Thank you to all who partook in our meme! From welcoming bankers' hatred to reflecting on saving the world to deporting the Koch brothers, here are some of our favorites...and stay tuned for more.

Remembering Women's History Month and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, New Deal 2.0 tells the surprising story of how women became citizens -- and how their economic lives have evolved along with their rights. As author and Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Ellen Chesler reveals, the long journey is far from over.

It's hard to fathom today, but for most of human history, and even into our own time, it was simply assumed that women had no need to acquire identities or rights of our own -- except, of course, those enjoyed by virtue of our relationships with men.

This principle was central to defining American women's claims on citizenship at the country's founding. And it stuck around at the heart of the long and fierce opposition women encountered in seeking rights to inheritance and property, to suffrage, and most especially, to control over our own bodies through legal access to birth control and abortion -- a right now ever precarious. Even violence against women was for many years condoned under the principle of male "coverture" that defined women's legal identities. If you can believe it, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1910 denied damages to a wife injured by violent beatings on the grounds that to do so would undermine "the peace of the household."

To be sure, there were challenges to this prevailing point of view. Mary Wollstonecraft's visionary 1792 tract, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, claimed on behalf of women the natural rights theories of the French Enlightenment that upheld the sovereignty of the individual. And in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton enumerated a long list of injuries against women at Seneca Falls and launched a suffrage campaign that she did not live to see through to its agonized victory an astonishing 72 years later! Hats off as well to the one really good guy of this era who spoke up for women -- the venerable John Stuart Mill, whose 1869 Essay on the Subjection of Women asked for the first time whether home and family are women's only natural vocations, or whether in a world where formal employment was moving outside the home, wives must necessarily follow.

Still, deeply entrenched assumptions about gender roles were hard to overcome. Even when women finally won the vote in 1920, one of the most powerful arguments propelling them to victory was the claim that modern government, in assuming obligation for the education and socialization of children and for the general social welfare, had taken on traditional responsibilities of the household. For many Americans this became the compelling rationale for why women finally needed a voice in their own right.

That same year Margaret Sanger helped inaugurate a modern human rights conversation that moved beyond traditional civil and political claims of liberty on behalf of women to establish reproductive and sexual rights -- realizing her claim that no woman can call herself free until she can decide whether and when she chooses to be a mother. Yet in order to gain widespread support for her cause, even a firebrand like Sanger wound up abandoning polarizing rhetoric about birth control in favor of a more sanitized, public relations-savvy sales pitch that put families ahead of women under the banner of Planned Parenthood, the organization that remains her global legacy. Nor can we forget that as Sanger lay dying in 1965, the Supreme Court argument that at long last provided constitutional protection to the use of contraception (and later abortion in 1973) focused on the protection of marital privacy. Scarcely a word was mentioned about women's equal rights.

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So, too, when Progressive-era reformers first sought to protect women workers, they argued that women had responsibilities to households and families and therefore needed a cap on their hours and a floor on their wages. With the best of intentions, the protectionist measures formulated under Muller v. Oregon essentially condoned sex discrimination in employment as the law of the land until the 1970s and 1980s, when Ruth Ginsburg and other then-young women's rights lawyers cobbled together equal protection doctrines and opportunities for women ingeniously derived from Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

We need to remember these developments. Public policy, we know, is largely path dependent. How we think and act today is often determined by a past we don't fully understand. This is particularly true for women who have for so long been denied fair recognition as historical actors. History is to the body politic as memory is to the individual, as veteran historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once observed. We need to keep our engagement with history lively, as we are bound to lose our way without it.

We need history to help us navigate our own troubled times. We especially need it now as we try to unravel the remnants of "coverture" that still constrain women's civil status and as we do so in the face of an intensifying backlash against women's equality.

The litany of injustices women still face in this country is by now familiar. On the one hand, nearly half of all American workers today are women, and more than a third of them are single heads of household. Their low earnings depress wages overall. On the other hand, in two-income households (though sadly a declining percentage of the total) female earnings are beginning to reach parity with men. In 1980, two thirds of families depended on only a male breadwinner and less than a third of married women with children worked. Today that number is exactly reversed. Yet the myth of traditional domestic arrangements as a norm still persists in our public policies.

Almost alone among Western democracies, the US provides little or no subsidized childcare and few maternity benefits to women. There is no federal legislation beyond a hard-won mandate for unpaid pregnancy and medical leave, which covers only workers in large organizations. Only a handful of states require paid family leave or flexible hours to cover personal obligations. School hours and educational calendars pay little attention to the absence of parents in most homes. Tax policy, wage scales, Social Security benefits, and health insurance formulas all still discriminate in multiple and often devious ways against working women.

To add insult to injury, the impulse to push women out of public roles and back to the private sphere now informs the radical misogyny at the core of the social policy agenda of one of the country's two established political parties. However veiled by claims of fiscal responsibility, the reactionary goals of Republicans now serving in the U.S. Congress are transparently clear.

American women are better educated than ever before. Fewer marry, and those who do wait until they are much older than in generations past. The average size of families has decreased markedly. Labor force participation, as well as civic and political involvement by women, is up despite the many obstacles we still face in balancing obligations at home and at work. Women are driving small business formation and economic growth in this country. They are voting in greater numbers than men and often far more progressively, with significant gender gaps recorded in all but two elections since the 1980s (when anxieties about terrorism in 2002 and about unemployment in 2010 narrowed the divide).

What women in polling and focus groups continually say is that we need more of a helping hand from government -- measures to enforce equal pay, improved benefits for education and health care, and more spending on the social sector. Instead, under the cover of scare tactics about fiscal doom, we get calls to end affirmative action policies and crush the public sector unions that provide secure jobs in traditional roles like nursing and teaching, and in non-traditional, better paying sectors as well. Women say we need more and better reproductive and maternal heath care. What we get instead are bills to eliminate birth control subsidies for the poor, defund Planned Parenthood, recriminalize abortion, and convey rights to fetuses that are then denied to children once they are born.

True enough, the GOP is not telling American women we should no longer vote, or go to college, or own property, or hold a job. But the Republican platform quite clearly opposes the core public policies and legal remedies that have secured us these rights through two centuries of struggle. If given their way, the forces of reaction in our country today would restore a patriarchal order that has taken 200 years to overturn.

The message is clear. The stakes are high. Women's basic claims as citizens in our own right are again at risk. Either we speak up more passionately and reclaim our own historical agency by overturning these injustices, or we condemn our daughters to refight the very battles we once had every reason to think we had won.

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.

A ground report from a historic movement to fight Scott Walker's bill and reignite justice for the middle class.

JUSTICE -- GOVERNMENT -- LEGISLATION -- LIBERTY. Choose the order in which to recite them. Those are themes of the four murals that adorn the Capitol Rotunda in Madison, Wisconsin and surround the throngs of citizens who have gathered for many days now to protest and, we hope, block passage of the anti-labor, indeed, anti-democratic Budget Repair Bill proposed by Governor Scott Walker. It's a bill that not only slashes public workers' incomes, but also strips them/us of their/our democratic rights to bargain collectively.

On Friday my wife Lorna and I decided, quite suddenly, to go down to Madison. We made the 300-mile round-trip drive on Friday to help bolster our fellow citizens on the eve of the big events on Saturday; to register our anger at the Republican-dominated Assembly's shameful passage of the bill (the Republican-dominated Senate remains "filibustered" with Senate Democrats holding out in Illinois); and to renew our own spirits in the face of the media's inadequate coverage and misrepresentation of what is at stake.

Arriving mid-afternoon, we went straight to the "unionized" Concourse Hotel, where Wisconsin's labor organizations have their "war rooms" set up. There we got caught up on developments and picked up "WI red" AFL-CIO signs bearing a blue map of the state in the shape of a fist and the words STAND WITH WISCONSIN. Informed and equipped, we headed up to the Capitol.

It was a chilly 20-degree afternoon, but it was bright outside and one had the sense that the state's motto "FORWARD!" still mattered. Police officers, drawn from cities and towns around the state, guarded entrances and patrolled counter-clockwise to the marchers. But they too were smiling, at least for now. In fact, to show their solidarity with the protesters, the Wisconsin Professional Police Association responded to reports that the governor's office was planning to close the Capitol that night and clear sleeping protesters from its halls by announcing that some of its own union brothers and sisters were going to sleep in the building along with them. (As one of my colleagues, Steve Cupery, put it hopefully: "Oh, oh, the cops are coming to Madison for a sleepover. Does this mean they are in bed with the demonstrators?")

After one full circle, we went into the Capitol building. It's a gorgeous place, not unlike the Capitol in DC. And it was made all the more gorgeous and welcoming by the presence of the hundreds, no thousands, of our fellow citizens occupying nearly every corner of the place. Posters adorned the walls and banisters, and noise -- the good noise of citizens' voices and young drummers -- reverberated throughout. And yet somehow everything remained "Wisconsin clean."

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Moving with others into the Rotunda area, beneath the great dome, I could not help but look up and around, and what I saw and heard made me tearful, joyfully so: throngs of people, the four murals above, the many signs that read "Beam Scotty Up," "Scott Walker is a Weasel, Not a Badger," "Forward! Never Backwards!," "The People Own this BLDG, the Kochs Own Walker," "I'm Sorry if My Rights are an Inconvenience for You," and "Stop the Class War Against Workers!," and the banners of diverse Wisconsin unions.

At the center of it all was the "People's Microphone" (smartly managed by a group of young people whom I assumed were members of UW-Madison's Graduate Assistants Union). There, one-by-one, people young and old spoke: students, Wisconsin unionists, and labor delegations from around the USA. Teenagers spoke in support of their teachers and parents. Workers of every trade decried the Republicans' so-called Budget Repair Bill and the corruption of democracy by billionaires such as the Koch Brothers; recounted how their own parents and grandparents struggled to organize unions and secure their democratic rights; and declared their determination. Folks from New York, Florida, Michigan, and points west registered their own unions' solidarity with Wisconsin.

Each little speech garnered rousing cheers -- and regularly everyone broke into "Kill the bill!" But just as regularly, and just as enthusiastically and tunefully, we all sang out with "This is what Democracy looks like!" accompanied by young drummers beating out the rhythm on large white plastic containers.

Voices never spoke hatefully. But they expressed outrage -- an outrage built up over thirty years in which the rich have become extraordinarily richer and working people poorer, in which livelihoods and industries have been destroyed and jobs exported, in which the public good and public infrastructure have been squandered. And they expressed outrage that the corporate elite, conservative politicians and pundits, and even other middle class folk of the Tea Party sort were now eager to not only cut the wages of public workers, but also savage democratic rights and the progressive services we have helped to create.

The democratic spirit and energy -- that's what brought me to tears. Here in Madison, Wisconsin, here in the heart of the state, here in America's heartland, working people in all their diversity were once again coming together in solidarity. It has been in the making for thirty years and more. Sadly it did not arise sooner. But that is history -- a history not to forget and a history from which to learn -- but, nonetheless, history. Now we have the making of a democratic surge. "This is what democracy looks like," I thought. Liberty -- Government -- Legislation -- Justice. Forward!

Harvey J. Kaye is the Rosenberg Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. A member of the National Writers Union/UAW, he is currently writing The Four Freedoms and the Promise of America. Follow him on Twitter: www.twitter.com/HarveyJKaye

Mike Konczal explains the pitfalls that await progressives as we enter into a discussion over prison reform.

University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt has this really amazing post over at Balkinization about the lessons that can be learned from the decline in mental institutionalization and how they can be applied to the de-incarceration movement. He starts by pointing out that in 1963, President Kennedy gave this speech:

If we launch a broad new mental health program now, it will be possible within a decade or two to reduce the number of patients now under custodial care by 50 percent or more. Many more mentally ill can be helped to remain in their homes without hardship to themselves or their families. Those who are hospitalized can be helped to return to their own communities... Central to a new mental health program is comprehensive community care. Merely pouring Federal funds into a continuation of the outmoded type of institutional care which now prevails would make little difference.

Harcourt then makes the point explicit: "This country has deinstitutionalized before." Drawing from a recent working paper, he outlines three things that can be learned from this previous deinstitutionalization and applied to the movement to get some sanity into how we think about our prison populations (my bold):

What then can we learn from deinstitutionalization in the 1960s that could help us decarcerate in a successful manner? The place to begin is with the three factors that most influenced deinstitutionalization: first, the development of federal social welfare programs (such as Medicaid and Medicare) that created financial incentives for states to channel care for the mentally ill from state mental hospitals to community-based outpatient facilities; second, the development and use of psychiatric medicines as treatment for even severe mental illness that not only allowed patients to live on their own, but transformed the way we thought about mental illness; and third, the increased understanding and sympathy for persons with mental illness resulting from changed perceptions catalyzed in part by World War II, impact litigation, and critical attention to the plight of patients in documentaries and films like Titicut Follies and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest...

These factors suggest several avenues for change today. First, federal leadership should be encouraged to create funding incentives for diversionary and reentry programs and other ways of reintegrating offenders (or avoiding incarceration from the outset) that would give states a financial motive to move prisoners out of the penitentiary and into community-based facilities and programs. The key here is to give states an economic and fiscal incentive to move convicts out of state prisons and into non-custodial programs on the model of Medicaid reimbursement for outpatient community mental health treatment...

Second, regarding the use of prescribed medications, there is a real need for improved psychiatric care and treatment of prison inmates... Two other ideas in the same vein. The increased use of GPS monitoring and other biometric monitoring could serve as substitutes to incarceration as well. Electronic bracelets, telephone monitoring, and other forms of home supervision are an attractive alternative for certain types of offenders. Moreover, a move toward the legalization or medicalization of lesser controlled substances would also have a direct impact on reducing our prison populations, not only because of decriminalization but also by eliminating the drug trade and its attendant violence.

Third, high-profile impact litigation regarding prison conditions, the paucity of mental health treatment, and prison overcrowding, as well as documentaries of prison life along the lines of Frederick Wiseman’s 1967 film, Titicut Follies, should form part of a larger strategy to shift the public perception of those persons incarcerated. Increased public awareness of the reality of prison life would contribute to greater willingness to support federal policies aimed at helping reduce our prison populations. In the words of Justice Sonia Sotomayor at the oral argument on the California prison overcrowding case, “When are you going to avoid the needless deaths that were reported in this record? When are you going to avoid or get around people sitting in their feces for days in a dazed state? When are you going to get to a point where you're going to deliver care that is going to be adequate?”

All of these approaches may well involve Faustian bargains, and the dangers associated with each are apparent. 1960s deinstitutionalization had its own dark sides, including the increased racial imbalance of the mental hospital population as the asylums were being emptied, as well as the problem of transinstitutionalization. Some solutions, such as the use of risk assessment, may actually worsen the problems of race. It would be absolutely crucial, in any effort to reduce mass incarceration, to avoid both the further racialization of the prison population and the transinstitutionalization of prisoners into other equally problematic institutions, such as homeless shelters or the kind of large mental institutions depicted, precisely, in documentaries like Titicut Follies.

Read the whole thing. The third part, the call to continue making a case for why mass imprisonment is a a terrible way to deal with serious problems, is very important. Because any other pathway for reform can easily end up preserving the worst parts of the original. This is even clearer when you consider two recent events surrounding prison reform: the conservative movement promoting prison reform as budget reform, and Mark Kleiman's framework for understanding what happens when brute force fails.

Conservatives and Incarceration

Since he is someone who knows which way the wind blows, it is telling that Grover Norquist wrote a recent National Review editorial calling for a rethinking of mass incarceration under the subtitle: "Let’s stand for limited government, federal accountability, and reduced spending." More and more conservatives are looking at how out of control mass incarceration has gotten in the past decades, and many liberals are hoping to have a bipartisan effort to address it. This is going to be harder than it looks, as mass incarceration is central to conservative thought. And also because conservatives have one main goal: reducing state-level spending.

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Indiana governor Mitch Daniels is worth watching. Simply spending less per inmate is going to be an easy sell. Daniels can brag that his government is "housing 38% more prisoners without having built one additional cell. At a per day cost that is down around 30%, by the way." Or that his state government has outsourced "prison food to Aramark, cutting the cost from $1.43 a meal to 99 cents in the process."

This isn't a complex business model. There's not going to be a lot of fat to trim off the budget other than breaking public unions and hitting their pensions or fire selling the prison to private interests. There's something unique about an age where our meritocratic consultant elite is off making excel PivotTables on how to optimize the exact minimum you can spend on feeding captive populations. However, corporate efficiency reform is not what's needed and isn't geared toward human dignity, checking the violence of the state and reducing crime in a smart way.

When it comes to actually reducing the prison population, which is where all the savings are really going to be, Daniels is hitting major problems within the DA's office and among the conservative rank-and-file. This quote from Indiana's Sen. Sue Glick, R-LaGrange, a member of the Senate's Corrections, Criminal and Civil Matters Committee, is telling: "We just don't accept the idea that because the Department of Correction has a bed problem that we should be releasing serious felons back on the street."

Without making the case for why mass incarceration is bad in and of itself, not just as a budgeting issue, it's going to be harder to move this. During times of budget stress you see an increase in fear among the general population. So any desire to use the state's balance sheet as an argument for changing prison policy is going to be offset by an increase in xenophobia and a retrenchment that expresses itself most forcibly in the language of crime control.

When Brute Force Fails

The other development is that many liberal wonks are adopting the conceptual framework of Mark Kleinman's "When Brute Force Fails" as a policy agenda. Aaron Schwartz has a good review of the book here. The book is amazing. It should be required reading for anyone interested in public policy, the arguments about incarceration, or game theory.

It talks about a lot of things, but a short way of describing it is that we need to change the term structure of the way punishment is exercised by the state. Instead of uncertain, harsh punishments, there should be more certain, weaker punishments. The big example he uses is that we should create a more expansive and punitive parole system in order to combat recidivism, which will reduce our need for long prison sentences.

The thing that worries me about the plan, like the conservative plan to cut prison budgets, is that it doesn't necessitate de-incarceration. Let's talk about Broken Windows for a second. There's a way of describing Broken Windows as the criminalization and aggressive attack on pre-criminal activities like loitering or petty drug use. You can picture a wonk saying, "By aggressively criminalizing early, petty activities, we can deter later activities and thus have a smaller prison system." And you can picture the system saying back, "Yes, we can criminalize petty early activities and have a massive prison system." The wonk will yell, "Hey -- that's not what I said!" but it'll be too late.

One conclusion of the Brute Force Fails approach is that you can have a smaller prison system through a more aggressive parole system. It is not hard to imagine the system saying, "Good idea, let's have both, a huge prison system with an aggressive parole system." After all, these can work as compliments instead of substitutes: the surveillance, degradation and control associated with long-term incarceration will prep a person for more aggressive monitoring after incarceration.

For the theory to work well, it requires a move away from thinking of prisons as a benefit and instead of as a cost, a dangerous, wasteful and ineffective approach that comes with mass devastation for communities. But that brings us back to Harcourt's point: we need to continue to move public opinion on why our current system is the worst of all worlds.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.