Today’s post about my new book, We the Men, focuses
on another form of forgetting in America’s dominant stories about itself—forgetting
the work the nation still has to do.
As modern Americans, many of us
have encountered people who announce or assume that the nation has left the
sexist bad old days behind. Still, I was
surprised to discover just how early in American history those premature
declarations began appearing and how important a role they have played in
perpetuating inequality.
Wildly exaggerated accounts of
American progress toward sex equality have been common in both everyday
settings and legal institutions since before the Nineteenth Amendment’s 1920
ratification made sex-based disenfranchisement unconstitutional. These
declarations are routinely framed in terms of American women universally,
although white women have tended to be top of mind.
The stories forget what remains
undone, even to the extreme of proclaiming that the United States has already
achieved sex equality. For example, a 1918 textbook assured young readers that:
“All men and women are regarded as equals before the law.” At the time, thirty-three
out of forty-eight states maintained sex-based restrictions on the franchise.
Although women had spent decades mobilizing for equality, discrimination
against women at work, in marriage, and in every other arena was still legal
and pervasive throughout the nation.
Judges have been suggesting or
proclaiming that the nation has moved past sex discrimination for almost as
long as American women have been mobilizing to challenge male supremacy. In
fact, many of the judiciary’s sunniest proclamations about American progress
have appeared in decisions denying women equality, as courts rationalize their
rejection of women’s claims by insisting that women already have so much.
I call these decisions
“self-contradictory victory announcements” because judges boast about America’s
embrace of sex equality while simultaneously enforcing male supremacy. While women
are not the only marginalized group to have experienced the judiciary’s
self-contradictory declarations, cases perpetuating women’s inequality have
long been prominent triggers for self-contradiction.
The Supreme Court continued its long tradition of self-contradictory
victory announcements in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health
Organization (2022). This
decision overruled Roe v. Wade (1973) in the course of upholding an
anti-abortion law from Mississippi, the Gestational Age Act of 2018.
Dobbs
repeatedly invoked overstated accounts of women’s advances to defend the
Justices’ decision to leap backward and eliminate a constitutional right that
women had held for generations. For example, Dobbs sought to justify
the Justices’ decision to give legislatures so much control over women’s lives
by announcing that: “Women are not without electoral or political power. It is
noteworthy that the percentage of women who register to vote and cast ballots
is consistently higher than the percentage of men who do so.”
This line of argument turned on
obscuring how far America still has to go. Dobbs never mentioned that
men held 85.1% of the seats in the Mississippi legislature that passed the
Gestational Age Act in 2018. Dobbs also did not mention that the
Mississippi governor who championed the bill and signed it into law was the
latest in the state’s uninterrupted line of white male governors. Boasting
about women’s electoral and political power while ignoring these persistent
inequalities made it easier to deny how politicians can endanger women when
constitutional safeguards disappear.
— Jill Hasday
