The ERA

Throughout the 1960’s, disparate portions of the feminist movement coalesced around several prominent leaders; such as Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, and Betty Friedan; uniting radical and more moderate portions of the movement into an effective national political machine.  Utilizing strategies developed by the Civil Rights movement; notably the combination of social disobedience, political advocacy, and bringing cases to establish legal precedence; what became known as the second wave of feminism battered many of the old ideas of gender norms into oblivion.  The movement successfully pushed forward and accomplished many of its goals; such as equal access to jobs and education, reproductive rights, women’s safety, and so much more; effectively creating the more equal society which we live in today.  The crown jewel of these efforts was to be the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would enshrine the central tenants of the movement in the U.S. Constitution.

By 1972, many of the goals of the women’s movement were not seen as bipartisan issues.  With the exclusion of what were seen at the time as some of the more radical feminist positions, such as abortion, both parties and the general public tended to be supportive of women’s issues.  Democrats saw it as a way to appeal to the more liberal portions of their base, and the Republicans saw it as a good place to compromise in order to get things they wanted, such as tax reform.  As a result, the ERA passed Congress by wide margins in both houses.  Within a year, 30 of the needed 38 states had ratified the amendment, and everyone expected it soon to be part of the constitution.  It was at this point that Phyllis Schlafly appeared on the scene.

Phyllis was a staunch conservative upper class housewife from Illinois, who if she had been supportive of feminist causes, would have been lauded by them as proof of what women could accomplish when given the opportunity.  Well educated, Phyllis was heavily involved in national politics throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, penning books and reports read by millions, and inserting her moralistic stance at every opportunity into Republican politics, including unsuccessfully running twice for Congress.  She also kept her basement full of food in case of a nuclear war, which is probably why by 1972 she spent most of her time talking about the importance of avoiding nuclear disarmament.  However, sensing an opportunity for real political influence, she shifted her focus to the ERA.  Utilizing connections she had established via years of writing a conservative newsletter, Phyllis began a grass roots campaign to stop states from ratifying the amendment.

Believing the ERA well on its way to ratification, the feminist movement by this time had shifted its focus to pushing other issues, such as reproductive rights.  As a result, the political clout they had built up over the past decade was poorly positioned to counter the sudden assault.  In a surprisingly short amount of time, Phyllis managed to build a coalition of middle and upper class housewives and working lower class women, exploiting a generational gap never fully addressed by the feminist movement.  While the ERA enjoyed widespread support from younger women, who rightly wanted the opportunity to pursue careers as they saw fit, many older housewives, who had no job skills, feared that it would remove many of the protections they had as women regarding things like divorce, alimony, child support, and access to social security; many of which were gained by earlier iterations of the feminist movement.  Phyllis, being one for political theater, of course took it a step further by claiming the ERA would lead to unisex bathrooms, same-sex marriage, an end to all traditional gender norms, women being forced to work and care for children, and people having fewer children.  However, the most effective message she found was stating that the ERA would make girls eligible for the draft, which really struck a chord given Vietnam was still pretty front and center in people’s minds at the time.

While feminists staged rallies, sit-ins, and even hunger strikes to try and convince state legislators to ratify the ERA, Phyllis and her group sent them baked goods.  Support for the ERA in many states plummeted.  Between 1973 and 1977, only five states ratified the ERA, while another four states rescinded their ratification.  The feminist movement attempted one last push for ratification, managing to get the deadline extended from 1979 to 1982, but no other states even took up the issue.  Instead, women’s equality became constitutionally protected under the 14th amendment thanks to a series of Supreme Court cases brought by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and other feminist lawyers.

Though defeated in passing the ERA, the second wave feminist movement did manage to notch many other accomplishments throughout the 1970’s, including establishing reproductive rights.  However, the powerful political coalition broke apart and became deeply divided in the 1980’s due to disagreements regarding sexuality, pornography, prostitution, lesbian rights, and transgender women.  Though many of the groups continued to exist, none regained the political clout they once held.  As for Phyllis, her role in the ERA’s downfall made her a powerful figure in social conservative circles, promoting what she referred to as “traditional American values” and effectively shifting the Republican party further to the right.  She remained active in politics until her death in 2016.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Activist_Phyllis_Schafly_wearing_a_%22Stop_ERA%22_badge,_demonstrating_with_other_women_against_the_Equal_Rights_Amendment_in_front_of_the_White_House,_Washington,_D.C._(42219314092).jpg

She Got the Look

In the mid-seventeenth century, rapid industrialization across western Europe attracted tens of thousands of people into cities looking for a better life than the one they could achieve toiling away in fields owned by some rich dandy asshat who dressed all fancy and forced everyone to call him m’lord or some such nonsense.  Unfortunately, though many did manage to raise themselves up into the crazy new thing called the middle class, many more found their lives much the same as before, only now with the addition of crazy big machines seemingly designed to maim people in every conceivable way and less than ideal living conditions.  To supply the needed labor force to keep the new factories humming, people were crammed together into much smaller spaces than they had been used to before.  It was the beginning of the trend to urbanization that continues to this day.

Oh what a wonderful time it must have been to be alive.  Just imagine, every step being jostled by crowds of your fellows as you make your way through a human built ant colony, breathing in the musky fumes of the factories, and drinking water highly likely to be made up partly of you and your neighbors’ piss and shit.  Oh, with all these wonders and more, is it any wonder that so many diseases began to run rampant through these cities?  Smallpox, cholera, typhoid, and more, transformed from the annoyances they had once been out in the clear blue skies to epidemics that killed thousands.  What fun.  Of course, the worst of all of these was a little something called consumption, which we today call tuberculosis.

Much like the quintessential Broadway starlet story, tuberculosis didn’t get its start in the big city, but oh boy did it ever hit the big time when it arrived.  By the end of the century, nearly a quarter of the people who died in western Europe were dying of tuberculosis, which given that it usually involved coughing up so much blood that you literally drown yourself, probably wasn’t all that great.  If there was one thing that could be said about tuberculosis compared to other diseases, it was that it had staying power.  While diseases like smallpox had a tendency to come and go rather quickly, people with tuberculosis could exhibit symptoms for years, slowly wasting away bit by bit.  People who had tuberculosis tended to have low grade fevers most of the time, which left them with sparkling dilated eyes, rosy cheeks, and red lips.  The fever left sufferers with little appetite, leaving them thin and pale, their hair fine and silky from the lack of nutrients.  When old timey people saw these poor souls, they of course thought to themselves, damn don’t they look hot.

It’s hard to say exactly how fashion trends get started, though what happened next probably had something to do with the prevalence of tuberculosis amongst famous writers, actors, and artists; people who managed to rub shoulders with the wealthy while still living amongst the disease ridden squalor of the lower classes.  The fact that most prostitutes also tended to die of tuberculosis probably had something to with it as well, since if your entire trade is sex, you tend to have an influence on what is considered sexy.  Either way, even as people died coughing up blood, old timey people began to fetishize the symptoms of tuberculosis.  Things being much the way they are now, women’s fashions were of course the most affected.  Corsets were tightened to give a more waifish shape, makeup was applied to give that wonderful consumptive look, and dresses began to resemble death shrouds.  Gussied up in such ways, fancy women would sit at parties, hunched over and giving potential suitors a languid eye, doing their best to look as sickly as possible.  Men’s fashions were affected as well of course; with a more delicate air becoming prized along with the more practical use of high collars and scarves to hide the sores that developed on the lymph nodes in the later stages of the disease.  Eventually, people began seeing getting tuberculosis as a sign of being intelligent and/or attractive.  It was all exactly as fucked up as it sounds.

This strange fashion sense continued through large parts of the nineteenth century, until germs were discovered to be a thing around 1880.  Previously tuberculosis had been blamed on all sorts of nonsense things, such as bad air and alarmingly people being too pretty, which should tell you how creepily entwined the idea of tuberculosis and beauty had become.  This new understanding of course changed lots of thing about how people lived, the first things of course all having to do with fashion.  Women’s skirts were shortened to keep them from dragging on the filthy ground, bringing new prominence to the shoe industry.  Men became clean shaven as giant beards became seen as germ jungles.  People were advised to get out in the sun more, prompting new crazes over tanning and the sporting life.  Eventually they also used this new knowledge to actually combat the disease, but of course that was later.

Image: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-3951-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Man Eaters

By the year 1898, pretty much every nation in Europe was leaping over each other to carve up the vast continent of Africa to ensure control of rapidly depleting resources.  Many of the top thinkers of the day believed in the Malthusian notion that it was only a matter of time until growing human population consumed everything on Earth, and every nation wanted to make sure they had more than their fair share.  It should come as no surprise, that the people who got the short end of the stick in all of this were of course the peoples of Africa.  However, perhaps the worst off of all were the peoples of East Africa.  Not only was the Arab slave trade still going strong, but a pandemic called Rinderpest had wiped out large portions of their cattle herds and the local big game.  As a result, they weren’t really in a position to tell the Europeans to go fuck off.

Now of course the Europeans weren’t without some kind of moral compass.  Which is probably why when the British seized control of what is today Kenya and Uganda, they stubbornly insisted it was in order to stop the Arab slave trade.  Which might very well have been true, but seems kind of secondary considering the first thing the British started doing was building a railroad from Lake Victoria to the Indian Ocean in order to move resources out of the heart of Africa as quickly as possible.  The construction of this railroad was a rather slow endeavor.  For some reason, most of the local Africans weren’t really down with helping out, forcing the British to bring in thousands of Sikh laborers from India.  Of course, these laborers and the locals didn’t get along well, so violence was not uncommon.

Despite these issues, by 1898 the railroad was largely complete, expect for a key section crossing the region of Tsavo, including a river of the same name.  The locals called Tsavo the “Place of Slaughter” which was a pretty apt name given it was often crossed by Arab slave caravans, who were not all that careful in avoiding inventory slippage, which is just a really nice way of saying a lot of god damn newly minted slaves died because of their brutal treatment.  Unfortunately for the British and their Sikh railroad builders, Tsavo was where they ran into a new and unforeseen problem.  Namely, two very large lions which started killing and eating a shit ton of workers.  Not really big fans of getting dragged kicking and screaming from their beds in the middle of the night, the workers built fences from thorny brush and lit bonfires to protect themselves, which did absolutely nothing.  As a result, the workers became convinced that the lions were actually supernatural demons, and many fled the area, halting construction on the railroad and bridge.

Now one might wonder why two lions might go on such a killing rampage, to which people who actually live around lions would probably roll their eyes because lions have a tendency to eat whatever the hell they want.  However, the situation in Tsavo at the time certainly didn’t help matters.  Rinderpest had killed off a lot of the big game, forcing many lions to look for other types of food to eat, such as the long line of dead and/or dying slaves left behind by the Arab slaver caravans.  Of course, once the British stopped these caravans from moving through the area, new food sources were needed, and since many lions already had a taste for delicious people meat, the crowded together Sikh workers probably seemed like the perfect alternative.

The head engineer of the bridge construction, John Patterson, was not really down with the whole situation, by which I mean he wanted to get his damn bridge built.  Having hunted tigers before in India, he took it upon himself to hunt down the killer lions.  Unfortunately, Johnny-boy was not really all that up to the task since he really had zero clue what he was doing.  He hunted the lions over a ten month period, including building convoluted traps and snares, but rarely managed to even see them.  In the meantime, the lions killed somewhere around one hundred people.  The British sent other big game hunters to assist, but Patterson insisted on remaining in charge because once you get a hard on for killing lions, there is really only one cure.  Finally, mostly thanks to pure luck, he managed to kill both lions in December.

The railroad was finished not long after, though not before Patterson had to hunt and kill a third man-eating lion which repeatedly attacked a new train station in the area.  The bridge was blown up by the Germans just fifteen years later during World War I.  As for Patterson, he stayed in Africa, shooting random animals for awhile, and later wrote a book about his adventures that of course made him look like a giant dick swinging hero.  This book helped make safari hunts popular, since there has never been a shortage of people wanting to feel like big dick swingers.  As for the railroad, it remained active for decades, shipping the wealth of East Africa to Britain, at least until Kenya and Uganda gained their independence in the early 1960’s, at which time it was allowed to largely deteriorate.

Image: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Colonel_Patterson_with_Tsavo-Lion.jpg