Greenfield Recorder – From global to local: The war against women continues

The war on women is everywhere: at home, locally, nationally and globally. Take, for example, the recent report from NELCWIT here in Franklin County. Last year, they served 1,933 female victims of primarily male sexual and physical violence.

In 2018, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center published that 81% of women reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment and/or sexual coercion in their lifetime. Furthermore, the majority of violence against women is perpetrated by male partners and acquaintances.

There are countless other misogynistic wars against women around the world, including military wars, sex trafficking, prostitution and pornography, the theft of female and lesbian sexual identity by some members of the trans movement, child marriage, female genital mutilation, and so on. Yet none of these wars is currently as intense as Israel and the US’s genocidal war against Gaza: 70 percent of those killed are women and their children.

How cruelly ironic that while US weapons destroy lives in Gaza and elsewhere in the world with impunity, 14 US states have criminalized women’s choice to have an abortion as murder and do not even allow abortion for heinous acts such as rape or incest, and six more states have implemented restrictions on early pregnancy. In the US states that ban or severely restrict abortion, there were 65,000 pregnancies resulting from rape between July 2022 and January 2024, after Roe v. Wade was ended with the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs case in 2022.

Today, a majority of U.S. adults believe that abortion should be legal. Therefore, the 2022 Dobbs decision is both a war on women and a war on democracy, because the will of the majority of U.S. citizens does not prevail or influence government policy. A recent, comprehensive study of democracies around the world concluded that “only 15 percent of people worldwide live in places where women and lower-income groups have at least somewhat equal access to power.” The United States is not one of them.

What drives the control over women’s bodies in our country? It is misogyny and injustice. After all, there is no comparable moral or medical control over men’s bodies. Yet the moral urgency to preserve life in the womb evaporates as soon as a poor child is born. One in six children under the age of five lives in poverty – the highest rate of any developed country; four million young people are homeless.

It is clear that controlling a woman’s right to her own body is not about the unborn child’s right to life. Otherwise, criminalizing abortion would also mean all sorts of social laws for the health of mother and child, decent housing, a living wage and a well-funded education.

As for the loss of economic democracy for women, women have higher poverty rates than men. And why? For at least three reasons:

Domestic violence results in female victims losing an average of eight million working days each year and is a major factor in women’s homelessness.

In the United States, unlike in any other comparable country, women’s reproductive labor – giving birth, breastfeeding, and caring for children – is not compensated with free child care and paid parental leave. As a result, women who give birth are cheated out of savings, pensions, and Social Security. It’s no wonder, then, that the greatest risk factor for poverty in old age is having been a mother.

More women than men struggle to cover daily expenses. This is due to the gender pay gap, which has stagnated for 20 years – it stands at 82% – and is a major factor contributing to the significant differences in poverty rates between women and men aged 75 and over.

For college graduates in 2024, the same economic inequality will remain: male college graduates are hired on average for just over $30 an hour, while women are hired for just over $25 an hour. This 82% wage inequality will follow these college graduates throughout their careers.

Salary is symbolic: Why are we women worth 82% of men in the workplace?

Oppositional realities:

In the 20th century, Americans lost more lives to violence against women than during all the wars and civil wars of the 20th century. And although thousands of memorials in the United States honor those who lost their lives fighting for their country, only one—the first of its kind—is currently planned for the women who lost their lives giving birth to the country’s children. The reality is that feminist revolutions to achieve human rights and equality for women (however unfulfilled that goal may remain) have liberated millions of women and girls and saved their lives, without guns, without fists, and without a single drop of blood being shed.

Women have much more to offer than men can learn: men commit 90% of all murders and almost all cases of sexual violence; men are the main perpetrators of war. If our skills, our social and intellectual intelligence and our wisdom were valued and welcomed at all points of social and political decision-making: in every home and in every national government and in the UN, then the world might have a chance at global peace and the restoration of our beautiful planet.

Pat Hynes of Montague is a member of the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice and delivered this keynote address at Bigger than Dobbs: The War on Women and War on Democracy, a June 23 event sponsored by the Reproductive Justice Task Force of Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution with several co-sponsors. The speakers’ speeches will be available shortly at http://www.fccpr.us.