Speeches

STATE WAC CONFERENCE
May 19 - 21, 2006
DEALING WITH LIFE’S UP AND DOWNS

Prepared Remarks of
KATHY STEWART
OCSEA Secretary-Treasurer
Chair, Women’s Action Committee

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Uncertainty seems to grow daily in life all around us.  Newspaper headlines scream of terrorist threats, international conflict, environmental disasters, dishonesty and corruption in government and business. School children are searched for weapons because some of their fellow students have chosen to become mass murderers.

Life grows busier for women everywhere.  Information streams at us from all directions and knows no boundary.  Cell phones, pagers, voicemail, e-mail, laptop computers and the internet contribute to the never ending workday as we can be reached anytime, anywhere, for any reason.  More and more people expect us to be – or asks us to be-always available.

Unfortunately, these are not the only sources of anxiety. Whether it is trouble at work, worry over finances, or concerns regarding the well being of our children, the health of our parents, the illness of a friend, the condition of our neighborhoods or schools, or even our own health, it appeared that there is no end to the flood of problems and stressors we all face.  Our personal lives can feel more and more out of control and out of balance. Currents of anxiety can be behind the smallest things we choose to do, or refrain from trying, at work, at home, and in our personal lives.

The mind’s anxious preoccupations, and frustrations sometimes seem endless.  But they do not have to be ultimately confining or imprisoning.

All that is asked of us is that we start paying attention to aspects of our life and our immediate experience that we may have previously taken for granted.

The idea of burnout takes on a deeper and more personal meaning. People are telling us what to do, where to go, who to speak to, or our actions are dictated by government policies.

How did we get to this point?  Let me give you a little perspective on how
history and the government has programmed our lives.

Between 1872 and 1900, the courts ruled that women were not entitled to the rights of “citizens” and even questioned whether they qualified as “persons” when it came to the applicability of constitutional rights.

Not until the late 1890’s did the middle class participate in a revival of mass action around women’s suffrage, making new alliances with workers and immigrants, and beginning to move in the direction of The Progressive Era reform.

The early twentieth century expanded protective legislation that put the
government in the business of regulating the hours and tasks that companies could assign to women in order to make sure that reproduction remained women’s primary role.

Women were the mobilizers and community organizers in working with the community and lobbying legislatures for securing saver neighborhoods, child protection laws, etc.  In order to organize social and political action by all mothers, they lobbied for a day which would be declared Mothers’ Day.  Well, they were successful, but then again, not successful. Mothers’ Day was adopted on May 8, 1914, by the 63rd Congress; however, the government had linked it to a celebration of home life and privacy totally disregarding their organizing efforts.

During the Depression years of the 1930’s, federal laws and business policies discouraged hiring of married women and mandated they be the first fired during cutbacks.  Twenty-six states passed laws prohibiting their employment for the fear that women would take a man’s job.

The Social Security Act of 1935, enlarged the commitment of the state to
helping families who could not care for dependents, but made access to aid contingent on family status.  In 1939 the act specifically redefined the recipients as the worker and “his” family.  Most women received benefits “only” through their husbands and many discovered later that if the relationship lasted less than twenty years, they ended up with no benefits at all.

World War II brought a major shift in women’s work.  Between 1940 and
1945, the female labor force increased by more than 50%.  The state also financed child care for mothers working in defense industries.  Following the war, women were laid off from manufacturing jobs in droves. The notion that traditional families fostered intense intimacy between husbands and wives while creating mothers who were totally available to their children, is an idea that combines some characteristics of the white, middle-class family in the mid-nineteenth century. 

Ideally a woman would be fully absorbed with her youngsters while simultaneously maintaining passionate excitement with her husband, was a 1950’s invention that drove thousands of women to therapists, tranquilizers, or alcohol when they actually tried to live up to it.  There are a few modern Americans who would like to return to the strict patriarchal authority of colonial days, in which disobedience by women and children was considered a small form of treason.  Other Americans prefer the Victorian family which arose in the 1830’s and 1840’s as household production gave way to wage work and professional occupations outside the home.  A new division of labor by age
and sex emerged among the middle class.  Women’s roles were redefined in terms of domesticity rather than production while men were labeled “breadwinners”

Our most powerful visions of traditional families derive from images that are still delivered to our homes in countless reruns of 1950’s television sit-coms.  When conservatives debate family policy, for example, the issue is often framed in terms of how many “Ozzie and Harriet” families are left in America.  Conservatives compute the percentage of total households that contain a breadwinner father, a full-time homemaker mother, and dependent children claimed that fewer than 10 percent of American families met the “Ozzie and Harriet” or “Leave It to Beaver” model. 

In retrospect, the 1950’s also seem to have been a time of innocence and consensus. Gang warfare among youths did not lead to drive-by-shootings, the crack epidemic had not yet hit; discipline problems in the schools were minor; there was no movement to oppose the 1954 addition of the words under God to the Pledge of Allegiance, and 90 percent of all school levies were approved by voters.

By the mid-1950’s, advertisers’ surveys reported on a growing tendency among women to find “housework a medium of expression for femininity and individuality.” 

In 1957, 80% of Americans polled said that people who
chose not to marry were “sick”, “neurotic” and “immoral.”

A woman’s retreat to housewife was in many cases not freely chosen. 
During World War II, thousands of women had entered new jobs, gained
new skills, joined unions, and fought against job discrimination. 

Approximately 95% of the new women employees had expected to quit
work at the end of the war. By 1945, an equally overwhelming majority did not want to give up their independence, responsibility and income, yet expressed the desire to continue working.   As it turned out, those who continued working were downgraded to lower paid, “female” jobs.

Vehement attacks were launched against women who did not resign.  In the 1947 bestseller, the Modern Woman, the Lost Sex – described feminism as a “deep illness”, called the notion of an independent woman a “contradiction in terms” and accused women who sought educational or employment equality of engaging in symbolic :castration” of men.

During the 1950’s institutionalization and sometimes electric shock treatments were used to force women to accept their domestic roles and their husbands’ dictates.  A 1954 article in Esquire called working wives a “menace.”  An author of Life Magazine termed married women’s employment a “disease.” 

The Journal of American Family Sociology did not carry a single article on family violence between 1939 and 1969.  Wife battering was not even considered a “real” crime by most people.  Psychiatrists in the 1950’s regarded the battered woman as a masochist who provoked her husband into beating her.

As late as 1970, 7.8% of married women under the age of 45 said that it was better for wives to be homemakers and husbands to do the breadwinning.  By the mid 1970-‘s the inflation rate exceeded the average income gain for Americans. Therefore two wages were necessary for families to maintain any continued improvement in real income.

In 1988, nearly half of all families with children had both parents in the work force.  That is not to say that parents, especially mothers, are happy with the pressures of balancing work and family life.  Poll after poll reveals that both men and women feel starved for time.  The polls also revealed a women’s growing dissatisfaction with the failure of employers, schools, and government to pioneer arrangements that made it possible to combine work and family life. One example of this was found in the almost daily reporting of cases of child molestation, or kidnapping, by a sexual predator.  The highlighting of these cases, drawn from every corner of the country, helps disguised how rare these cases actually were when compared to crimes committed within the family.

In 1989 when young Americans were asked to describe a good citizen, the overwhelming majority said it was someone who was personally generous and caring; only 12% thought good citizenship meant voting or other political involvement.

In 1990 – “60 Minutes” Commentator, Andy Rooney, blamed America’s
social ills on “bad parents.” Growing numbers of such parents, he charged, were producing “kids who feel no responsibility toward their families, their neighbors, or their country.”

Work, school and medical care in America are still organized around the 1950’s myth that every household has a full-time mother at home, available to chauffeur children to doctor and dentist appointments in the middle of the day, pick up elementary school children on early dismissal days, and stay home when a child has the flu.

Sisters, this is a country run on prejudice and fear while men, mostly white- wealthy men, are manipulating the strings. Yet, we allow this to happen.  We allow this to happen by not exercising our right to vote. Why do women let other men cast their vote for them?  Do men believe that we are void of any independent thought?  Have we not suffered enough?

What makes America great is our individual freedom.  The individual
freedoms we have are guaranteed to us by the Constitution.  The specific
guarantees are in the Bill of Rights.  The Bill of Rights is made up of
Amendments.  Each of these Amendments addresses specific rights we have to protect us from an already overbearing government.  As women we have not always had the rights we have today, but we are still far from having equal rights.  Rights are freedoms no matter what spin someone may try to put on any piece of legislation.  Today women still only make approximately $.70 for every dollar a man makes.  Minorities of both sexes are even further behind.  Equal pay for equal work is still eluding many of us.

I feel strongly that one of our greatest challenges as individuals is to
understand that we are all in this struggle together.  Too many times I have heard people say that minimum wage laws do not really concern them because they make a lot more money than that.  Well, this attitude is wrong on three levels.  First, you may not work for minimum wage but you really should care about those who do.  Second, honest economic experts will tell you that a raise in minimum wage will create pressure that will cause all other wages to increase.  Third, when minimum wage is as low as it is, government programs will be heavily burdened with making up the difference.

I have to say that when preparing speeches I have a tendency to cut back on mentioning the Republican Legislature, but the gloves have to come off.  The Republicans Administration today is not conservative by any real definition of the word conservative.  They have ceased to be what they say they really are.  They are now known as the Corporate Party. 

The privatizing of Medicaid was a good example of corporations writing a
bill that was turned into law.  What happened next?  Prices went up and
services got worse; but profits for insurance companies increased. 

The Republican Congress claims that their tax breaks to the rich will make
our economy boom – Sisters, I am here to tell you that the only boom I heard was on 9-11. 

We now sit on the second largest oil reserve in the world in Iraq.  We were told first that the oil would pay for the war.  A LIE.  Then we were told that it would pay for reconstruction of Iraq.  A LIE.  The truth is that Vice President Cheney’s company is getting free oil and the White House is in bed with BIG OIL.  The higher the prices, the more the Bush’s friends and family make.  All this while our young men and women die – it makes me sick!

"Anxiety” comes from the Latin word anxious, which means a
condition of agitation and distress.  When stress and agitation arises
repeatedly and persists over time, it is called chronic – which is the state our government has put us into.  Witness the administration’s approach to poverty; work harder, longer (the renewed Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Act mandates longer work hours for needy mothers), or marry. 

The second of these two solutions is another “crusade”; While the Bush
administration claims not to be able adequately to fund its own “Leave No Child Behind” public education program, it has billions of dollars to spend on promoting abstinence and heterosexual marriage, with no evidence that Service announces that it will scrutinize the returns of the poorest taxpayers, those claiming the earned income tax credit.  This is a credit offered to taxpayers who earn under $35,000.00 for a family of four, and it averages $2,000.00.  The Bush administration wants to spend $100 million to go after these working poor Americans in search of fraud rather than concentrate on corporations, who, according to some estimates, defraud the government by tens of billions of dollars every year.

The recent federal House Budget Bill provides $7.2 billion less in funding in
FY 2007 for discretionary programs than is needed just to maintain current services.  This will undoubtedly lead to major services cuts in domestic job training, services for the elderly and many health programs. At the same time, the House budget proposes a whopping $338 billion additional tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the very rich.

State programs are at risk with cuts in the budget.  Blackwell’s TEL
Amendment to the budget will limit the amount of any increase in General
Revenue Funds.  As the budget shrinks, we will see more privatizing of our jobs. We have seen the closures of two prisons, one DYS facility and two MRDD facilities. Rumors are circulating within the Ohio Veterans’ Home about privatizing housekeeping, laundry, dietary and maintenance.  Is your department next to be privatized?  Is your job next?

My dear sisters, now do you get the picture?  Who we elect to office on both the federal level as well as on the state level affects our daily lives, as well as our families. Now do you understand how important your vote is?  Only you can change the future – not by cooler talk or ignoring the problems – but only by exercising your right to vote.  Sisters, become informed voters.  Sign up to get the AFSCME Legislative Report, read our OCSEA website.  Stop the madness of letting other people make decisions for you.  I beg you on November to get out and vote.  Vote for candidates that have your interest at heart.  Don’t vote for candidates that sell their sincerity and their personal family values, instead vote for candidates that share your interest and positions on issues.

We have experienced the horrible warning of current conditions and the threat that things will get worse unless we do something about it.  Remember what the old saying is – IN POLITICS, IF YOU WANT ANYTHING SAID, ASK A MAN.  IF YOU WANT ANYTHING DONE, ASK A WOMAN.

Thank you.

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