Andrea Flynn

Roosevelt Institute Fellow
 

Recent Posts by Andrea Flynn

  • The WPA: A Flawed Model for Women, but an Inspiration for Progress

    Apr 9, 2013Andrea Flynn

    The New Deal left women behind, but it proved government can be a champion for the economically downtrodden.

    The participation of women in the American work force has expanded dramatically in the 78 years since the Roosevelt administration launched the WPA to provide jobs to Americans out of work and on relief. Today women comprise nearly half the work force and typically work through the life cycle, not episodically, before and after childrearing, which for so long was considered their principal occupation.

    The New Deal left women behind, but it proved government can be a champion for the economically downtrodden.

    The participation of women in the American work force has expanded dramatically in the 78 years since the Roosevelt administration launched the WPA to provide jobs to Americans out of work and on relief. Today women comprise nearly half the work force and typically work through the life cycle, not episodically, before and after childrearing, which for so long was considered their principal occupation.

    Today married, as well as single, women play a critical role in the U.S. economy. In nearly half the country’s dual income families, women earn as much or more than men. And as a percentage of the total, there are many more single women heading households today. For these reasons, today’s employment policies must be sensitive to gender in ways they never have been before.

    Women were an afterthought of policymakers back in the Roosevelt years. Prevailing cultural mores still viewed work among married women as a threat to the sanctity and moral fabric of the family. New Dealers actually passed legislation (over the objection of Eleanor Roosevelt and others with feminist leanings) that prevented two workers in any one family from claiming a government salary, which meant that women during the Depression often were fired or forced to quit their jobs.

    Women actually claimed only 13.5 percent of the 8.5 million total jobs created by the WPA, the majority of them in traditionally female occupations such as sewing, childcare and eldercare, teaching and education, etc. No surprise, these jobs paid less than other positions occupied by men, with WPA salaries ranging from only $20 to nearly $100 dollars per month. And most of those jobs, in fact, went to women who were divorced, widowed or unmarried.

    With the advent of World War II, record numbers of women entered the work force to fill jobs left by men conscripted to fight the war. Despite postwar conventions that again celebrated domesticity and pushed women out of positions reclaimed by returning veterans, the war actually ignited a behavioral shift that forever reshaped the U.S. labor force.

    In 1948, women comprised 29 percent of the labor force overall, and 17 percent of married mothers worked outside the home. Most of them were part of families living at the edge of poverty and needing two salaries, but some were in the professions and in business and simply rejected prevailing values. Those numbers have steadily increased over the last 60 years. Today, women make up nearly 47 percent of the labor force, with more than 79 percent of mothers now working.

    But old ways die hard. Women may make up nearly half the American work force, but they still face an ever-increasing number of obstacles to balancing work and family and to achieving economic security. A report recently released by the Ms. Foundation for Women illustrates the myriad challenges facing women workers:

    • The Bureau of Labor Statistics lists more than 440 occupations. Four out of five women are concentrated in only 20 of these jobs, most of them traditionally female roles such as secretaries, home health care and childcare workers, teachers, waitresses, etc. that barely afford women a living wage.
    • Approximately 63 percent of minimum- and sub-minimum-wage workers are women.
    • The recent recession has had a particularly negative impact on women. By 2011, women had regained only 11 percent of jobs lost (compared to men’s 24 percent), and by the end of 2012, the women had regained 46 percent (compared to men’s 50 percent).
    • Of families headed by single mothers, 28.7 percent — 4 million of them — live in poverty compared with 13 percent (or 670,000) of those headed by men.
    • Underemployment is a serious issue facing women workers. Approximately 26 percent of working women are in part-time jobs, which do not provide essential benefits and job security.

    Though not sufficiently attentive to the needs of women at the time, Roosevelt’s New Deal and WPA exemplified the role government can and should play in guaranteeing a basic floor of well being for all Americans. We would be wise to revisit those ideals today as we think about how to protect and advance women workers across the United States.

    President Obama has suggested many such initiatives: universal pre-school; better job training to equip students to pursue trades; a historic expansion of Medicaid and private health insurance that will guarantee all women basic preventative services (including reproductive health care and family planning); and pay equity and a raise in the minimum wage.

    Indeed, the first piece of legislation President Obama signed upon entering office was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which overturned the 180-day statute of limitations for women to contest pay discrimination. Today, in commemoration of National Pay Equity Day, President Obama said:

    Wage inequality undermines the promise of fairness and opportunity upon which our country was founded… Our country has come a long way toward ensuring everyone gets a fair shot at opportunity, no matter who you are or where you come from. But our journey will not be complete until our mothers, our wives, our sisters, and our daughters are treated equally in the workplace and always see an honest day's work rewarded with honest wages. 

    There are other significant steps we can take:

    • Congress should pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, legislation that has been introduced a number of times since 2009 but has failed to secure support from both chambers of Congress. The legislation – an update to the 1963 Equal Pay Act – would prohibit employers from paying a man more than a woman for the same job and would prevent employers from punishing women who call attention to pay disparities.
    • We should ensure that women who work as nannies, home health care workers, housekeepers, etc. – positions that are a major backbone to our economy – receive a fair wage and benefits necessary to lead healthy, financially secure lives.
    • We should ensure that all workers are guaranteed sick days and parental leave so their families don’t play second fiddle to a job.
    • We should task our best and brightest with creating innovative job training programs (and job creation initiatives) that will enable women to move beyond the 20 or so occupations the majority currently occupy. And we should think critically about how the federal government can provide better job security for women in part-time and seasonal jobs.
    • We should create affordable childcare programs that would allow women to know their children are being well-cared for while they earn a living to support their families. This would also give women greater flexibility to occupy full-time, more stable positions.

    FDR may not have offered women their rightful place in the New Deal’s employment programs. But today we know better. Only by lifting the barriers that prevent women from achieving real economic equity, can we regain real security for American families and re-establish our country’s stronghold as a global economic leader. 

    Andrea Flynn is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

    Read more

    Share This

  • Why the GOP’s Efforts to Reach Out to Women Are Doomed to Fail

    Mar 20, 2013Andrea Flynn

    Why should women vote for a party that's actively working against their needs and interests?

    Why should women vote for a party that's actively working against their needs and interests?

    On Monday, the GOP released a report detailing its "Growth and Opportunity Project," a new initiative that explores reasons for the party’s November defeat and posits strategies for winning future elections. If it wasn’t evident before, it is now abundantly clear that the Republican establishment officially attributes its November loss to a failure in style, not substance. The 100-page report details the party’s inability to effectively communicate its policies and priorities to women, immigrants, young people, and people of color. It largely ignores the possibility that what motivated the majority of American voters, and in particular women, to give President Obama a second term was an aversion to the GOP’s outdated vision for the nation.

    Acknowledging that Obama won the single women’s vote by a “whopping 36 percent,” the report’s authors suggest ways the party can be more inclusive of this critical voting bloc: Making a better effort to listen to female voters; fighting against the Democratic rhetoric against the “so-called War on Women"; doing a better job communicating the GOP’s policies and employing female spokespeople to do it; and using Women’s History Month to “remind voters of the Republican’s Party historical role in advancing the women’s rights movement.”

    I’m glad they specified “historical” role in advancing the women’s rights movement, given that their current role seems squarely focused on rolling back women’s rights. It’s encouraging that GOP strategists in Washington want to spend more time listening to women voters, but there is no indication that Republican lawmakers will respond to that feedback. As Rachel Maddow said on her program this week, while Beltway leaders are “preaching about how to appear more reasonable to the women folk among us,” Republican governance has become a competition – a race – “to see who can get the most extreme the fastest.”

    And a race it is.

    This week Andrew Jenkins of RH Reality Check reported on some of the most recent Republican efforts to chip away at women’s access to care:

    Arkansas just passed a bill banning abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy, while South Dakota just passed a bill to expand its 72-hour waiting period, which was already one of the longest in the country, in a state with only one abortion clinic. The North Dakota Senate just approved a ban on abortions after six-weeks of pregnancy, the most restrictive in the country. And in Kansas, a state House committee just passed a 70-page bill that defines life at fertilization and requires that physicians lie to their patients.

    That’s not all.

    Republicans in Texas remain hard at work leading national efforts in steamrolling access to women’s health care. Previous budget cuts and funding restrictions have already closed more than 50 clinics and are making it more difficult, if not impossible, for nearly 200,000 women to access care. Last week the Texas Senate Education Committee moved a bill forward that would ban Planned Parenthood and other organizations from providing sexuality education in schools, and the governor recently promised to advance a 20-week abortion ban.

    In Wisconsin, four Planned Parenthood clinics closed as a result of a GOP-led ban that prevents the organization and other clinics from receiving state funds. In Oklahoma, a major Planned Parenthood facility closed after the state’s department of health cut off funding through the WIC program, forcing low-income women to go elsewhere to obtain vouchers for themselves and their children. Last month, Republicans in Michigan introduced a bill that would require women to get a vaginal ultrasound at least two hours before obtaining an abortion.

    Mississippi is about to close its only abortion clinic thanks to a requirement that abortion doctors have admitting privileges at a local hospital (and local hospitals’ refusal to grant those privileges) – a move the Republican governor has applauded as being the first step in ending abortion in that state.  Earlier this year, a Republican (female!) representative in New Mexico proposed legislation that would have allowed for women who terminated pregnancies resulting from rape to be charged with a felony for tampering with evidence. (She promptly rescinded and then proposed a new bill that would instead charge abortion providers with facilitating the destruction of evidence.)

    The new GOP report also suggested that Republicans “talk about people and families, not just numbers and statistics.” In releasing his 2014 budget proposal last week, Paul Ryan certainly provided an interesting perspective into how the GOP proposes taking care of women and families. According to the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), the Ryan budget includes significant reductions for “child care and Head Start, K-12 education and Pell grants, job training, civil rights enforcement, women’s preventive health care, domestic violence prevention and more.” It would dismantle Medicaid, Medicare, and the food stamp program. It would repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), denying nearly 15 million women access to affordable health insurance and Medicaid and forcing women to pay more for prescription drugs, including family planning. As NWLC pointed out, repealing the ACA would “allow insurance companies to continue charging women higher premiums than men, deny coverage to women with so-called pre-existing conditions like domestic violence, and refuse to cover maternity care.”

    The ACA is certainly providing fertile ground for GOP lawmakers to show how much they care about women. Twenty states now restrict abortion coverage in health insurance plans that will be offered through the insurance exchanges, and 18 states restrict abortion coverage in insurance plans for public employees. Nearly all of those states are Republican-led. Additionally, 14 Republican governors have reported they will not participate in the Medicaid expansion programs that are a critical part of the ACA, denying access to a broad range of health services to millions of women.

    On top of all this, 22 Republican Senators and 138 Republican members of the House voted last month against the Violence Against Women Act, a critical piece of legislation that provides assistance to victims of domestic and sexual violence.

    In their report, the GOP strategists recommended developing training programs in messaging, communications, and recruiting that address the best ways to communicate with women. “Our candidates, spokespeople and staff need to use language that addresses concerns that are on women’s minds in order to let them know we are fighting for them,” they state. Given the abovementioned pieces of legislation, the GOP will be hard-pressed to convince women the party is fighting for them. It’s patronizing to think that using different language, new messaging, and female spokespersons will convince women to support a party that is so clearly working against their best interests. Women are smart enough to know that a party that calls itself home to lawmakers relentlessly fighting to chip away at family planning and abortion access, food stamps, affordable health care, education, civil rights, and a social safety net providing tenuous stability to millions of marginalized individuals is not a party committed to truly understanding or addressing their priorities.

    Maybe next year the GOP will attempt a more earnest effort at celebrating Women's History Month. Although, by that time, their state leaders might have alienated half the women in the country, and it will be too late. 

    Andrea Flynn is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. She researches and writes about access to reproductive health care in the United States and globally.

     

    Portrait of woman covering her ears via Shutterstock.com.

    Read more

    Share This

  • Emergency Contraception Use Spreads, but Many Women Are Still Left Out

    Feb 26, 2013Ellen CheslerAndrea Flynn

    New evidence shows more young women are using emergency contraception but we still have work to do to reduce all barriers.

    New evidence shows more young women are using emergency contraception but we still have work to do to reduce all barriers.

    A federal study released recently shows that use of emergency contraception (EC) in the United States, known colloquially as the “morning after” pill, has more than doubled in the past decade. This is good news. It demonstrates the critical and expanding role the method may now be playing in enabling women, particularly young women, to prevent unplanned pregnancies. But there are still serious hurdles women face in accessing this method of birth control. While access has expanded, there is still work to be done.

    The study, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and the National Center for Health Statistics, strengthens the case for promoting EC widely and making it more readily available. Based on interviews with more than 12,000 women from 2006-2010, the research finds that EC use among all sexually experienced women between the ages of 15-44 has increased to 11 percent (up from a baseline of 4.2 percent). That number is even higher among women 20-24, one of the highest risk groups for unplanned pregnancy. Nearly a quarter of this cohort now reports having used EC.

    This is no coincidence. In 2006, nearly a decade after EC first entered the market under the trade name Plan B and after years of stalling and political maneuvering by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency finally ruled that the product can be provided without prescription to women over the age of 18. A year later, a federal judge ordered the FDA to make it available to women over the age of 17. An important provision of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) also now promises to cover the cost of all methods of contraception, including this one.

    The government study confirms what we already know: accidents happen. Half the participants report having used EC out of fear that their initial birth control method had failed; the other half used it because they had unprotected sex. This reminds us that even women who have a “plan A” need a “Plan B,” or, as the product is now also marketed, a “Next Choice.” Nearly one-third of all U.S. women using contraception rely on the pill, and approximately 16 percent use condoms – both effective methods when employed perfectly, but also ones prone to human error. Condoms break, and sometimes women forget to take a daily low-dose pill. And then there are still the many women who, because of lack of access, cost, forgetfulness, or spontaneity, still don’t consistently use birth control and need protection after the fact.

    One of the most common arguments against EC is that it is really just an early abortion method masked as contraception. This simply has no basis in science, as most recently explained by the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics. Unlike medication abortion, which terminates a pregnancy in its earliest stages, EC actually prevents a pregnancy from occurring.

    The next most popular and equally erroneous claim is that increased access to EC – and, for that matter, any program or product that provides access to abortion, contraception, or sexuality education – will promote risky sexual behavior. Studies from diverse countries over many years tell us this is not the case. But new research coming out of New York City now confirms that access to EC right here at home does not encourage young people to become more sexually active. In fact, it does just the opposite. The NYC Department of Health recently reported a 12-point drop over 10 years, from 51 to 39 percent, in the proportion of public high school students who are sexually active. Over the past few years, the proportion of sexually active students using contraception, including Plan B, increased from 17 to nearly 27 percent. Both trends coincided with an expansion of school-based health centers that provide free contraception (including EC), counseling, and sexuality education.

    So now we have homegrown data to show that when young people have access to sexual health information, no or low-cost products and services, they make better and safer decisions about their reproductive and sexual lives.

    But while the federal data illustrates an overall increase in EC use, it also reveals an educational and economic divide among women who use it, suggesting the need for better information and access for low-income women. The CDC study finds that EC use is highest among college-educated women (12 percent), compared to women who have only completed high school or received a GED (7 percent). A 2011 study conducted by researchers at the Boston University School of Public Health also found that while a majority of pharmacies in low-income neighborhoods do have EC available, they often provide incorrect information about eligibility.

    Add this to a number of other potential barriers, and it is clear why EC use isn’t higher.

    The drug is not actually sold over the counter, where it would be most accessible, but rather behind the counter, where a pharmacist must retrieve it. (Still, this makes it more widely available in the 72-hour window after unprotected intercourse when it works most effectively.) Nine states around the country have a “conscience clause” on the books that permits pharmacists to deny filling a prescription on religious or moral grounds. Only 17 states and the District of Columbia explicitly require hospital emergency rooms to provide EC and related services to sexual assault victims.

    The cost of EC is prohibitive for many potential clients. Plan B and Next Choice, the two most popular products on the market, range in price from $35 to $60 at a pharmacy and from $10 to $70 at Planned Parenthood and other public health clinics, which offer an income-based sliding fee scale and often include counseling and other services.

    Even at these high prices, the limited market for the product may not provide private drug companies any incentive to advertise it beyond women’s magazines or other niche marketing sites. This means that young women just becoming sexually active, and all women who do not regularly visit a clinic or a private physician, may never learn about it. Age restrictions requiring a photo ID and concerns about confidentiality may also be intimidating and restrict use.

    There are also a number of potential hurdles to EC provision under the Affordable Care Act. Will women be able to use their private insurance or Medicaid benefits to purchase it at a drug store? Or will they need to visit a Planned Parenthood or community clinic? What about the many states that are not planning to participate in the Medicaid expansion? How will low-income women in those states receive information about and access to EC and, for that matter, regular methods of contraception?

    In recent years, Planned Parenthood has put forward an effective reproductive health information campaign using online and cell phone platforms. Millions of women, and especially young people, are now texting or visiting its website each month to learn about and gain access to EC, along with other important sexual health information.

    The Obama health care plan needs to imitate and vastly expand this marketing approach if it is to be effective. At long last, the Affordable Care Act promises to provide a national policy that prioritizes women’s health and primary, preventive care. But we must seek greater clarity about its implementation. Our next challenge will be to buttress the ACA with an inventive, far-reaching public information campaign so a broad and diverse population can understand and access its many benefits. How about calling this campaign “Morning After in America"? For those Americans old enough to remember Ronald Reagan, this surely has a familiar ring!

    Ellen Chesler is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and author of Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America. Andrea Flynn is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. She researches and writes about access to reproductive health care in the United States. 

     

    Contraception image via Shutterstock.com.

    Read more

    Share This

  • What Did the State of the Union Say to Women?

    Feb 14, 2013Ellen CheslerAndrea Flynn

    The president didn't just lay out specific policies that will benefit women. He also shifted the theory of how government can help them.

    The State of the Union address is inherently a political exercise, intended to chart a course for governing but also to let important constituencies know that they are heard and valued. On Tuesday night, President Obama seemed intent on sounding down-to-earth, sensible, unthreatening, and easy to understand. He presented a long list of concrete proposals as if there couldn’t be any disagreement over their merits.

    The president didn't just lay out specific policies that will benefit women. He also shifted the theory of how government can help them.

    The State of the Union address is inherently a political exercise, intended to chart a course for governing but also to let important constituencies know that they are heard and valued. On Tuesday night, President Obama seemed intent on sounding down-to-earth, sensible, unthreatening, and easy to understand. He presented a long list of concrete proposals as if there couldn’t be any disagreement over their merits.

    For women, a critical voting bloc who helped deliver his second term, the president checked off many important boxes. He spoke about ending violence against women, guaranteeing them equal pay, preventing teen pregnancy, providing working families with more daycare and early child education, and promoting military women in combat roles. He also acknowledged that women around the world are drivers of prosperity and must be empowered if we hope to reduce global poverty and secure emerging democracies.

    Hearing this litany of familiar issues was reassuring, but the overall theme of the speech provided an even more important takeaway. Without much fanfare, the president put forward a reshaped agenda for government programs that are, as he put it, not “bigger” but “smarter.” This is vital for women because it would have the government target policies and marshal resources for women and families, which, in turn, prevent larger and costlier social and economic problems. It’s a welcome departure from forgetting about women and children and waiting around to address the unfortunate consequences after the fact.

    No grand principles were enunciated. But the president craftily put forward a theory of change that emphasizes strategic and comprehensive investments and interventions to establish a floor of well being for at-risk women and families.

    • He called on the House of Representatives to follow the Senate’s lead and reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, not just as a moral imperative but because studies since its passage demonstrate the effectiveness of the social services and criminal justice reforms this pioneering legislation funds. Over two decades, rates of intimate partner violence and homicides have decreased dramatically, as the White House recently reported.
    • He called for expanding mandatory and free early childhood education – currently available to only three in ten American children – not just because it’s the right thing to do for hard-pressed parents, but because the data shows that it also boosts graduation rates, decreases teen pregnancy, and even correlates with palpable reductions in violent crime in communities across the country.
    • He promised to fight to increase the minimum wage and pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. This would close a real gender earnings gap. It would also benefit the nearly two-thirds of all minimum wage workers who are female, many of them single heads of households who can’t possibly lift their families out of poverty without this critical and long overdue intervention. Small businesses have long opposed a raise, despite studies that demonstrate a return to employers through increased productivity.
    • He mentioned the Affordable Care Act only in passing, but it too provides many additional preventive policies, which, as he noted, are already improving services while driving down health care costs overall. For example, the ACA has already brought comprehensive, affordable family planning and reproductive health care to more than 1 million women. By 2016, it could extend those services to as many as 13 million additional uninsured women if the many state challenges to contraceptive coverage and the Medicaid expansion do not undermine its potential reach and impact. And here again, as we have written previously, data demonstrates incontrovertibly that these services will dramatically reduce rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion.
    • While the focus of the president’s speech was primarily domestic, he also mentioned America’s responsibilities in the world and obliquely referenced the signature efforts of his administration to mainstream gender considerations into our diplomatic, defense, and development policies. Under the president and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the United States has joined 30 other countries in adopting a National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security, facilitated by the United Nations, which applies gender considerations and disaggregates spending across all agencies to require focused investment to improve the status of women. The government recognizes that this is not just the right thing to do, but also the smarter course if our aim is to meet the security and development challenges of our foreign policy. This shift in thinking lies behind the decision to promote military women to combat rank, for example, because in conflicts that involve civilian populations, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, women officers on the frontlines have played critical roles in connecting with local populations. And local women empowered by the U.S. presence have in turn become important agents in post-conflict resolution and peace processes and in relief and reconstruction efforts.

    The president’s State of the Union provided a blueprint for a strong, positive government obligation to secure the wellbeing of women and families at home and abroad. Not a lot of detail was offered, nor was there any fancy philosophical framework for what would represent a palpable shift in U.S. priorities and our traditional ways of governing. He spoke as if this was all pretty much just common sense – the better part of wisdom.

    But certainly if Senator Marco Rubio’s response is any indication, the president’s intentions, however masked in straightforward, anodyne rhetoric, face innumerable obstacles to their realization. That should not, however, stop us from applauding and getting behind the potential for meaningful policy change.

    Ellen Chesler and Andrea Flynn are Fellows at the Roosevelt Institute.

    Read more

    Share This

  • Women Are Less Safe in Gayle Trotter’s World

    Feb 4, 2013Andrea Flynn

    The right is borrowing pro-choice language to push back on regulations that could save women's lives.

    The right is borrowing pro-choice language to push back on regulations that could save women's lives.

    Just when we thought the gun lobby’s approach to ending gun violence couldn’t get any more ridiculous, last week we were introduced to Gayle Trotter. A fellow at the conservative Independent Women's Forum, Trotter unveiled to the Senate Judiciary Committee the latest canard that curbing access to guns would create an "undue burden" for women who would "choose" to defend themselves from violence. Her assertions are illogical at best and downright dangerous at worst. Two aspects of her testimony are particularly troubling: the appropriation and misapplication of pro-choice language to describe the need for unfettered access to weapons and the notion that guns make the world a safer place for women.

    It’s puzzling that Trotter decided to use the loaded language of choice and undue burden to argue that women must have access to assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. The concept of undue burden has done more to roll back access to abortion than perhaps any other legislation. It’s derived from the Supreme Court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which gave states the right to restrict abortion as long as their laws didn’t create an “undue burden” for women. Over the past two decades, we have watched as states across the country have determined that there are actually very few burdens that are undue: 72-hour waiting periods; mandated parental or court consent; involuntary, and sometimes invasive, ultrasounds; lectures based on factual inaccuracies and disproven pseudoscience; and travelling hundreds of miles from home to access care.

    In many parts of the country it is far easier to obtain a gun than it is an abortion. In 35 states women are required to receive counseling before an abortion is performed and 26 of them require women to wait at least 24 hours before obtaining the procedure, meaning at least two separate trips to the clinic. Only 12 states require some type of waiting period between the purchase and acquisition of a gun, and in some cases those laws only apply to federally licensed dealers. How’s that for a pro-life agenda?

    Before she wielded such historically charged language, Trotter should have made sure it would actually help make her case. Is she suggesting the courts apply the same extremely low undue burden standard to guns that they have applied to reproductive health care? By that logic, mandatory background checks and restrictions on high capacity magazines and battlefield-appropriate automatic weapons should hardly be contentious.

    But as a woman and a sensible human, what I find even more troubling – and outright erroneous – is the claim that a society with more guns is a society safer for women. A growing chorus of gun advocates have dusted off outdated gender stereotypes of women as vulnerable and defenseless, exploiting them to make the case for fewer restrictions on guns. Arguing that without guns women will be less safe perpetuates the notion that violence against women at the hands of men is an inevitable reality of our culture. It suggests that attempting to stem violence at its root is futile and the only solution is to go “all in” on guns—arm everyone. I am offended and frightened by the notion that what is needed to keep women and children safe is an increased presence of the very weapons responsible for so many deaths of women and children every year.

    This claim falls along the dangerous spectrum of (il)logic that says we simply should dress more modestly, drink less, stay at home after dark, and arm ourselves with mace and self-defense skills to avoid being the victims of violence. But if those things don’t work, we should just tuck an automatic weapon in our purse or under our pillow for when we inevitably will have to fend off a band of heavily armed attackers.

    How is this the answer to our epidemic of violence against women? Shouldn’t we be demanding changes to a culture that normalizes violence, instead of trying to convince people that we’d be safer if more of us were armed with deadly weapons?

    In her testimony, Trotter referenced women who used guns to defend themselves against violent intruders—guns that would not be banned under the proposed legislation. Trotter’s anecdotes can be compelling. But you know what else is compelling? Evidence! Research! Logic!

    In an editorial over the weekend, the New York Times called into question Trotter’s suggestion that bands of armed home intruders are a common problem facing women and provided a wealth of statistics to illustrate that the presence of guns greatly increases the risk of lethal violence against women. Mayor Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns campaign will soon release statistics that illustrate how much less safe guns make women. Trotter conveniently ignored the research that shows that in states that that require a background check for every handgun sale, 38 percent fewer women are shot to death by intimate partners. She failed to mention that in the United States, women are 11 times more likely to be murdered than women in other high-income countries with sensible gun restrictions. She didn’t tell us that the presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of homicide for women by 500 percent.

    As Bloomberg’s campaign points out, Trotter attached a list of 21 self-defense incidents that occurred over the course of two years and four months to her written testimony. In that same period, 1,900 women were murdered with guns by current or former intimate partners. The women Trotter speaks of are outliers in a society where women are far more likely to be injured or killed by someone they know. More guns won't fix this. The proposed gun legislation alone won't rid us of our culture of violence, but it is a critical step in the right direction. And for that matter, so is passing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), a legal commitment to protecting women from assault, adequately punishing those who harm them, and demanding an end to a culture where women are the all too frequent victims of violence. Trotter puzzlingly opposes this legislation.

    Fight firearms with firearms? Makes sense if you want to sell more guns, but not if you want to protect women.

    Andrea Flynn is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

     

    Woman with gun image via Shutterstock.com.

    Read more

    Share This

Pages