We don’t value readers so much. Or gayness, transness, wokeism, Marxism, feminism, or multiculturalism

By Diane Roberts

Heather Booth  (1945 - )

Heather Booth (born December 15, 1945) is an American civil rights activist, feminist, and political strategist who has been involved in activism for progressive causes. During her student years, she was active in both the civil rights movement and feminist causes. Since then she has had a career involving feminism, community organization, and progressive politics.

Early life and family

Booth's father, Jerome Sanford Tobis (1916–2012), was a physician who specialized in physical therapy and cardiac rehabilitation.^{[1][note 1]} Her mother, Hazel Victoria Weisbard Tobis (1918–2002),^[4] was a special education teacher.^[5]: 104 Although Hazel Weisbard was her high school's valedictorian, her parents forbid her to accept a scholarship to attend college.^[2] Once her three children were grown, she went back to college and obtained bachelor's and master's degrees.^[6]

Booth was born in a military hospital in Brookhaven, Mississippi, on December 15, 1945, during a period in which her father was serving as an Army doctor.^{[5]: 104 [6]} Soon after her birth, her family moved to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where she received her elementary education in P.S. 200 in the Bath Beach neighborhood. Later, she attended high school in Long Island's North Shore after her family had moved to that upscale area.^[7] She has two brothers, David and Jonathan.^[5]: 105 Booth grew up in a warm, loving, and supportive family. Her parents taught her the importance of recognizing injustice and acting to correct it.^[6] They were observant Jews, belonging to a liberal synagogue, who showed by example the importance of treating others with decency and respect.^[2] From her Jewish upbringing, Booth learned to take on responsibility for building a society that reflected these goals.^{[8][note 2]}

After her family had moved to Long Island, Booth's mother, using Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, made her aware of the growing discontent of prosperous suburban housewives with the conventionally narrow lives they led.^[2] In high school, Booth joined a sorority and the cheerleading team but left both of them when she came to believe that their members were discriminating against students who did not lead their privileged lives.^[2] She began leafleting against the death penalty. In 1960, she joined CORE in a protest against the segregationist policies of the Woolworth's chain.^[9] Upon graduating from high school in 1963, she spent the summer traveling in Israel and that fall enrolled as a freshman at the University of Chicago.^[7] She chose that school in part because it had no sororities and deemphasized sports.^[10] In college, she quickly immersed herself in political activism.^[2] In 1967, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in social sciences, then in 1970, a Master of Arts degree in educational psychology, both from the University of Chicago.^[6]

She and Paul Booth married in July 1967, shortly after she graduated from college.^[10] They had met at a sit-in protesting the University of Chicago's cooperation with the policies of the U.S. Selective Service System whose local boards were then drafting men to serve in the Vietnam War.^[11] Later that year, she was arrested during a protest at the U.S. Army induction center in Chicago.^[12] The couple had two sons, Eugene Victor Booth (born in 1968) and Daniel Garrison Booth (born in 1969).^{[note 3]}

One of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Paul Booth was national secretary of the organization when they met.^[13] He helped organize the 1965 March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam,^[14] subsequently became president of the Citizen Action Program in Chicago (a group formed in 1969 by members of Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation), and was later a director of the Midwest Academy.^[15] Beginning in the 1980s, he held a series of positions within the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union.^[16] In 2017, by then executive assistant to the union's president, he retired, continuing his political engagement by supporting Heather Booth in her work.^[17] He died January 17, 2018, from complications of chronic lymphocytic leukemia.^{[16][note 4]}

Civil rights

Booth's opposition to racial discrimination began when she was still in elementary school. She defended an African-American fellow student who was being attacked for allegedly stealing another student's lunch money. It was soon discovered that the girl who made the accusation had put the money in her shoe and forgotten it. In a 1985 interview, Booth said "I remember having the feeling that you don't do this to people."^[18] While in high school, she joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to help protest Woolworth's lunch counter discrimination in the South. In 1963, soon after enrolling in college, she became head of a group, called Friends of SNCC, that was organized on campus to support the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.^[11] She also became student liaison to the Chicago Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), which was then protesting school segregation in the city.^[19] As CCCO liaison, she helped coordinate freedom schools in the Chicago's South Side.^[6]

In 1964, Booth joined the Freedom Summer project in which volunteers from Northern and Western colleges and universities worked to register black voters and set up freedom schools and libraries in Mississippi.^[13] She was arrested for the first time while she was carrying a sign saying "Freedom Now!" during a peaceful demonstration in Shaw, Mississippi.^[20] In an interview conducted in 1989, she said that the experience reinforced her commitment to the civil rights movement. Confronted by the violent resistance of white Mississippians, she feared for her own life, but also realized that she could leave whenever she wished and was awed by the extraordinary heroism of the black residents with whom she worked. "They had a quiet heroism," she said, "not just by standing up to bullets, but by day to day being willing to go and talk to their neighbors, have meetings in their churches, take people into their homes." She said the work was full of tiring and frustrating tasks but recognized that it is the mundane everyday work that brings meaningful change.^[6]

In 1965, Booth was arrested while demonstrating at banks that were providing financial support for the apartheid regime in South Africa.^[11] Shortly afterward, she helped form a number of local groups that sought to learn about urban problems and find ways to overcome them.^[10] She left SNCC in 1967 when its leaders no longer welcomed Whites as members.^[21] She then devoted more of her time to issues related to feminism and the anti-war movement.^[11]

Feminism

Soon after she arrived on campus, Booth ran up against the university's bias in favor of its male students. In 1965, she began to set up consciousness raising groups to deal with the problem.^[2] These small groups of women met regularly to speak about incidents, both minor and more serious, that seemed to be unique but often proved to be shared. In a pamphlet published in April 1968, Booth and two co-writers noted a tendency for women to "see their problems as personal ones and thus blame themselves."^{[22][note 5]} In discovering how many ostensibly unique concerns were actually common ones, members gained a sense of the collective influence they might exert toward changing the unfair practices and dismissive attitudes they had previously accepted as cultural norms.^[23] She also helped to organize a course on women's studies, began to coach women who were uneasy about speaking up in class, and conducted a study on the disparity of treatment between male and female students in the classroom.^[24] Noticing a similar unequal treatment among student activists, she founded a campus group, the Women's Radical Action Program, to document and counter the ways in which women were relegated to subordinate roles in national organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society and SNCC.^{[10][note 6]}  In 1967, Booth joined with other activists to form the Chicago West Side Group, which was reported to have been "the first women’s liberation group in the country, with the primary goal of raising the consciousness of its members."^[25]

In 1965, a fellow student asked whether Booth could help his sister who was so greatly distraught about an unwanted pregnancy as to consider killing herself.^[26] By contacting the medical arm of the civil rights movement, she was able to refer the woman to a reputable doctor who was willing to perform an abortion.^{[2][note 7]} As word quietly spread throughout the university community she was asked to make more referrals to the same doctor. In complying, she made sure that he would not only treat them, but also make sure the patients made a successful recovery.^[26] The Jane Collective, or simply Jane, emerged from this early start. Booth formed it by involving like-minded students in a clandestine organization for evaluating doctors, counseling women who contacted them, performing referrals, and conducting follow-up discussions by phone.^[10] By 1969 this group, calling itself the Abortion Counseling Service of Women's Liberation, began to advertise in student and underground newspapers, advising pregnant women who needed help to "Call Jane."^{[26][note 8]} The Jane Collective disbanded following the Roe v. Wade decision of the U.S. Supreme Court on January 22, 1973, which effectively legalized abortion throughout the country.^[5]: 105

In 1969, recognizing the need to counter a strong tendency among feminists to see all organizational structures as oppressive, Booth joined with five other women to found the Chicago Women's Liberation Union (CWLU).^{[28][note 9]} They believed that organization was essential for the movement be able to reach out to women who were not already radicalized and for it to develop strategies for winning reforms that would demonstrably improve women's lives. They said a structured approach was needed, including careful planning, the setting of specific goals, and developing strategies achieve these goals. Overall, they were committed to helping women to gain a sense of their collective power.^[30] The CWLU organized local chapters, published newspapers, engaged in direct action, and ran a liberation school founded by CWLU's first staff member, Vivian Rothstein.^[28][31]

After her marriage and the birth of her sons, Booth began to experience family-related issues that most feminist activists had considered to have little or no importance.^[10] Finding no local child care centers in the Hyde Park community where she lived, she joined with two friends in an effort to set one up.^{[note 10]} The bureaucratic obstruction that they encountered led the three to set up a new citywide organization in Chicago called the Action Committee for Decent Childcare (ACDC).^[32] Based on the rationale given for setting up the CWLU, to which it was related, ACDC created an organizational structure having specific and achievable goals. A position paper written anonymously in 1972 stated these goals as building a power base of women who work together to accomplish specific reforms in childcare policy, with the expectation that each victory will provide an opportunity to expand the power base and bring further goals within reach. The committee did not set up childcare services but worked to overcome legal barriers to the substantial expansion of these services throughout the city. Within a few years it had forced the liberalization of licensing procedures and won a million dollar city investment in childcare centers.^[10]

In 1972, "Socialist Feminism: A Strategy for the Women's Movement", which is believed to be the first publication to use the term "socialist feminism", was published by the Hyde Park Chapter of the CWLU which included Booth, Day Creamer, Susan Davis, Deb Dobbin, Robin Kaufman, and Tobey Klass.

Community organizing

After earning her master's degree in 1970, Booth took on part-time editorial work to help support her family.^[13] Outraged at her employer's treatment of its clerical staff, she encouraged them to organize. When they confronted him, the boss agreed to meet their demands but insisted on firing Booth.^{[note 11]} She sued and in 1972 won her case before the National Labor Relations Board. The next year, using money she was awarded in the suit, she founded the Midwest Academy, a training organization that taught grassroots community organizing methods^[33] based on earlier work done by Saul Alinsky.^[13]

Booth and the other leaders of the academy created a highly regarded tool for the use of the community organizers who came to them for training. Using the tool, academy instructors taught the importance of establishing organizations to set specific goals for using pressure-group tactics in a formally-structured campaign.^[33] This tool, the "Midwest Academy Strategy Chart," instructed students in the actions that must be taken following the articulation of a problem and the methods that must be used for determining the success of the resulting campaign. The steps include setting concrete near- and long-term objectives, identifying individuals or groups that are either committed to solving the problem or likely to become supportive allies, and they include measuring the strength and likely tactics of those who will oppose the change. The chart directs attention to targets—the specific individuals who hold decision-making power and are able to affect the campaign—and it asks how these people can be influenced. It focuses on the resources that the campaign can call upon: its budget, its staff, and facilities available to it. And it asks how the campaign can be used to strengthen the coordinating group, what experience its leaders will gain as they conduct it, and whether it offers a good chance to expand into new constituencies and raise additional money.^[34]

In 1978, Booth proposed and helped to found an alliance of citizen-activist and labor organizations called the Citizen Labor Energy Coalition, often referred to as CLEC. The group chose her as its executive director at its first meeting and began work toward overcoming the mutual distaste that was seen to exist between the major elements of the New Left and the leadership of the AFL–CIO. In the words of labor historian Andrew Battista, CLEC addressed "a crucial issue of American public life: the relationship between the decline of organized labor and the decay of liberal and progressive politics." CLEC's lasting contribution is seen to be the establishment of new citizen-labor activist groups at the state level.^[35]

The experience she gained as president of the Midwest Academy and the many contacts she made with people who attended its training programs enabled her to set up Citizen Action, a nationwide coalition of local activist groups.^[36] Set up in 1980, Citizen Action gradually absorbed the statewide goups set up by CLEC and, eventually, CLEC itself.^[35] By 1989 the new coalition had a membership of two million people with 24 state affiliates.^[18] The issues it took on included plant closings, affordable health care, high energy costs, toxic waste sites, and similar problems, most of them having a degree of bipartisan support.^[37] Largely influenced by the negative fallout following the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, Citizen Action began to move away from the nonpartisan activism of the other organizations that Booth had founded. Departing from her previous practice, she began to take first steps toward entering mainstream politics by helping to defeat Republican candidates for office.^[38]

Progressive politics

In 1981, Booth was arrested while supporting miners during the Pittston Coal strike. A news report said she brought about 50 people to support the strike, about 20 of whom were arrested for blocking a courthouse entrance.^[39] She was an adviser to Harold Washington's 1983 and 1987 mayor campaigns in Chicago^[40] and subsequently served as field director for Carol Moseley-Braun's successful campaign for the Senate in 1992.^[41] Because the headquarters of Citizen Action was in Washington, D.C., her position as its president caused her to make frequent trips there from her home in Chicago.^[6] In Washington she was able to make a growing number of connections with the national leadership of the AFL-CIO and the Democratic Party. In 1993, she became an outreach coordinator for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for women, labor, and related concerns and subsequently was named coordinator of the committee's National Health Care Campaign.^[42] The DNC made her its training director in 1996. Four years later, Julian Bond asked her to lead the newly-established National Voter Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Organized as a charitible organization. the fund aimed, in its words, "to engage in issue advocacy, educate voters on candidates' stands on civil rights, and increase voter turnout in the African-American community through voter education and non-partisan registration and get-out-the-vote efforts."^[43] Its work helped to produce the unusually large African-American turnout in the presidential election of 2000.^[7]

Late in 1999, Booth helped found a federation of progressive community organizing groups called USAction.^[44][45] USAction absorbed some of the member organizations of Citizen Action and, like Citizen Action, it was a progressive advocacy organization intended to stimulate and coordinate community pressure groups.^[44] Booth also began working as a political consultant. Having previously worked with the National Organization for Women (NOW) during efforts to obtain passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, she directed field outreach for the pro-choice rallies that were connected to the 2004 March for Women's Lives that NOW helped organize.^[2] In 2018, Booth was arrested at a Capitol Hill protest in support of the DACA program and in 2003, she was lead consultant to the Campaign for Comprehensive Immigration Reform and subsequently to the Voter Participation Center.^[46][47] She was also the senior advisor to the One Nation Working Together rally held in October 2010^[2] and consultant to the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare a year later.^[48] Since 2011, she has been a member of an organization of political consultants called Democracy Partners.^[49]

They said, ‘Elizabeth, if you really want to push for this consumer agency, you’ve got to get organized.’ And I said, ‘Great! How?’ They said, ‘I’ve got two words for you: Heather Booth.’

— Elizabeth Warren, appearing in the documentary film, Heather Booth: Changing the World.^[50]

In 2004, Booth was Get-Out-the-Vote (GOTV) coordinator for the New Mexico Kerry/Edwards presidential campaign.^[51] In 2008, she was director of the AFL-CIO Health Care Campaign.^[52] In 2009, she directed the campaign to promote congressional passage of President Obama's first budget.^[46]

Booth worked to achieve financial reform and establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In 2010, she was hired to direct Americans for Financial Reform (AFR),^[53] a coalition of about 200 consumer, labor, and special interest groups established in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the subsequent Great Recession.^[45] AFR played a key role in achieving passage of the Dodd-Frank Act later that year.

As Elizabeth Warren later explained:

AFR managed to scrape together some money, and they used it to hire a handful of employees, including Heather Booth as executive director and Lisa Donner as her deputy. Creating a small team to organize the overall campaign for reform was a brilliant move. Instead of each nonprofit putting a little time into fighting for this or that provision, AFR coordinated the efforts of dozens of groups, magnifying the work of each one by helping them speak with a single voice. Heather and Lisa and the rest of their crew put out press releases, coordinated briefings on Capitol Hill, and organized groups of volunteers. The staffers and lobbyist and lawyers for the megabanks outnumbered them by a zillion to one, but the AFR people were there—day in and day out—hammering on the need for financial reform. They worked their hearts out.^[54]

Regarding passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, Booth was jubilant but did not see the achievement as an end in itself. She wrote:

The big lesson is that if we organize, we can win. The progress we made was because people raised our voices, took the message to the public, to the streets, and to the Halls of Congress, where we were joined in our efforts by some committed elected representatives.... [T]he legislation headed to the President’s desk is a better start than almost anyone predicted was possible in the face of the powerful opposition and entrenched power of the status quo. We won. Now let's get back to work.^[55]

Calling her "one of the nation's most influential organizers for progressive causes,"^[8] a profile published in 2017 by journalist David Wood said:

Inside almost every liberal drive over the past five decades ― for fair pay, equal justice, abortion rights, workers' rights, voter rights, civil rights, immigration rights, child care ― you will find Booth. But you may have to look hard. Because she’s not always at the head of the protest march. More often, she's at a let's-get-organized meeting in a suburban church basement or a late-night strategy session in a crumbling neighborhood's community center. She's helping people already roused to action figure out practical ways to move their cause forward. And always she's advancing the credo she learned as a child: that you must not only treat people with dignity and respect, but you must shoulder your own responsibility to help build a society that reflects those values.^[8]

In 2019, Booth was arrested during a "Fire Drill Fridays" climate change rally on Capitol Hill.^[56]

During the Biden/Harris presidential campaign of 2020, Booth served as director of senior and progressive engagement and on December 15 of that year was quoted as saying "President-elect Joe Biden’s team has always focused on older voters and their concerns will be top-of-mind in his upcoming term."^[57][58]

Political opponents and critics

As an activist on the national scene, Booth has drawn considerable criticism from political opponents. In 1978, Congressman Larry McDonald (R. Ga.) claimed that Booth and the Midwest Academy were associated with the Communist Party USA.^[59] A year later, he quoted an article claiming that: "The founder of the Midwest Academy, Heather Tobis Booth, and her husband, Paul Booth, were top leaders of Students for a Democratic Society in the mid-1960s who decided like many other S.D.S. activists that the way to create a socialist system in the United States was to organize a 'hate the rich' campaign under cover of a 'populist' movement for those who have incomes near or below the poverty line."^[60] In a book published in 2010, conservative author Stanley Kurtz called Booth "arguably the queen of socialist politics in Chicago,"^[61]: 228 also saying she was determined "to drag modern American socialism, kicking and screaming, into the heart of America's mainstream institutions."^[61]: 150

In 2013, Paul Sperry said she was a leading figure among the "socialist activists and their front groups [who] played a shockingly outsized role shaping and passing the monumental financial reform legislation that authorized the creation of President Obama's powerful consumer credit watchdog agency."^[62] Sperry is a conservative journalist and author of anti-Muslim books, who has served as bureau chief in Washington, D.C. for the conspiratorial website WorldNetDaily and written opinion pieces for the New York Post.^[63]

Honors and awards

• On May 9, 1987, Booth received the Thomas-Debs Award at a dinner in her honor held by the Democratic Socialists of America.^{[64][note 12]}
• On June 16, 2009, the Washington, D.C., office of AVODAH held a "Partner in Justice Event" honoring Booth.^[65]
• On July 6, 2013, during the national conference of the National Organization for Women, Booth accepted the Victoria J. Mastrobuono Women's Health Award on behalf of the Jane Collective.^[66]
• On September 23, 2015, the Chicago Abortion Fund honored Booth and the Jane Collective at its 25th anniversary celebration.^[67]
• On October 19, 2016, United Vision for Idaho gave a reception honoring Booth in conjunction with a showing of Heather Booth: Changing the World.^[68]This was one of quite a few receptions of similar nature that were held in conjunction with the showing of the documentary film.
• On October 21, 2020, Jane Fonda presented Booth with Personal PAC's Irving Harris Award at a virtual luncheon that was also attended by Hillary Clinton.^[69] Personal PAC is an Illinois-based political action committee that is dedicated to electing pro-choice candidates to state and local office.^[70]

References

1. ^Dennis McLellan (1993-12-03). "Dr. Jerome Tobis dies at 96; UCI professor, physician and researcher". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2017-07-03.
2. ^ Jump up to:^{ab c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s} "Heather Booth VFA Fabulous Feminist". Veteran Feminists of America. Retrieved 2017-07-05.
3. ^ Jump up to:^ab c Heather Booth. "Some Civil Rights and Student Movement Origins to Women's LIberation" (PDF). Paper presented as part of "A Revolutionary Moment: Women's Liberation in the late 1960s and early 1970s," a conference organized by the Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program at Boston University, March 27–29, 2014. Retrieved 2017-07-05.
4. ^"Hazel V Tobis, 04 Jul 2002". "United States Social Security Death Index," database, FamilySearch; citing U.S. Social Security Administration, Death Master File, database (Alexandria, Virginia: National Technical Information Service, ongoing). Retrieved 2017-06-03.
5. ^ Jump up to:^{ab c d e f g h} Paul D. Buchanan (2011-07-31). Radical Feminists: A Guide to an American Subculture. ABC-CLIO. pp. 104–107. ISBN 978-1-59884-356-9.
6. ^ Jump up to:^{ab c d e f g h i j k l m n o} Leigh Behrens (1989-07-23). "Activist voice A passion for justice fuels Heather Booth's life". Chicago Tribune. p. 3.
7. ^ Jump up to:^ab c "Heather Booth [interview]" (PDF). Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Veterans Movement. 2006-06-11. Retrieved 2017-07-11.
8. ^ Jump up to:^ab c d David Wood (2017-05-13). "She's The Best Answer To Donald Trump You Never Heard Of | HuffPost". HPMG News. Retrieved 2017-07-05.
9. ^ Jump up to:^ab c Steph Solis (2013-08-19). "A lifetime of activism began with lessons overseas". USA Today. McLean, Virginia. Retrieved 2017-07-03.
10. ^ Jump up to:^{ab c d e f g h} Heather Booth (interviewee), Becky Kluchin (interviewer), Gina Caneva (editor) (2016-09-12). "Heather Booth: Living the Movement Life [transcript of an interview]". CWLU Herstory Project. Retrieved 2017-07-09.
11. ^ Jump up to:^{ab c d e f g h} "Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement – Heather Booth". D.C. Everest Oral History Project. Retrieved 2017-07-05. Originally published in The Nation's Longest Struggle: Looking Back on the Modern Civil Rights Movement by the D.C. Everest school system of Wisconsin. This interview was conducted and edited by Junior and Senior High School students of the Everest system
12. ^"18 Protesting Draft Arrested at City's Induction Center". Chicago Tribune. 1967-10-20. p. 2.
13. ^ Jump up to:^{ab c d e f} Ben Joravsky (1989-04-27). "She's leaving home: Heather Booth looks back on 25 years of struggle". Chicago Reader. Retrieved 2017-07-03.
14. ^"15,000 White House Pickets Denounce Vietnam War: Students Picket at White House". New York Times. 1965-04-18. p. 1.
15. ^"Training for RADICALS: The Industrial Areas Foundation and the Midwest Academy | Romanticpoet's Weblog". 2010-08-10. Retrieved 2018-01-19.
16. ^ Jump up to:^ab c Sam Broberts (2018-01-18). "Paul Booth, Antiwar Organizer and Union Stalwart, Dies at 74 [obituary]". New York Times. Retrieved 2018-01-18.
17. ^ Jump up to:^ab 2017  Congressional Record,  163, Page E51 (2017-01-11)
18. ^ Jump up to:^ab c Paul Galloway (1985-02-14). "A Woman Born to Be Riled; Involvement Came Naturally to Activist Heather Booth". Chicago Tribune. p. 1.
19. ^"Chicago SNCC History Project; Heather Booth". Retrieved 2017-07-13.
20. ^Carrie Golus (Winter 2022). "For activist Heather Booth, AB'67, AM'70, the personal has been the political for more than 50 years". UChicago Magazine. University of Chicago Magazine. 112 (2). Retrieved 2022-02-11.
21. ^Kristin Anderson-Bricker (1992). From Beloved Community to Triple Jeopardy: Ideological Change and the Evolution of Feminism Among Black and White Women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1960–1975. Syracuse University. p. 56.
22. ^ Jump up to:^ab c d Heather Booth, Evie Goldfield, Sue Munaker. "Toward a Radical Movement". CWLU Herstory Project. originally published: Boston, New England Free Press, April 1968. Retrieved 2017-07-19.
23. ^"How to start your own consciousness-raising group". Cwluherstory.com. The Chicago Women's Liberation Institution. 1971. Archived from the original (Leaflet) on 12 February 2004. Retrieved 2017-07-14.
24. ^Gred Borzo. "Documentary Features Social Sciences Alumnae who Shaped the Women's Movement". University of Chicago, Division of the Social Sciences. Retrieved 2017-07-13.
25. ^Ashley Eberle (Spring 2009). "Breaking With Our Brothers: The Source and Structure of Chicago Women's Liberation in 1960s Activism" (PDF). Western Illinois Historical Review. Western Illinois University. 1. Retrieved 2022-02-11.
26. ^ Jump up to:^ab c d Kate Manning (2017-04-23). "The Amateur Abortionists: [Op-Ed]". New York Times. p. SR.3.
27. ^David T. Beito (2006-05-01). "History News Network | T.R.M. Howard: Thirty Years Later". Columbian College of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 2017-07-14.
28. ^ Jump up to:^ab Margaret Strobel. "Chicago Women's Liberation Union". Encyclopedia of Chicago. Chicago Historical Society. Retrieved 2017-07-16.
29. ^Margeret "Peg" Strobel; Sue Davenport (1999). "The Chicago Women's Liberation Union: An Introduction". The CWLU Herstory Website. University of Illinois. Archived from the original on 4 November 2011. Retrieved 25 November 2011.
30. ^ Jump up to:^ab Hyde Park Chapter, Chicago Women's Liberation Union; Heather Booth; Day Creamer (1972). Socialist Feminism: A Strategy for the Women's Movement. Washington, D.C.: Chicago Women's Liberation Union. pp. 26–27.
31. ^{{cite web |title=The Liberation School for Women, a Project of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union |author= Vivian Rothstein |work=Revolutionary Moment conference |year=2014 | accessdate=2022-02-09 |url=https://www.bu.edu/wgs/files/2013/10/Rothstein-The-Liberation-School-for-Women-A-Project-of-the-CWLU.pdf |format=PDF
32. ^Myra Marx Ferree; Patricia Yancey Martin (1 February 1995). Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women's Movement. Temple University Press. p. 148. ISBN 978-1-4399-0156-4.
33. ^ Jump up to:^ab John Herbers (1983-09-04). "GRASS-ROOTS GROUPS GO NATIONAL". New York Times. p. 22.
34. ^"Midwest Academy Strategy Chart" (PDF). Smoke-Free Environments Law Project, Center for Social Gerontology. Retrieved 2017-07-20.
35. ^ Jump up to:^ab Andrew Battista (August 1999). "Labor and Liberalism: The Citizen Labor Energy Coalition". Labor History. Taylor and Francis. 40 (3). Retrieved 2022-02-11.
36. ^"Below the Beltway: Activist Trouble". American Prospect Magazine. Prospect.org. 9 (36). January 1998. Retrieved 2017-05-10.
37. ^Maralee Schwartz (1989-08-06). "Shape Up, Shake Up, Activists Urge Democratic Party". Washington Post. Washington, D.C. p. 20.
38. ^Thomas B. Edsall (1997-10-26). "Mainstream Politics, Link to Teamsters May Stunt Liberal Activist Group". Washington Post. Washington, D.C. p. 10.
39. ^"Panel Proposed to Compare Efficiency". Indiana Gazette. Indiana, Pennsylvania. 1981-02-11. p. 3.
40. ^Ben Joravsky (1988-06-02). "Uneasy alliance: Can north-side progressives build a coalition in the absence of Washington and in the wake of Cokely?". Chicago Reader. Retrieved 2017-07-03.
41. ^ Jump up to:^ab Al Kamen (1993-02-17). "DNC Peppered With Democrats of All Flavors". Washington Post. Washington, D.C. p. 17.
42. ^Robin Toner (1993-12-03). "Partisan Jostling Frays Health Care Cooperation". New York Times. p. 24.
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This Equal Pay Day, March 15^th, the White House is announcing critical steps that the Biden-Harris Administration is taking to advance pay equity and promote women’s economic security.

President Biden and Vice President Harris have long championed equal pay as a cornerstone of their commitment to ensuring all people have a fair and equal opportunity to get ahead. Closing gender and racial wage gaps is essential to building an equitable economy and addressing the barriers that have long hampered women from fully participating in the labor force. But we still have work to do. In 2020, the average woman working full-time, year-round earned 83 cents for every dollar paid to their average male counterpart.  Compared with the average man working full-time, year-round, disparities are even greater for Black women, Native American women, and Latinas, as well as certain subpopulations of Asian women.

This Equal Pay Day, the Vice President is hosting a virtual summit, bringing together partners across the country who are taking critical steps to tackle pay discrimination, create good-paying jobs, and support families’ access to care.

Today, the Biden-Harris Administration is announcing new actions to promote women’s employment and support working families across the country. These actions will:

• Advance pay equity for the Federal workforce.  The Office of Personnel Management announced that they anticipate issuing a proposed regulation that will address the use of prior salary history in the hiring and pay-setting process for Federal employees, consistent with the President’s Executive Order on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce.  Banning the use of prior salary history can help break the cycle of past arbitrary and potentially discriminatory pay that can follow women and workers of color from job to job, entrenching gender and racial pay gaps over time.

• Promote efforts to achieve pay equity for job applicants and employees of Federal contractors. President Biden will sign an Executive Order directing the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council to consider enhancing pay equity and transparency, including by limiting or prohibiting federal contractors from seeking and considering information about job applicants’ and employees’ existing or past compensation when making employment decisions, and appropriate accountability measures.  The Department of Labor will consult with the FAR Council on the efficiency, economy, and effectiveness in Federal contracting that would be promoted by potential regulatory changes, and the most effective implementation strategy for any subsequent rulemaking.

Federal Contract Compliance Programs issued a new directive clarifying federal contractors’ annual obligation to analyze their compensation practices.  Conducting these pay equity audits helps address and prevent pay disparities based on gender, race, or ethnicity.

• Ensure equitable access to good-paying jobs. The Department of Labor issued a report analyzing the impact that women’s concentration in low- wage sectors – and their relative underrepresentation in many good-paying occupations – has on their overall economic security and gender and racial wage gaps. The report finds that, in 2019, Black women lost $39.3 billion and Hispanic women lost $46.7 billion in wages compared to white men due to differences in industry and occupation. This segregation intensified the COVID-19 pandemic’s disproportionate impact on women, in part due to the overrepresentation of women in hard-hit industries such as hospitality.  

• Address discrimination against caregivers.  Yesterday, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published technical assistance on caregiver discrimination, addressing the • Strengthen pay equity audits by Federal contractors. The Department of Labor’s Office of circumstances under which discrimination against applicants and employees based on pandemic-related caregiving responsibilities may violate federal employment discrimination laws
• The actions announced today build on steps the Administration has taken to advance pay equity, including:

• Provided immediate relief through the American Rescue Plan (ARP) to millions of women who have borne the brunt of the pandemic.  This work includes: standing up a historic vaccination program that has fully vaccinated more than 215 million Americans; reopening schools; providing direct payments to individuals; expanding nutrition programs for families; providing paid leave tax credits for small and midsize employers; distributing the majority of emergency rental assistance to female-headed households; and expanding the Child Tax Credit, which last year helped reduce child poverty to its estimated lowest level in recorded American history.

• Helped keep childcare providers open and boosted pay for childcare workers. States have already delivered American Rescue Plan stabilization grants to more than 150,000 child care providers serving more than 5 million children and their families. One survey finds that 92% of providers receiving funds relied on them to help stay open and nearly half used them to repay debt incurred during the pandemic. Many states also used funds to help boost compensation of the child care workforce. For example, Minnesota is requiring providers to increase compensation, while North Carolina and Connecticut offered bonus payments to providers who increased compensation of the workforce. Increasing compensation for child care workers helps narrow gender and racial pay gaps, as more than nine in ten are women and more than four in ten are women of color. While ARP funds allowed childcare programs to provide temporary bonuses, they need long-term funding as the President has proposed to sustainably increase wages.

• Provided tax relief to help families with childcare costs during the pandemic by delivering a historic increase in the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC) to support millions of working families this tax season. The ARP increased the maximum CDCTC for a median income family with two children under age 13 by more than sixtimes—providing up to $8,000 towards child expenses in 2021. It will reimburse most families for up to half of their childcare expenses. And the ARP CDCTC is fully-refundable, helping lower-income parents fully benefit regardless of their tax liability. Even before the pandemic, families struggled to afford childcare, forcing parents and especially mothers to forego higher paying jobs, work fewer hours, or take time out of the workforce, leading to lower pay over their career. The President has urged Congress to pass his plan for childcare, which could lower childcare costs for nine in ten families with young children.

• Increased the minimum wage to $15 per hour for Federal workers and contractors, benefiting manywomen and people of color. The President issued Executive Orders directing the Administration to work toward ensuring that employees working on federal contracts and federal employees earned a $15 per hour minimum wage. Those directives went into effect in January, raising the wages of about 370,000 federal employees and employees of federal contractors. In addition to helping the government do its work more efficiently, these directives take a step towards narrowing racial and gender disparities in income, as many low-wage workers are women and people of color. The order also eliminates the subminimum wage for workers with disabilities. The President has called on Congress to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, so that American workers can have a job that delivers dignity, and to make greater strides towards pay equity.

• Signed into law the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.  Administration investments through this law will increase access to good-paying jobs, including for women, people of color, and members of other communities who are currently underrepresented in the sectors where these jobs will be created, such as transportation, clean energy, and broadband.  The Department of Transportation and the Department of Labor signed a memorandum of understanding to promote the creation of good infrastructure and transportation jobs with a focus on equitable workforce development using funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

• Issued an Executive Order to promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility across the federal government – the nation’s largest employer – including by prioritizing efforts to close gender and racial wage gaps, address workplace safety and harassment, including in our national security workforce, and advance equity for LGBTQI+ public servants.

• Issued an Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy. This established the Administration’s policy of addressing anticompetitive behavior in labor markets, which can fall heavily on women and workers of color. The Order includes specific initiatives to promote competition in labor markets, including encouraging the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to ban or limit non-compete agreements, and encouraging the FTC and the Department of Justice to strengthen antitrust guidance to prevent employers from collaborating to suppress wages or reduce benefits by sharing wage and benefit information with one another.

Editors note:  Passage of the Equal Rights Amendment will provide the underpinning for such issues as equal pay.  The Constitution will become the final word on equity.

                                                    *********************

The Resource Library on  womensvoicesmedia.org provides you with information and help on this and many other issues, concerns and interests by, for, and about women.

https://womanup.org/

WomanUp is an activist network of hundreds of thousands of women and allies, stepping up to fight for progressive causes and candidates. Our goal is to leverage the power of women to make progressive change.

WomanUp is a partner of LeftAction, and was launched by one of its leaders, Leigh Stringer. WomanUp partners with a range of progressive organizations and candidates, and helps match them up with activists with a demonstrated passion for their causes.  

Have an organization or cause that you would like to promote to women? Looking for ways to quickly and creatively build your base of female supporters? Please contact us.

About the Founder

Leigh Stringer is a longtime promoter of progressive change, and the founder of WomanUp. Leigh helped launch LeftAction with her husband, John Hlinko as well as ActForLove, a dating site for progressive activists.

Leigh serves on the board of Global Women for Wellbeing, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting women's health and women's leadership. She is an architect, an author of two books, The Healthy Workplace and The Green Workplace and has spoken and written extensively about the need for a greater focus on health and sustainability on the part of businesses. She is a woman-of-action and the mother of two young daughters.

by Glee Violette

I graduated high school in 1966. Abortion was outlawed then, of course. But even though birth control pills were starting to become available, only married women could get them, and only with written permission from their husbands. Many doctors refused to prescribe them. Taking them was a moral offense that would get you excommunicated from most religions. Many pharmacists would not fill the prescription. And when they did, whispers went around the drug store, and the pharmacist and the clerks would treat you with contempt. It was a big freaking intimidating deal.

If a girl or woman got groped or raped, she usually kept it to herself. She would be blamed, always, for wearing the wrong thing, being in the wrong place, and acting the wrong way. Always.

Even if she was a minor, and the offender was an older relative. Men were praised for being sexual. Women were shamed. Even married women could expect leers and slurs about her condition if she was pregnant. That's why maternity wear was so concealing and prudish then. It was considered disgusting for a very pregnant woman to be out in public. In most jobs women quit immediately when they found out they were pregnant. Or they would be fired. And there would be no unemployment benefits.

Women had to take the oath in the marriage service that she would "love, honor, and Obey". It was even in secular marriages by Justices of the Peace. It was taken for granted. Women had the relationship to her husband that a child had to his mother. Subordinate. Obedient. There were laws, but "slapping around" or spanking a wife who "got out of line", "forgot her place", and "tried to wear the pants in the family", was actually regarded as appropriate by most people. And even when a wife was beaten to the point of needing hospitalization, usually, her husband was merely warned by police to "take it easy on her", and it was the wife who faced interrogation by her clergy, the police, and the hospital about what SHE did to "set him off", and was counseled to change her attitude. She was NEVER to deny a husband his conjugal rights to her body.

Because women could not control pregnancy, even by choosing to abstain, she had no control of her life. The fact that her employment depended on it, meant that no financial institution could take a chance on her being to repay loans. She could not get credit, buy a house or a car, or take out a student loan, unless her husband or her father, somebody legally "responsible" for her, co-signed the loan.

Because she could not control pregnancy, she was denied most jobs in management or training. Companies did not want to invest in temporary employees. They did not want to have to rebuild organizations when key people left.

Colleges denied most applications from female high school graduates. The attitude was that girls were only there to find a husband, and that they would drop out when they married and had babies. (And girls and women who became pregnant out of wedlock were expelled from high school and college immediately). Colleges felt that every time they accepted a female, she was taking the place of a future male breadwinner. It was considered almost immoral in their eyes.

Besides, "everyone knew" that women were not as smart as men, anyway. The silly things had no common sense. They needed to be guided and protected. They were the weaker sex, both physically and mentally. Television and movies made constant fun of them, especially of women who were clever and tried to rise to the level of men, and do their jobs. Those who succeeded were called horrible names, and came to bad ends. Unless, of course, a man came along to put her back in her place and she smiled and went happily back to it. Ah, true love!

Because of all that, her temporary availability, her subordinate status. it was simply unthinkable to see women in positions of authority. Women in the police and the military wore skirts and heels and did not carry weapons, and mostly did secretarial work, or support work as drivers, communication messengers, crossing guards, etc. Women did not appear on media as experts, or host the nightly news. In business, women did not appear in the board room, except as secretaries, serving coffee, passing out papers, and getting touched inappropriately. "Working girls" were fair game.

Look at old video and you do not see any women in orchestras, except as the singer, or on any film crews except as the script girl, or on any newscasts except as the weather girl, in a perky revealing outfit to reflect the weather of the day.

This was the world I grew up in. Where little girls were admonished to pretend to be weak and clumsy and stupid so the boys would feel big and strong. So they would LIKE us. So that someday, one of them would choose us, and marry us.

Our only goal in life was to be a housewife and mother, after a temporary stint as a nurse, teacher, telephone operator, store clerk, waitress or secretary. We were discouraged from "racy" choices like airline stewardess, model, actress or musician, because people would get the "wrong idea" about us. (A girl who became a cocktail waitress or nightclub singer might as well just put a scarlet A on her chest.)

So when Ruth Bader Ginsburg graduated high school in 1951 and was accepted at Cornell University, that was a big deal. When she got accepted at Harvard University after marrying and becoming a mother, that was a HUGE deal. When she graduated TOP of her class at Columbia Law School, that was nothing less than astounding. And THEN, she became a PROFESSOR at Rutgers Law School in 1963 (where she was told she would be paid less because her husband had a good paying job). She was one of only 20 female law professors in the entire country.

She was also a volunteer attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the ACLU, and participated in more than 300 gender discrimination cases, and argued six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court between 1973 and 1976, winning five of them. She joined the ACLU board of directors and in 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where she served until her appointment to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993.

In the 54 years since I graduated high school, the social role, the opportunities, and the rights of women changed, thanks to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and other pioneers like her, from basically that of a child to that of an adult human being. We have almost gained equality to men in business and so many other fields. We still have a ways to go to be equal in pay. (And of course, women of color still are kept back at a much lower level than white women). We have only a tenuous hold on control of our own bodies. The same men who claim a mask is a violation of their civil rights to govern their own bodies, have no problem claiming the right to decide every aspect of ours.

The primary goal of McConnell and Trump, and the religious organizations that back them, is to overturn Roe v Wade, and LGBTQ rights, and then every advancement we have made in Civil Rights, Women's Rights, and Voting Rights in the Courts. They want to roll back the clock and re-establish white supremacy and religious authority to where they were in my day. In Ruth Bader Ginsburg's day.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg showed us that anything is possible if we are willing to put the will, the time, the effort, and the work into it. This tiny woman overcame every obstacle and achieved something for ALL of us living in this country today. We ALL need to step up now, and carry her torch forward. We stood on giant's shoulders. We must not fail her. We will not fall, but climb higher, to the place she led us to, the place she wanted us to go. 

VOTE.  Get everyone you know to vote.  Everything we ever fought for and won, is on the line.