Ellen Chesler

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow
Roosevelt Institute Profile

Recent Posts by Ellen Chesler

  • A New Year's Resolution to Make Women Full Partners in Peace and Security

    Dec 23, 2011Ellen Chesler

    A new National Action Plan aims to fully integrate women in diplomacy and defense, but holding on to the progress they've already made may be a greater challenge.

    A new National Action Plan aims to fully integrate women in diplomacy and defense, but holding on to the progress they've already made may be a greater challenge.

    The abuse of women protesters in the streets of Cairo earlier this week shocked many onlookers and met with sharp rebuke from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. "The systematic degradation of Egyptian women dishonors the revolution, disgraces the state and its uniform, and is not worthy of a great people," she said in a speech at Georgetown University on Monday. "As some Egyptian politicians and commentators have themselves noted, a new democracy cannot be built on the persecution of women, nor can any stable society."

    Quite ironically, the headlines from Cairo coincided with Clinton's release Monday of a U.S. National Action Plan (NAP) on Women, Peace, and Security. The detailed plan is meant to integrate women as full and equal partners by applying gender considerations as a tool of analysis across all U.S. diplomatic, defense, and development policies. The NAP brings the U.S. into compliance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 and four subsequent UN resolutions adopted since 2000 as a global framework for more effective conflict resolution and sustainable peace-building. It also institutionalizes priorities long promoted by Clinton personally, even before she became Secretary of State.

    Clinton traveled to the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, and it was there that she delivered the landmark speech of her years as First Lady. In no uncertain terms she staked a claim for the fundamental principle of the global women's movement -- that women's rights are human rights and human rights are the right of every woman. Drawing a direct corollary between societies that oppress women and states that fail on a larger scale, she also memorably repositioned women's rights not just as a moral imperative, but as a necessary condition of success in U.S. foreign policy -- not just the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do if our aim is to meet the world's most critical security and development challenges.

    In the years since, Clinton's increasing prominence as a diplomat in her own right has provided her a powerful platform for these core beliefs. As a consequence, large numbers of individuals around the world, including many elected officials and professionals in diplomacy, development, and defense who simply never thought this way before, have come to agree that investing in women and working to secure their rights are among the most effective tools we have to consolidate democratic transitions in fragile states, to maintain regional peace and security, to spur economic growth and reduce poverty, to improve public health and well-being, and to address dire challenges the world faces to sustaining our fragile natural environment.

    The NAP represents a quantum expansion of this effort because it moves beyond diplomacy and aid to incorporate U.S. defense policy and personnel, whose scale and reach is so much greater. Under-Secretary of Defense Michele Flournoy and Admiral Sandy Winnefeld were in the audience when Clinton spoke on Monday, and U.S. military strategies in Afghanistan, including the Marine Corps's Female Engagement Teams and the Army's Cultural Support Teams, which both send women soldiers to support ongoing combat operations by engaging women in local populations, were cited as examples of the virtues and success of enhanced gender integration and awareness.

    Clinton seized the occasion of the release of the NAP to call for a redoubling of efforts in several critical areas:

    First, to invest in conflict prevention strategies including early warning systems that monitor increases in violence against women as an indicator of instability and future widening conflict, while also putting women and girls at the center of U.S. efforts to secure countries through programs in food security, public health, and economic entrepreneurship.

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    Second, to strengthen protection for women and girls in conflict situations, with greater focus on greater legal accountability for rape and sexual violence and on enhanced training of foreign militaries, police, and justice systems to support women victims of violence and find them safe shelter -- much as has occurred as a result of federal funds made available to American cities to reduce high incidences of crime over the past four decades.

    Third, to mandate participation of women in conflict resolution and peace processes, as has been successful in some small countries in recent years, including most prominently Liberia, Darfur, and Kosovo.

    Fourth, to support many more women-led civil society organizations in post-conflict relief and reconstruction efforts, especially in refugee situations where they are most vulnerable.

    Translating good intentions into effective operational plans is in itself an accomplishment worthy of note and celebration, especially in this holiday season. So let us all give three cheers for the leadership of Secretary Clinton and so many others who have worked hard on these efforts in the Obama administration. But as with so many worthy resolutions made at the coming of a new year, those announced this week face innumerable obstacles to their realization.

    First, of course, is the sad reality that universal standards for women's human rights offer no sure cure for violations that persist with uncanny fortitude and often unimaginable cruelty, as the situation in Egypt reminds us. With harsh fundamentalisms resurgent in many countries, women and girls will remain vulnerable despite improved U.S. intentions and indeed, in part, perhaps because of them. Their rights will remain an arena of intense political conflict as a response to the social dislocations that inevitably result in the short term from opening greater opportunity to women and from the larger assaults on traditional cultures of many real injustices of modernization and globalization.

    Even in the U.S. decades of substantial progress by women have fueled a fierce backlash, so much so that America continues to reside in the unlikely company of Iran, Sudan, and Somalia as the only UN member states that have failed to ratify the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, commonly known as CEDAW. President Jimmy Carter signed the treaty shortly before leaving office in 1979 and sent it to the Senate for ratification, where it has remained in limbo ever since, held hostage by three obstacles: the high bar of 67 votes needed for U.S. ratification of international treaties; the hostility of U.S. conservatives to multilateralism in general; and, of course, their historic contempt for women's rights agreements of any stripe. Failure to be party to this visionary accord compromises the sincerity of America's global efforts on women's rights, if not necessarily the effectiveness of some of the specific bi-lateral agreements and policies the Obama/Clinton team has put in place.

    No matter how noble the intentions of Secretary Clinton and President Obama in the larger arena of women's rights and foreign policy, the prospect for lasting impact thus remains tethered to political realities. In the likelihood that the U.S. Congress remains locked in partisan combat, resources to expand innovation in diplomacy, development, and even in defense policy simply will not exist. And making better use of what we have, of course, will require that whoever replaces Hillary Clinton, who has announced she will not return for a second term, is a foreign policy leader of comparable intellect, energy, and commitment to women's rights.

    And that, sad to say, is an awful lot to hope for, even as we head into these days of good cheer.

    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.

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  • Message from Mississippi Personhood Defeat: Americans Don’t Want to Criminalize Women’s Personal Choices

    Nov 9, 2011Ellen Chesler

    Due to grassroots organizing and education, the amendment went down to decisive defeat. Politicians take heed.

    Due to grassroots organizing and education, the amendment went down to decisive defeat. Politicians take heed.

    Yesterday's solid defeat of the Mississippi Personhood amendment is a victory against extremism and for women's health and rights, but it is also a big win for progressive political organizing. Voters in the state that Gallup ranks as the most conservative in the nation soundly rejected the move to grant legal status to embryos from the moment of fertilization. The law would have banned abortion without exceptions and directly challenged Roe v. Wade, but it also threatened some forms of birth control and emergency contraception that may result in the loss of embryos, as well as infertility treatments that make use of them.

    What's most interesting about this win is that just ten days ago polls projected exactly the opposite outcome. That was before the Mississippians for Healthy Families Coalition, a local campaign supported strategically and financially by the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and the ACLU, hit the ground. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the PPFA board.) According to Planned Parenthood, the campaign raised $1.5 million dollars, opened four offices across the state, deployed 50 full-time staff, and recruited nearly 1,000 volunteers, most of them in a classic get out the vote operation that made more than 400,000 phone calls and knocked on some 20,000 doors. This tireless effort closed a 31-point gap in just 10 days of active campaigning, possibly establishing a record for voter turnaround in this country.

    When it was all over, even outgoing Republican Governor Haley Barbour, a reliable conservative, expressed misgivings about the amendment as government gone too far. (Though in what is now becoming classic behavior for GOP officials and candidates confused about how much they must pander to the party's rightwing, he then reversed himself and said he would vote for it.) The state's voters, and especially its women, were smarter. Once they understood that the law would have threatened birth control and mandated government intervention in decisions that ought to be personal, including the right to end a potentially life-threatening pregnancy, wise citizens of all political stripes simply voted against it.

    The Mississippi victory ought to be viewed as an omen for next year's presidential and congressional campaigns. For years it has been perfectly clear that a sizable majority of Americans don't want to criminalize abortion or compromise access to contraception and sensible sex education. But unlike the determined minority of anti-choice and puritanical extremists on the other side, these folks have never privileged social concerns in the voting booth. Perhaps understandably, what's mattered more to them are economic issues or considerations of national security, and they have moved back and forth between Democrats and Republicans depending on which party's leadership inspired the most comfort in these zones.

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    At a briefing in Washington last week I was privy to early polling by the Obama campaign, which has uncovered an important shift, especially among voters between the ages of 30 and 49, who supported the president in the last election but are now abandoning him out of frustration over failed promises and disappointing economic policies. While they also express little confidence in Republican alternatives on these matters, they are deeply concerned by the party's apparent capitulation to its base of right-wing social extremists. The decision by Congressional Republicans early this year to defund Planned Parenthood is wildly unpopular and apparently registered an astonishing 85 percent disapproval, giving Obama a big opening to win back this group.

    Planned Parenthood has shared its own polling with supporters, which demonstrates a solid 65 percent overall approval rating for the organization across the country. And these numbers simply leap off the charts when sorted by age, race, or gender. Support from women, minorities, and young people registers over 80 percent. This is not surprising, since they are the principal beneficiaries of the organization's services in 800 health centers in all 50 states and online, where some 2 million users now visit the PPFA website each month. One of every five women in America has or will use its services at some point in her lifetime. And beyond the healthcare it provides, the organization's Political Action Committee is demonstrating its effectiveness. (Which, of course, only makes anti-choice Republicans even crazier.)

    No surprise then that the Obama administration and Democrats in general have suddenly found religion on matters of women's health. With his now famous "nope, zero" response, the president simply shut down John Boehner's effort to sacrifice public funds for family planning as part of the deal to reduce the federal deficit and prevent a government shutdown last spring. All of the Republican presidential hopefuls this year, however, have since taken the money back out of their proposed budgets in order to curry favor with conservatives who care about these issues and vote on them in Republican primaries. And all of them supported the Mississippi Personhood amendment. When it comes time for a general election, whoever wins the primary will have a lot of explaining to do.

    Dare I say that on this particular "morning after" our erstwhile Republicans, ironically enough, may finally be seeing the value of a "Plan B" that can make the consequences of impulsive, unwise behavior simply disappear?

    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.

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  • A Woman with a Plan: The Real Story of Margaret Sanger

    Nov 2, 2011Ellen Chesler

    Her opponents have smeared her as a racist and classist, but she devoted her life to fighting for equal access to reproductive choice.

    Her opponents have smeared her as a racist and classist, but she devoted her life to fighting for equal access to reproductive choice.

    Birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger is back in the news this week thanks to GOP presidential candidate and abortion rights opponent Herman Cain, who claimed on national television that Planned Parenthood, the visionary global movement she founded nearly a century ago, is really about one thing only: "preventing black babies from being born." Cain's outrageous and false accusation is actually an all too familiar canard -- a willful repetition of scurrilous claims that have circulated for years despite detailed refutation by scholars who have examined the evidence and unveiled the distortions and misrepresentations on which they are based (for a recent example, see this rebuttal from The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler).

    It's an old tactic. Even in her own day, Sanger endured deliberate character assassination by opponents who believed they would gain more traction by impugning her character and her motives than by debating the merits of her ideas. But when a presidential candidate from a major U.S. political party is saying such things, a thoughtful response is necessary.

    So what is Sanger's story?

    Born Margaret Louisa Higgins in 1879, the middle child of a large Irish Catholic family, Sanger grew into a follower of labor organizers, free thinkers, and bohemians. Married to William Sanger, an itinerant architect and painter, she helped support three young children by working as a visiting nurse on New York's Lower East Side. Following the death of a patient from a then all-too-common illegal abortion, she vowed to abandon palliative work and instead overturn obscenity laws that prevented legal access to safe contraception.

    Sanger's fundamental heresy was in claiming every woman's right to experience her sexuality freely and bear only the number of children she desires. Following a first generation of educated women who had proudly forgone marriage in order to seek fulfillment outside the home, she offered birth control as a necessary condition to the resolution of a broad range of personal and professional frustrations.

    The hardest challenge in introducing Sanger to modern audiences, who take this idea for granted, is to explain how absolutely destabilizing it seemed in her own time. As a result of largely private arrangements and a healthy trade in condoms, douches, and various contraptions sold under the subterfuge of feminine hygiene, birth rates had already begun to decline. But contraception remained a clandestine and delicate subject, legally banned under obscenity statutes, and women were still largely denied identities or rights independent of their relationships with men, including the right to vote.

    By inventing the term "birth control," Sanger brought the practice -- and by implication, women's entitlement to sexual pleasure -- out into the open and gave them essential currency. She went to jail in 1917 for opening a clinic to distribute primitive diaphragms to immigrant women in Brooklyn, New York, and appeal of her conviction led to a medical exception that licensed doctors to prescribe contraception for reasons of health. Under these constraints she built a network of independent local women's health centers that eventually came together under the banner of Planned Parenthood. She also lobbied for the repeal of federal obscenity statutes that prevented the legal transport of contraception by physicians across state lines, which were struck down in federal court in 1936.

    Sanger sought and won scientific validation for various contraceptive methods, including the birth control pill, whose development she supported and found the money to fund. In so doing, she helped lift the religious shroud that had long encased reproduction and secured the endorsement of contraception by physicians and social scientists. From this singular accomplishment, which some still consider heretical, a continuing controversy has ensued.

    Sanger always remained a wildly polarizing figure, which clarifies the logic of her decision after World War I to jettison "birth control" and adopt the more socially resonant term "family planning." This move was particularly inventive but in no way cynical, especially when the Great Depression brought attention to collective needs and the New Deal created a blueprint for bold public endeavors.

    Some have falsely charged that Sanger defined family planning as a right of the privileged but a duty or obligation of the poor. To the contrary, she showed considerable foresight in lobbying to include universal voluntary family planning programs among public investments in social security. Had the New Deal incorporated basic public health and access to contraception, as most European countries were then doing, protracted conflicts over welfare and health care policy in the U.S. might well have been avoided.

    Having long enjoyed the friendship and support of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Sanger also had ample reason to believe the New Dealers would fully legalize and endorse contraception as a necessary first step to her long-term goal of transferring responsibility and accountability for voluntary clinics to the public health sector. What she failed to anticipate was the force of opposition family planning continued to generate from a coalition of religious conservatives, including urban Catholics and rural fundamentalist Protestants, that held Roosevelt Democrats captive much as today's evangelicals have captured the GOP.

    The U.S. government would not overcome cultural and religious objections to public support of family planning through its domestic anti-poverty and international development programs until the late 1960s, after the Supreme Court protected contraceptive use under the privacy doctrine created in Griswold v. Connecticut. At this time, Planned Parenthood clinics became major government contractors, since there were few alternative primary health care centers serving the poor. Today, one in four American women funds her contraception through government programs, many of them still run by Planned Parenthood -- a number likely to rise under the Affordable Care Act.

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    Sanger's eagerness to mainstream her movement explains her engagement with eugenics, a then widely popular intellectual movement that addressed the manner in which human intelligence and opportunity is determined by biological as well as environmental factors. Hard as it is to believe, eugenics was considered far more respectable than birth control. Like many well-intentioned reformers of this era, Sanger took away from Charles Darwin the essentially optimistic lesson that humanity's evolution within the animal kingdom makes us all capable of improvement if only we apply the right tools. University presidents, physicians, scientists, and public officials all embraced eugenics, in part because it held the promise that merit would replace fate -- or birthright and social status -- as the standard for mobility in a democratic society.

    But eugenics also has some damning and today unfathomable legacies, such as a series of state laws upheld in 1927 by an eight-to-one progressive majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, including Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis. Their landmark decision in Buck v. Bell authorized the compulsory sterilization of a poor young white woman with an illegitimate child on grounds of feeble mindedness that were never clearly established. This decision, incidentally, was endorsed by civil libertarians such as Roger Baldwin of the ACLU and W.E.B. Dubois of the NAACP, both of whom Sanger counted among her supporters and friends.

    For Sanger, eugenics was meant to begin with the voluntary use of birth control, which many still opposed on the grounds that the middle class should be encouraged to have more babies. She countered by disdaining what she called a "cradle competition" of class, race, or ethnicity. She publicly opposed immigration restrictions and framed poverty as a matter of differential access to resources like birth control, not as the immutable consequence of low inherent ability or character.

    As a nurse, Sanger also understood the adverse impacts of poor nutrition, drugs, and alcohol on fetal development and encouraged government support of maternal and infant health. She argued for broad social safety nets and proudly marshaled clinical data to demonstrate that most women, even among the poorest and least educated populations, eagerly embraced and used birth control successfully when it is was provided.

    At the same time, Sanger did on many occasions engage in shrill rhetoric about the growing burden of large families of low intelligence and defective heredity -- language with no intended racial or ethnic content. She always argued that all women are better off with fewer children, but unfortunate language about "creating a race of thoroughbreds" and other such phrases have in recent years been lifted out of context and used to sully her reputation. Moreover, in endorsing Buck v. Bell and on several occasions the payment of pensions or bonuses to poor women who agreed to limit their childbearing (many of whom enjoyed no other health care coverage), Sanger quite clearly failed to consider fundamental human rights questions raised by such practices. Living in an era indifferent to the obligation to respect and protect individuals whose behaviors do not always conform to prevailing mores, she did not always fulfill it.

    The challenge as Sanger's biographer has been to reconcile apparent contradictions in her beliefs. She actually held unusually advanced views on race relations for her day and on many occasions condemned discrimination and encouraged reconciliation between blacks and whites. Though most birth control facilities conformed to the segregation mores of the day, she opened an integrated clinic in Harlem in the early 1930s. Later, she facilitated birth control and maternal health programs for rural black women in the south, when local white health officials there denied them access to any New Deal-funded services.

    Sanger worked on this last project with the behind-the-scenes support of Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the National Council for Negro Women and then a Roosevelt administration official. Their progressive views on race were well known, if controversial, but their support for birth control was silenced by Franklin's political handlers -- at least until he was safely ensconced in the White House for a third term, when the government rushed to provide condoms to World War II soldiers.

    Sanger's so-called Negro Project has been a source of controversy first raised by black nationalists and some feminist scholars in the 1970s and later by anti-abortion foes. Respecting the importance of self-determination among users of contraception, she recruited prominent black leaders to endorse the goal, especially ministers who held sway over the faithful. In that context, she wrote an unfortunate sentence in a private letter about needing to clarify the ideals and goals of the birth control movement because "we do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population."  The sentence may have been thoughtlessly composed, but it is perfectly clear that she was not endorsing genocide.

    America's intensely complicated politics of race and gender has long ensnarled Sanger and all others who have sought to discipline reproduction. As many scholars of the subject in recent years have observed, much of the controversy proceeds from the plain fact that reproduction is by its very nature experienced individually and socially at the same time. In claiming women's fundamental right to control their own bodies, Sanger remained mindful of the dense fabric of cultural, political, and economic relationships in which those rights are exercised.

    In most instances the policies Sanger advocated were intended to observe the necessary obligation of social policy to balance individual rights of self-expression with the sometimes contrary desire to promulgate and enforce common mores and laws. She may have failed to get the balance quite right, but there is nothing in the record to poison her reputation or discredit her noble cause. Quite the contrary.

    The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. may have put it best in 1966, when he accepted Planned Parenthood's prestigious Margaret Sanger Award and spoke eloquently of the "kinship" between the civil rights and family planning movements. Here is what he said, since it bears repeating:

    There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist -- a nonviolent resister... She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions. Margaret Sanger had to commit what was then called a crime in order to enrich humanity, and today we honor her courage and vision; for without them there would have been no beginning.

    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.

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  • From Eleanor Roosevelt to Michelle Obama, How First Ladies Can be Assets to the Presidency

    Sep 22, 2011Bryce CovertEllen Chesler

    ellen-chesler-150On Sunday, September 25, the FDR Presidential Library and Museum and the Roosevelt Institute will present "FDR's INNER CIRCLE: DOMESTIC POLICY," a program that will examine the historical impact that FD

    ellen-chesler-150On Sunday, September 25, the FDR Presidential Library and Museum and the Roosevelt Institute will present "FDR's INNER CIRCLE: DOMESTIC POLICY," a program that will examine the historical impact that FDR's circle of close advisers had on the president and the New Deal. Panelists, who will include Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Ellen Chesler, will also discuss to what extent modern presidents can and do rely on close confidants in an era of expanded government and more complex society. Online participants are invited to view the event and join the conversation here. I got the chance to sit down with Ellen ahead of her remarks and talk about one of FDR's closest advisers, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the changing role of the modern-day first lady.

    Bryce Covert: How did Eleanor Roosevelt develop into the strong force in Franklin's presidency that she eventually became?

    Ellen Chesler: Eleanor Roosevelt came of age in a laissez-faire era when responsibility for addressing poverty was at best accepted as the obligation of privileged elites. Churches were at first the preferred venue for this charity or "noblesse oblige," but then came an assortment of voluntary institutions, including the settlement houses on New York's Lower East Side, where Eleanor went to work. It was there that she opened her eyes to the harsh realities of poverty in this country and to the vast disparities of wealth and opportunity as a result of the circumstances of one's birth: social class, race, ethnicity, and, of course, gender.

    Orphaned and terribly sad as a young girl, Eleanor was predisposed to sympathy for the suffering of others. Later, as a young wife, she found herself burdened with the demands of five young children and bored with the conventional preoccupations of women of her social class. Reaching out to help others less fortunate in their personal circumstances became her special calling. It also served her husband's career.

    But then, as is well known, their life together unraveled with Eleanor's discovery of the love affair between Franklin and her young social secretary, Lucy Mercer. The marriage survived, but only as a union of two people committed to advancing Franklin's political aspirations. That bond strengthened as a result of his paralysis after he contracted polio at the age of 39. Through the 1920s, as he struggled to regain his strength, Eleanor kept herself up-to-date on matters of public policy and also gained sophistication in the machinations of electoral politics. By the time they came to Washington in 1933, she had earned herself a secure place among his inner circle of advisers, many of whom came with them from New York.

    During Franklin's 12 years as president, Eleanor traveled endlessly, serving as a witness for a president who only occasionally left the White House. His disability undoubtedly made him a far more compassionate man in his own right, with a rare sympathy for human suffering. But whatever his own predilections, Eleanor was always hectoring him to do more and to fight harder for basic social justice. She was famous for leaving notes on his morning breakfast tray about something or other that was troubling her and needed his attention. She was often berated by his staff and by their own children for never giving him a moment of peace.

    Together, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt helped transform the basic discourse of politics in this country. Out of the turmoil that enveloped capitalism and democracy during the Great Depression and World War II, they created a new paradigm of an activist state whose fundamental obligation is not only to protect the basic civil and political rights of its citizens, but also to provide for minimum standards of social security and economic wellbeing.

    In what I think was the last article she published before her death in 1963, Eleanor used the example of Sarah Delano Roosevelt to invoke a world that had been transformed by Franklin's innovative leadership. She wrote that even his own mother, a woman of solid Christian values, could never fully accept the radical principle that had defined her son's presidency -- his belief that citizens in a democratic society are worthy not just of private charity or public assistance, but have fundamental rights as human beings. They are entitled to speak and worship and assemble freely, as the U.S. constitution requires, but also, as she put it, they are entitled to "the right to a job, the right to education, the right to health protection, the right to human dignity, and the right to a chance of fulfillment." As a living legacy to her husband, Eleanor embodied these principles in the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, forged under her genial leadership as chair of the Human Rights Commission in 1948.

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    BC: How does Eleanor's role in her husband's presidency compare to presidencies in the modern era?

    EC: They are really not comparable. The White House today is so much bigger and more professionalized. Presidents have phalanxes of advisers beyond their formal cabinets and departments. This professionalization has actually complicated the role of the first lady, making it more difficult for her to serve openly as an informal adviser.

    Perhaps ironically, the many challenges to traditional patriarchal households and the many educational and employment opportunities now available to women in their own right also hobble the lives of first ladies who are, after all, volunteering their services. Remember that Eleanor had no formal education beyond boarding school and had never held a job beyond some teaching at a Manhattan private school. Options for women, and particularly for married women, were sufficiently limited that no matter what she did or how controversial many of her views became, most Americans still saw her as Franklin's agent -- perhaps a bit outspoken at times, but still carrying out his objectives, not the other way around.

    She also got special dispensation because of his polio. It's hard to imagine a president today essentially confined to the White House or to campaigning from the back of a train. Can you contemplate a first lady today with her own daily newspaper column (or blog), communicating to the public directly without a filter of any kind? Or try to imagine a situation where a president running for reelection would send his wife to the convention to put his name in nomination, while he stayed in Washington, mixing martinis before dinner, accompanied by his secretary and assorted friends?

    Hillary Clinton had a tougher time in part because she entered the White House as an accomplished professional with a distinguished career in her own right. The balance of power between men and women, and the traditional economic and social arrangements of households, was also shifting for all Americans right under her feet.

    The Clinton White House became a mirror in which everyone seemed to see their own reflection and onto which they projected their own (perhaps unacknowledged) anxieties. I remember polling my own friends to discover with no surprise that women who did not work and their husbands all tended to dislike Hillary. But I also often found that the ones whose wives were out-earning or out-performing them were just as uncomfortable with her. Eleanor did not face that hurdle. And of course once Hillary held a job in her own right, as senator or as Secretary of State, she became immensely popular across the board, even among conservatives.

    BC: What other comparisons can we make between Eleanor and Hillary as first ladies?

    EC: Hillary Clinton strongly shares Eleanor Roosevelt's conviction that the state has an obligation to advance the social and economic wellbeing of its citizens. I would credit her for urging her husband as the first act of his presidency in 1993 to sign the Family and Medical Leave Act. It was a landmark piece of legislation because it recognized the profound changes in family structure that have occurred as a result of the revolution in women's work and formal employment. It was an important breakthrough in American thinking about the appropriate role of government in helping men and women balance obligations to work and family.

    Like Eleanor, Hillary also spent the better part of her years as first lady on the road, meeting as often with the powerless as with the powerful. She had boundless enthusiasm for that. She also had an understanding that the modern welfare safety net created by the New Deal was not fulfilling the vision of the Roosevelts for a temporary government subsidy that would help build personal capacity and self-reliance.

    Others may disagree, but I would argue that Hillary Clinton, as first lady and later as a senator, helped ameliorate some of the shortcomings of the compromised 1996 legislation to reform welfare by providing a better integrated program that combines economic subsidies with social supports. She also was a player in helping to win increases in the minimum wage, rewarding work through the expansion of the earned-income tax credit, widening opportunities for education and job training, widening access to Head Start and daycare, and protecting reproductive choice. Incremental changes in healthcare provisions, which she also championed, resulted in a substantial broadening of the population of working families eligible for insurance. Among these was S-CHIP, the State Children's Health Insurance Program, which covers young people through the age of 18 and was an important model for further expansion of health insurance under the Obama administration.

    BC: How does the relationship between Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt compare to Obama's presidency?

    EC: I heard Michelle Obama deliver a powerful speech in New York on Tuesday -- an impassioned call to action for Democratic women that drew a very vivid comparison between her husband and his conservative opponents. Her defense of her husband was elegant and powerful and was distinguished as much by its passion as by its content. As so many pundits have observed, Michelle Obama, a forceful advocate for her husband during the campaign, has been something of a prisoner in the White House, her attention focused only on matters that could not possibly provoke controversy, such as elementary education, child obesity, military families, and of course, fashion. I know all the arguments about why this was necessary and how threatening a tall, strong, brilliant, and beautiful African-American woman would be to many Americans, especially if she seemed "uppity." I realize that she was encouraged to appear devoted to her daughters and family and essentially to take an "un-Eleanor, un-Hillary" approach to her position. But after hearing her speak this week, I think this has been a mistake and would send her out on the road 24/7! It's still not too late, and she may yet turn out to be one of her husband's best assets.

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  • Ellen Chesler on Wal-Mart v. Dukes: "The Simple Answer is an Equal Rights Amendment"

    Jun 24, 2011Bryce CovertEllen Chesler

    ellen-chesler-150In the wake of this week's Wal-Mart ruling on the sex discrimination class action suit, Bryce Covert spoke to Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Ellen Chesler.

    ellen-chesler-150In the wake of this week's Wal-Mart ruling on the sex discrimination class action suit, Bryce Covert spoke to Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Ellen Chesler. Chesler calls for constitutional protection of women's rights, explains why women's success is linked to economic growth, and remembers Eleanor Roosevelt's tireless work to bring human rights to all.

    Bryce Covert: Why is this ruling considered by many to be so dangerous?

    Ellen Chesler: Women and minorities who think they are underpaid will now find it nearly impossible to band together to sue their employers and claim punitive monetary damages. Class actions have been a significant vehicle to establish discrimination in employment and seek redress during the half-century since the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. But with this ruling, the Supreme Court is now saying that employees can sue collectively only if there is proof of an explicit company policy to discriminate. It's no longer enough to demonstrate a clear statistical pattern of women earning less and winning fewer promotions. This is outrageous. What company announces up front that it discriminates?

    The court, of course, did leave the door open to individuals who can still try and vindicate their rights one by one. But without the economies of class actions, protection against discrimination is beyond the reach of most workers, who don't have the resources to sue one person at a time. Management is effectively left with little liability. It can do whatever it wants.

    Moreover, the same five justices who prevailed in this decision ruled against Lilly Ledbetter several years ago when she brought an individual action claiming she had been paid less than men doing her same job over many years. That decision rested on a technicality -- that Ledbetter had not taken action within the time limits required for lawsuits under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. With Democrats controlling both houses of Congress in 2009, women's rights advocates then passed the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which simply extends the timeframe. President Obama signed the law as his first official act. But we don't have a comparable political situation now, which makes the Wal-Mart ruling even scarier.

    Legislative remediation in this situation could be achieved through the Paycheck Fairness Act, which was passed by the House of Representatives in 2009 when Democrats were in control, but was then blocked by Republicans in the Senate. That measure puts more teeth into claims of pay discrimination from women by authorizing their right to demonstrate unfair practices through exactly the kinds of aggregate data that the majority has challenged in this ruling. But with Republicans now controlling the House there is no chance for this bill.

    BC: What elements are missing in American law that would better ensure women's rights?

    EC: The simple answer is an Equal Rights Amendment to our constitution. Ironically, we are the only major democratic country in the world that does not offer women a constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law.

    Let's remember that the rights of women in the United States have essentially been cobbled together case by case, with no more than the due process clause of the 14th Amendment as an underlying constitutional principle. Even with respect to employment discrimination, women were an afterthought -- actually a kind of joke. We were added into the 1964 Civil Rights Act by a racist Southern member of Congress who thought he could kill the whole thing by specifically including women as a minority class. Ingenious young women lawyers then seized on that provision, among others, and built a vibrant body of jurisprudence to establish equal protection as a foundation for women's rights.

    But sadly enough, it's a whole lot easier to unravel a body of law, no matter how clever it may be, when there are no deep constitutional principles framing it beyond due process. And one of the great ironies of history is that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was foremost among the pioneers of the women's rights revolution of the 1970s, is now being made to witness the evisceration of her work by her own colleagues on the court.

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    Justice Ginsburg, of course, wrote the minority opinion in the Wal-Mart case, citing evidence that gender bias suffuses the company's culture -- that women make up more than 70% of the wage earners but only 33% of the management who have a free hand to make decisions about pay and promotions. She was joined in that opinion by the two other women on the court, Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, and by Stephen Breyer.

    I also want to remind readers that international human rights conventions growing out of the landmark work of Eleanor Roosevelt also provide a binding legal framework to prevent sex discrimination. The landmark Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, commonly known as CEDAW, is quite a visionary document in terms of the obligations it places on countries to protect the civil, political, social, and economic rights of women. But another great irony of history is that the United States is not a party to this treaty. We're one of only four countries in the world that has never ratified it, which places us in the unlikely company of Iran, Sudan, and Yemen. CEDAW was passed by the United Nations in 1979 and signed by Jimmy Carter before he left office. But for years its been held up in the Senate by conservatives opposed to human rights and multilateral engagement as a general matter and to women's rights agreements of just about any stripe. The US Constitution requires a super-majority of 67 Senators to ratify a treaty, and that's been hard to achieve on just about any matter in recent years.

    This also reminds me that the Paycheck Fairness Act, which closes some of the loopholes in the Equal Pay Act of 1963, is also part of Eleanor's legacy. The Equal Pay Act was the central piece of legislation recommended by the Kennedy Commission on the Status of Women, which Eleanor chaired until her death in 1962. Eleanor had for many years supported protective labor legislation for women, which took into account their primary obligations as mothers. But through the Kennedy Commission, she came to understand that this approach had created silos for women and closed off opportunity. This change in her thinking was also influenced by her work on global women's rights. It's an important piece of Roosevelt history.

    BC: Beyond the individual women who lost in this case, what's the fallout for our country?

    EC: Hillary Clinton's iconic status notwithstanding, the historic leadership of the United States in the global women's rights revolution is steadily being eroded.

    In comparative gender equality rankings by the World Economic Forum, the United States today stands only 19th among the 144 countries surveyed. We're outranked predictably by the Scandinavian countries, by the UK, France, and Germany, but also by Canada, Australia, and even some of the small democracies of Eastern Europe. Obviously, American women are not disadvantaged in these comparative rankings just by wages, which remain low here for so many women, especially at the bottom of our wage scale. Also considered are measurements of public policies that support women and families, such as subsidized childcare and health care, paid family and medical leave, and flexible work arrangements, where the United States too often falls short.

    Conservatives so often claim that women are not victims of discrimination in the workplace -- that they chose easier assignments and less demanding work in order to balance work and family. But this seems to me a rather feeble argument because the absence of family-friendly work policies for both men and women is itself a disadvantage that governments in modern industrial societies ought to redress.

    BC: Women's rights have clearly become a hotly partisan issue. Was it always this way?

    EC: Quite to the contrary, the Republican Party was actually the party that first supported an equal rights amendment for women. There's been a substantial partisan realignment on these issues. Who today would believe that Richard Nixon was a strong enforcer of affirmative action for women and other minorities?

    Everything changed when Ronald Reagan's political handlers recognized that they could finally unravel the New Deal coalition by appealing to social conservatives who had traditionally voted with Democrats on pocketbook issues. They could be lured away because of their growing discomfort on matters like affirmative action and reproductive rights. Conservative Republicans are shamefully guilty of spreading the spurious claim that gains for women always come at the expense of men, when the truth is that expanding opportunity has exactly the opposite effect.

    We now have concrete metrics from more than 100 countries around the world to demonstrate the direct correlation between improvements in women's status and overall well-being.

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