argument that a state can’t afford to treat people equally, does not wash with those who know their rights. It is however the excuse women have heard for many years.  When the underclass asks for adequate salary or fair tax, a common state reply is to awe them with statistics, to bowl them over with big words. In this way it is hoped the complainant will be overwhelmed and will believe this all is too complex to understand. Women used to be told ‘Don’t bother your pretty little mind about it’ I  was told by one tax official in 1999 that the changes I sought to the tax plan, to equalize benefits for all children, were simply too hard to make because the tax code occupied volumes.

 

So behind closed doors, in meetings the underclass finally is  able to get, games are still played to show the press the state is  always willing to listen to voters, and then to get rid of them by intimidation.

 

And it is demoralizing to keep banging your head against a brick wall. Sojourner Truth in 1853 said “We have been thrown down so low that nobody  thought we’d ever get up again”/

 

Patience, is however hard to come by. Many women in  the care movement have become exhausted and burnt out. Elizabeth Phelps said “Forerunners of revolutions are usually confident of immediate success and bewildered at apparent failure”


And even at late stages of a movement getting public approval, the state still can do what it does best – wielding power, passing laws quietly that undermine rights. The state can ride the tide of objection and then just before an election hand out some tax cuts to the wealthy, hoping the voter has only a short term memory..  Or if there is a painful law to pass for the underclass, the state can announce it just before a holiday, or couched in with an announcement of something major the public likes, or something massive, like preparations for war. Canada’s Feb 2003 budget about children was a case study in that – an announcement made after consulting only acceptable ‘stakeholders’ made despite objections but using glowing terms of equality, and given the week the nation was deciding whether to go to war.

 

Sometimes the undergroup is included, but only in a token way. Women in the home have been included in the national women’s group in Canada, but at meetings their small contingent is often seated intentionally off to one side, isolated.  When Susan B. Anthony joined other female teachers to attend a teachers’ convention  in 1853 she discovered that all the executive and all the speakers were male. Though women were allowed to attend, they were not supposed to speak.  I was allowed to attend a public meeting for Calgary women to question the finance minister, but was told by the organizer that I was not allowed to talk..

 

Yet despite all the games, the ignoring, the mocking, violence, ostracism, tokenism or clever conning, the stream joins with thousands of others can becomes a wave, unstoppable.  What leads an idea from being on the fringe to being mainstream?

 

It is hard to say.  Some suggest that one dynamic leader can cause it, or one pivotal event like Rosa Parks refusing to give up her bus seat to a white rider a nd being arrested.

But we only circle single events in hindsight. Actually Parks had been disciplined before when riding the bus. Clarence Darrow actually lost the Scopes trial about evolution but the press around the debate lessened religious extremism in public schools. Emily Murphy got the right for women to sit in the Senate , but she was never herself named the first female senator.. William Jennings Bryan fought for the poor dramatically lost 3 bids for election.   What causes the tide to carry on despite these setbacks?

 

I have often wondered for it seems to be at that point like a magical coincidence of events

One part of the secret seems to be in convergence- where many stripes, many fields start to have the same insight. When those who worked for the vote for women noticed that slavery was also an oppression and they added their powerful voices to the anti-slavery cause. When sociologists and economists started to notice that unpaid caregiving labor is crucial to an economy and  mental health.  Isabella Bakker, Canadian economist observed in 1998 that the care sector of the economy ‘cannot be treated as a bottomless well from which water can always be drawn’” New Zealand  feminist economist Marilyn Waring, traveled the world to redefine economies to include unpaid labor. She said ‘When I see a woman holding her child, I know I am watching a woman at work’.

 

This phenomenon then of an idea catching hold and electrifying the public is an enigma but it does not ‘just happen’, nor is it manufactured. I think it has several elements. One is just the power of the people.  We all like to spread bad news and it reputedly does travel fast.  but it does not travel if we are not touched by it in our hearts and it is not worth spreading if it does not in some way affect us. So if the underclass has succeeded it is probably that it has raised the issue to that level of ‘news’ that it becomes a subject of underground rumor, shooting across phone lines and Internet messages and this is not the same as having a mass mailout campaign or a mass petition campaign for this time it is spontaneous.

 

When an idea becomes the subject of e-mail messages around the world, its speed is awe-inspiring.

 

I think in my small movement we are nearly there.  I don’t know what turned the tide but in the past 5 years independent pollsters are finding that the majority of people asked believe in choice for men and women about where to care for their children. The word ‘choice’ has become politically correct term.


It takes a long time  to set a new course for the massive ocean liner that is government. And yet it happens. When Susan Anthony rose to all a woman’s rights meeting to order, 50 years after her struggle for equality began she was deluged with floral tributes and said “Well this is rather different from the receptions I used to get fifty years ago. They threw things at me then- but they were not roses”

 

 

Harriet Tubman encouraged those on the underground railway “Children if you are tired, keep going. f you are hungry, keep going. If  you want to taste freedom, keep going”

 

Once in a while the leader is aware of the tide, and aware of the opposition to it, and he takes a stand for equality, even though not all voters agree he should.

The Sherpa on Mount Everest does not tell you where to go –he leads you there. The sergeant in the Army says “Follow me”. The first schools to be integrated in the US were done so with an armed guard to enforce equality, and the move was not popular everywhere/

 

In the 1970s when I first taught school there was an interest in fighting pollution from factories and the schools tried to get kids interested in environmentalism, with only mixed success.  Mostly the kids still tossed their pop tins, cities sprayed DDT and factories spewed smoke. But then something happened and people are recycling with blue boxes, smoking is banned from public buildings and factories that pollute are shut down. Sometimes the law comes before the will of the people, but not long before.

 

My daughter lives in university residence in another city and I visited her recently. She has a shakeable little fortune teller globe as a joke and for fun while no one was watching  I asked it a question.. “Will my cause succeed?’ And  I shook the globe and turned it upside down slowly I saw the letters form ‘absolutely’.  

 

What a relief.  And I hearkened back to phone calls I had had recently from researchers in a national magazine article about my work, on a Montreal phone in where every caller had agreed with me, on a phone call from a Florida researcher, a Boston editor, an Australian women’s rights activists who wanted to talk to me and I thought- there, you see! It was worth it. Gandhi was right!  We were going to make it!

 

And then because I had another moment before we were to leave, I asked the globe another question, “Will it succeed in my lifetime?”  I tuned it over and watched the words form. The white letters swam into view. They read ‘Absolutely not”

 

I have decided I do not endorse such silly globes. The latest Canadian budget is just too far off base and  I am patient but not that patient.

 

Oddly enough this past week I may have seen the promised land. The Ontario government has just promised tax credits for family caregivers of people with disabilities. The Nova Scotia government is promising them for care of the elderly. The Quebec government  is offering  tax breaks to reduce costs of family vacations.  It appears only the feds are out of the loop.  They may come on side shortly. The voice of the people speaks. 

 

Gandhi would understand how I am feeling.  In my own small way.

 

 

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