Notorious RBG: the Gift of Her Story with Thanks to Her, Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik

Notorious RBG cover - book by Irin Carmon
Notorious RBG cover – book by Irin Carmon

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is an enormously compelling figure.  How do I know this?  Authors Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik have given us the gift of this book, that’s how.  Described by the New York Times as “a cheery curio, as if a scrapbook and the Talmud decided to have a baby,” it is a lively, engrossing, humanizing introduction to a revered figure.

Born in 1933, six years before World War II, she remains, at 82, very much a part of our present, and our future.  Hers are the shoulders so many of us stand upon, proud of what we’ve fought for for today’s young women and men, parents and professionals, teachers, truckers and temps — all of it so much less than she faced down and conquered.  For all of us.

Beyond the exploration of her remarkable intellect and judicial virtuosity, Carmon reveals the warmth, spirit and personal moments that transform an icon into a person.  Her unlikely close friendship not only with Justice Scalia but also with his family, is intriguing, of course.  The genuine partnership she shared with her husband Mary for 56 years is a unifying thread through much of the book; the story of his last days one of the most moving.

Of course, threaded through the narrative are the legal and policy changes she championed and often brought from idea to reality — and, in recent years, fought, not always successfully, against the reversal of some of them.  From her days at Harvard Law School to those on the O’Connor Court, the impact of her passion and intellect is clear.

So.  If you want to have fun and be inspired at the same time, or need a gift for anyone who cares about women, or law and policy, or just loves a great story, this is it.  (Full disclosure: I DO know Irin but I never expected to write about the book until I read it.  Couldn’t help myself….)

Good Girls Revolt — When Men Were “Mad” and Women Were Researchers

Good-Girls-Revolt-Amazon-Pilot
Three “good girls” at Newsweek talking with brief hire Nora Ephron, who left her researcher role for “someplace I can write.”

It’s hard to believe, watching now.  Even more than Mad Men, Amazon’s Good Girls’ Revolt is all too familiar.  The story of the women of Newsweek and their battle for equality in the newsroom, it’s a heartbreaker, and it’s not because of the huge moments of oppression or betrayal, although they are present. (Through some creative reporting, a young researcher discovers what really happened at the 1969 Altamont Festival that “killed the 60’s.”   But the rewrite assignment – and the credit – goes to a guy who never left the building. “That’s how we do things here. We have a process.  Men are the reporters – you girls are the researchers.”)  The researcher on this story  loves the thrill of reporting so much she surrenders everything she’s learned, even though she’ll never get credit for it in the office, much less in print.

Sadly, many of us remember; it happened to us.  

Implicit, explicit and intractable power all in male hands, all the time, permeates every moment of Good Girls Revolt’s pilot episode.  We know where their pending revolution is coming from.

Even more frequent than the “big stuff” were the small assumptions, dismissals, insults and slights that eat away, day by day, at confidence and ambition and hope.

  • Four women in a hallway conversation greeted by the boss: “Hello, my little coven.”
  • The Managing Editor sending his best researcher, who keeps her reporter partner (and lover) safe and “his” stories on the cover, for coffee.  “Black, two sugars, right?”
  • “Sweetie,” “honey,” “cutie.”
  • A husband who “gives his wife a year” to write a novel before moving her to Connecticut to raise babies, but then puts a hole in her diaphragm so she’ll be pregnant before that year ends.
  • Three guys hungrily ogling a smart, but lovely women as she tries unsuccessfully to make it through the newsroom without incident.

Sadly, many of us remember; it happened to us.

For me it was a very sweet 60 Minutes producer sitting next to a very pregnant me in the newsroom and urging me not to come back to work – to stay home like his wife did.  Or the executive who called with sympathy for my miscarriage and told me that, pregnant woman that I’d been, I shouldn’t have been working so hard – as if I was my fault.  (His assistant asked me if I’d even wanted the baby at all.)

In addition to newsroom battles, this introductory episode takes us to a “consciousness raising” meeting, led by a pregnant “Eleanor Holmes Norton” and featuring, like a 12-step program, the telling of individual stories of humiliation, discrimination and sexual harassment.

Sadly, many of us remember; it happened to us.

In my own community, oppressive sexual relationships between researcher and producer weren’t frequent, but they weren’t rare, either.  They almost never ended well.  One correspondent told me at a bureau Christmas party “I’d really love to sleep with you.  Really.  But I never dip my pen in the company inkwell.”  He thought I’d be impressed.

We need this show – and so do our daughters and nieces and sons and nephews and husbands and young friends.  Here’s how Buzzfeed’s Ann Helen Peterson  ends her piece on the show:

Good Girls Revolt may be about a bunch of accidental revolutionaries. Its politics may be embroidered with melodrama, and romance, and fixation on clothes. But, then again, so is life. And that doesn’t make the show, or the work of the women behind the scenes, any less feminist — or necessary.

As [production designer Jeannine] Oppewall says, “Sometimes I look at my nieces, who don’t quite yet see the amount of work it took for us to pull this off, and I’m like, ‘You better have a look at the past, because if you’re not vigilant, the past can always be your future.’ You gotta babysit it and talk about it and push it and make it seem like this is absolutely the way it should be.”

 

Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Cancer, Courage and Rage

Cancer has taken so many people I’ve loved and admired. This new interview with two hugely admired and much-loved celebrities reminded me of how deeply it affects us all .  We know, in our heads, that the presence of beauty, courage, fame and an amazing marriage and family can’t keep the monster at bay.  Neither can being the most respected broadcast journalist of the past 30 years; Tom Brokaw had cancer too.  So did my husband, by the way.  Thankfully, they are still with us.  But it’s a roll of the dice, not fame or fortune, or even education, that’s made it so.

So why are we not all enraged?  Why do we refuse to keep this plague at (or at least near) the top of our agenda?  We face so much right now: attacks on women, racial tension, income inequality, climate change, declining education systems and infrastructure – fill in your own particular blank.  But no matter how we feel about any of these issues, we all grieve for those we’ve lost to cancer; we all long for their presence in our lives and know that it is just a lack of knowledge that took them from us.

No family is untouched; the lucky ones face it among older members but so many lose loved ones — family and friends, well before they’ve seen their children grow up, or get married or find their way in the world and before they’ve exhausted the gifts that brought so much to all of us.  I’ve been thinking about them a great deal recently, and have felt, for some time, a need to honor them once again here.  Many died before there was an Internet but I’ve added links where I could.

We were young journalists together:

Margot Adler

Mary Halleron

Mark Harrington

Joan Shorenstein

Teachers, mentors, friends:

Ed Bradley

Ed Hornick

Eden Lipson

Maggie Morton

Susan Neibur 

The Dearest:

Laurie Becklund

Bob Squier

 

 

 

Facing the Political Future: a Sadly Personal Perspective

ICKES
Harold Ickes

I’ve been hiding from the news, which is weird since I spent most of my life as a journalist.  I’m not sure though, that after 8 agonizing years of W and then 6 frustrating ones with President Obama (much of it not his fault) I can face what the next congress will do.

Do you remember the various, endless Clinton hearings?  Even more than the impeachment battle, the moment that I keep remembering was deeply personal: Sen. Alphonse D’Amato questioning Deputy Chief of Staff (and my longtime friend) Harold Ickes, whose father, also Harold, had been Secretary of the Interior in the Roosevelt Administration, and credited with implementation of much of the New Deal.

His father, D’Amato told Harold, would have been ashamed of him.

I had worked with Harold when we were all young, so along with political anger came real pain that, beyond the issues, he had faced such very cruel personal grandstanding.

That’s not important in policy terms and is probably mild compared to the harshness that any witnesses at the pending, inevitable deluge of hearings under a Republican congress will face: two years of destructive power escalating the politics of obstruction to that of destruction.  Beyond what that will mean to our country, poor people, women, immigrants, ACA users, voting rights, Supreme Court nominations,  and the jeopardy we face around the world, none of which will receive much attention except as political weapons, it’s just not something that will be easy to watch, especially for an unrepentant dreamer like me.

Mo(u)rning in America: 2014

sad capitol   I  spent W’s eight years in political despair. It was hard to watch the news or read the paper, harder still to think of all our fellow Americans without resources who would, and did, suffer on  a very concrete level.  Our kids were educated, our mortgage getting paid; we had work and health insurance and political and religious freedom but for many the pain of those years was personal.

Barack Obama’s election felt like the turning of a corner. This morning, as we face the unremitting and successful (and un-American and cruel and racist) assault on voting rights, the prospect of Joe McCarthy-like hearings in both bodies about almost everything that this president has been able to accomplish despite unprecedented, treasonous opposition, certain continued and brutal safety net cuts, violation of workers rights, a terrifying, determined erosion of the rights of women, a near-caliphate level of fundamentalism among even some of our newly elected members of Congress, the now-certain, veto-proof approval of the Keystone Pipeline, obscene power grabs by wealthy oligarchs and their ALEC, Americans for Prosperity operations not only nationally but state-by-state and unimaginable foreign policy attitudes, it’s a grim day.

Friends of mine have posted look-ahead messages and I admire them for it.  For me, it’s going to take a little longer.

 

Do We Americans Still Have It? Do We Care? #MicroblogMonday

Apocalypse-road-sign-resizedI’ve spent most of my life thinking about disasters and potential apocalypses and injustice and misery: I’m a journalist, or at least I was, so I don’t get discouraged easily.  So far the world, or at least our country, has always seemed to right itself in the nick of time.  I seriously wonder if we can still do it though.  We all know why:

A bitterly divided country

Racism

Institutional injustice

The terrifying assault on women’s rights and well-being, here and elsewhere

The decline of our public schools

Climate change

The rise of fundamentalism

The coarsening of our culture

The cost of a college education

Ebola

ISIS

Hunger

Anti-Vaxx-ers (seriously)

Add your own here____________________

Beneath those individual issues lies the biggest threat: what appears to be the larger change in our values.  As I watched The Roosevelts and, strangely enough, re-watched The King’s Speech, I wondered (not for the first time) where those sorts of world leaders (FDR, a president with political skills, toughness, vision and an understanding both of where the country was and where he needed to take it, Teddy Roosevelt who took on income inequality through trust busting and began what became the environmental movement (and yes he also started a couple of wars… or a reluctant King George IV, who not only held Britain together and committed under horrible circumstances but also led by example) are today, whether they could be elected or heeded —  whether they would even be willing to try.  Even more, I wondered if our country would accept them; whether we are still capable of selflessness or a sense of duty or a thoughtful response to a call to sacrifice.  I hope so.

 

 

 

A New Gig and New Ways to Make Change – Care2.com

Care2-full-color

This is pretty exciting. I’m now Managing Editor for all the Causes channels at Care2. It’s a unique organization that provides essential information on critical problems and the people who want to change them. Unlike many such groups, Care2 combines information and action – offering members both the information they need on the issues they care about and the tools to take action on those issues.
I hope you’ll come by and take a look; the issues range from Environment,and Animal Rights to Women’s RightsHuman RightsCivil Rights and  Politics to Health Policy to  Global Warming .

I’d be particularly grateful for your observations about the organization and its 11 million members!  Comment here or write to me at cindys@earth.care2.com.

Sarah Palin, Rape Kits and Birth Control

When you first heard that Wasilla, AK and its then-mayor Sarah Palin were charging rape victims for the cost of their rape kits (evidence collecting) you didn’t quite believe it, right?  This video is the first of a series being produced by "The Wasilla Project" and was called to my attention by Nerdette, a sharp cookie whose blog "Not My Gal" is usually on top of these things.  After I watched it I went back to this CNN version of the story: 

It’s kind of slippery but, partly because I’ve been working on the issue of very scary threats to the right to planning ones pregnancies, and to actual birth control and family planning, I’ve very aware of the Palin perspective on these important life decisions.  Watch both videos and see what you think.  And if you want to learn more, stop by Birth Control Watch and see for yourself what informs a lot of the thinking behind Sarah Palin and that guy she’s running with.   

PREVENTING SPOUSAL ABUSE; HONORING THOSE WHO HELP

Nat_aliza_officeSometimes a common event can remind you of the wonderful ways that others find to live their lives and help others.  Tonight we went to a benefit for a group that helps Jewish women trapped in abusive relationships; it’s call the Jewish Coalition Against Domestic Abuse.  We went because a good friend chairs the group, but also because they were honoring a remarkable pair of lawyers: Nathaniel "Nat" Lewin  and his daughter Alyza Lewin .  Together they are the law firm of Lewin & Lewin LLP . This article in Jewish Week Magazine describes them beautifully.

Nat_aliza_two_shot2
Nat has an impressive history; it was kind of thrilling to see him honored and hear him speak so beautifully and lovingly of his lawyer daughter, his photographer daughter, his wife and grandkids, then to hear Alyza thank her parents, her husband, her sister, her kids and her nanny, all of whom were there. 

She described her memory of having "the talk" with her mom early in her adolescence — not "the talk" talk – but one at least as important.  Her mother, she said, told her to be economically self-sufficient, AND to never let her work keep her from getting married and having children, Then, she continued, half joking, her mother said "These two things, they conflict.  So now maybe it will be easier because I told you."  Everyone laughed, mostly with recognition.  We all know that clash and live with it.   

Most moms have a connection with their kids, begun physically of course, before birth that continues in a way that makes leaving them to go to work tough.  We were probably hard-wired that way.  When I saw this mother of four describing her mother’s warning and her subsequent efforts to be mother and powerhouse attorney, I thought about so many women — those law school pioneers terrorized in class and shut out of study groups, med students thrown out of operating rooms because they were too germy to be there without pantyhose (true story), women reporters shut out of the Radio TV Correspondent’s dinner unless they came as "hostesses."  We’ve all come a long way, and clearly Alyza Lewin, through her work, with her dad, on Jewish issues, is using the progress we made to help others.  As Jewish Week wrote:  "That’s meant
everything from representing apartment tenants whose landlords won’t
allow them to hang a mezuzah, to assisting government employees having
trouble getting their security clearances renewed because of family
ties to Israel, to helping rabbis ensure menorot can be displayed on
public property during Chanukah." 

She comes by it naturally.  Her dad, when he spoke, didn’t say much about his track record as an attorney – he didn’t need to.  Again, the profile;

Combining his time as an assistant to the
solicitor general and private practice, he’s argued 27 cases in front of the
Supreme Court. And his daughter notes that there is no legal issue relating to
the Jewish community that doesn’t have his "fingerprints" on it. ..
he drafted the provision of the Civil Rights Act that protects one’s religious
observance or practice. Later in the decade, he wrote legislation that allowed
federal workers to work "compensatory time" if they wanted to get
time off to observe religious holidays. … Lewin is still trying to create further protection for religious liberty.  The firm has taken up the case, on appeal,  of a Jewish parole officer in New York whose employer pressured him not to observe religious holidays by scheduling
mandatory meetings and training sessions on those dates. They are arguing that
the plaintiff faced a "hostile work environment"
similar to the kind of environment considered actionable for sexual harassment and
that the courts should recognize such a standard for religious practice.

Before forming Lewin and Lewin, Nathan Lewin was
a founding partner at Miller, Cassidy, Larocca & Lewin. Among his most
well-known clients was Ed Meese, when the Reagan administration attorney
general was the subject of an independent counsel investigation over charges of
influence peddling. …

U.S.dLewin also was actress Jodie Foster’s lawyer
when she testified during the trial of John Hinckley for the shooting of
President Ronald Reagan. In 1975, Lewin represented John Lennon on an appeal of
a US   decision to deport
him because of his previous conviction on drug possession charges in Great Britain.
Lewin said he never met the Beatle, having been recruited to handle the appeal
through Lennon’s lawyer. And he joked that he probably shouldn’t have cashed
the check Lennon sent him to pay for his services because the
autograph on it probably ended up being more valuable.

The Lewins currently …are working on a number of
other Jewish-related cases, such as the Boim case, in which, on behalf of a
victim of a Hamas terrorist attack in Israel, they successfully sued the Holy Land Foundation and two other U.S. charities for providing funding to the terrorist organization.  They are waiting for the results of an appeal but the legal theory they devleloped has been adopted by a number of other terror victims since.

So.  They deserved the honor.  The issue is horrifying – the "Jews don’t do that sort of thing" myth decimated – like the lives of so many of the women JACADA works to help.  The biggest reward for me though was to listen to this accomplished, unassuming and loving daughter tell her story and speak with such colleagial regard for her father.  It’s how things should be.  And so seldom are.
 

 

BLOG AGAINST SEXISM DAY: CAN YOU BELIEVE WE STILL NEED TO DO THIS?

Superwoman_2 March 8 is Blog Against Sexism Day – and as I began thinking about what to write, this is what came out:

Once I met Betty Friedan – actually more than once – but the first time was at the 1967 National Student Association convention.  It was obviously a turbulent time: the Vietnam War was everyone’s obsession – at the conference and in the world outside; the Civil Rights movement was moving toward racial separation, Ramparts Magazine had just revealed that the CIA had been funding NSA and lots of other student activities. 

Betty_friedan_bw_3I wrote about this on the Ms. website when Betty died, so I’ll just repeat it here: She spoke about inequities in pay, power and sense of self between women and men. I was irritated. Didn’t she know there was a war going on? Didn’t she know how many kids went to bed hungry? Didn’t she know about racial injustice?

During Q and A I asked her "How can women worry about themselves when there is so much more abject misery in the world? " I asked. She drew herself up as only she could, looked me square in the eye and said "My dear, don’t hide behind the poor."

Fist_2 She was right, of course.  Over the years — I just realized that it’s 40 this year — we’ve struggled and grown.  The consciousness raising groups of the 70s were just that: they genuinely raised our awareness of the vast disparity in pay, rights and attitude between women and men.  The world today is unimaginably different.  But not finished.

There’s a sad split between old school feminists like me and younger, equally committed women.  I don’t feel it personally but see it as a real political loss – we should be working together and for many younger women the groups of my generation seem staid, old and disinterested in their younger sisters.  If we’re fighting sexism we shouldn’t be fighting each other! 

Beyond that, pay equity is closer but not all the way there; many major businesses and executive jobs still sport major glass ceilings, working mothers at all levels still have real problems – more in the hourly kinds of work than white collar.  Divorce, domestic abuse, child custody and support — all of these issues are still without resolution.  And in many areas, like abortion and federal protection of rights, we’ve slid badly under the current administration.

What gives me hope though is to think of my sons and the sons of my friends, and of the young people who share our lives in our community.  These men wouldn’t dream of assuming certain tasks belong to women; wouldn’t dream of treating a female colleague or employee with less than appropriate dignity and can’t imagine another way to live.  Systemically we still have a lot to do, but I do think that as we move forward these sons of feminists, raised with respect to respect their moms and sisters, classmates and friends, will not only de-fang sexism but also provide shining examples of how much better life is without it.  Amen.