the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jan 22, 2006
It was not until November 1971, in this "land of freedom and liberty for all," that the U.S. Supreme Court finally recognized that women are included among those "persons’ who enjoy all those rights established by the Constitution. In the decision, Reed v. Reed, the Court declared unconstitutional an Idaho state law that established a "preference" for men to act as executors of wills. By 1971, there had already been other rulings which accorded women certain legal rights, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (Ironically, women were included in that act only because Southern segregationists hoped that by attracting the votes of Northern men who couldn’t accept women’s equality, they could then defeat the whole bill.) And the 19th Amendment to the Constitution had given women the right to vote nationwide in 1920. But Reed v. Reed was significant because the Supreme Court, for the first time, ruled that women, as well as men, were covered by the "Fourteenth Amendment’s command that no State deny the equal protection of the laws to any person within its jurisdiction."
Within a few months, the Supreme Court ruled that the state cannot deny access to birth control to unmarried persons, declaring that all persons, not just married ones, have the right to be "free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child." Formally, the ruling also applied to unmarried men, but men had long had liberal access to condoms, regardless of their marital status. And unmarried women already had access to means of birth control in some states, but the 1972 ruling extended that access throughout the whole United States.
Then on January 22, 1973, the Court issued Roe v. Wade—the ruling that has stood ever since as the symbol of women’s freedom, banning Texas, and de facto the other states and the federal government, from "unwarranted" intervention in a woman’s decision concerning abortion. In the words of Margaret Sanger, who had been arrested a number of times in the early 1900s for providing women with information and means of birth control, it seemed that women finally had gained the right to "own and control their own bodies," without which "no woman can call herself free."
These legal decisions did not appear because of the good will of Democrats, as so many Democrats later would imply. Roe v. Wade was decided by a 7 to 2 majority. Of the seven justices who ruled for women, five had been appointed by Republican presidents. The two "no" votes came from one Republican appointee and one Democrat, Byron "Whizzer" White, who was put on the bench by his buddy, John F. Kennedy.
Nor were these decisions, appearing within a short 14 months of each other, the result of "activist judges," as the opponents of abortion and many Republicans pretend. Rather, the decisions were a de facto recognition of the widespread mobilizations of the 1960s and early "70s, which were battering down many of the reactionary limitations put on the population, especially the black population and women.
Not trusting their fate to the "good will" of either judges or Congress, women’s organizations continued to mobilize, aiming their efforts at passing the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution, which stated, "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex." The amendment was originally proposed in 1923 by the movement that had succeeded in winning the vote for women. For almost 50 years, Southern Congressmen, who were opposed to the ERA, had used their positions on Senate and House judiciary committees to block any vote on the amendment. But, in 1971, with women demonstrating across the country—including in the halls of Congress—the amendment finally was put on the floor for a vote. It quickly passed 354-24 in the House and 84-8 in the Senate, neither party wishing to appear to oppose it.
The amendment was endorsed not only by women’s groups, but also by the AFL-CIO and most major unions, as well as by both parties—at least until 1980, when the Republican Party changed its position. Polls regularly showed that nearly two-thirds of adult Americans favored the ERA. By 1977, the amendment had been passed by 35 of the 50 state legislatures, needing only three more states for ratification.
In other words, the idea that women should have equality of rights before the law, including the right to control their own bodies, had been endorsed by large majorities in the whole population, by the courts, by Congress and by most of the states.
Few in the women’s movement at that moment imagined the ferocity with which religious forces would soon act to eliminate those rights, both legally and de facto. Nor was it yet so obvious that American society was quickly moving to stand on more reactionary ground. But the anti-war movement was over; the black mobilization, under the blows of a repressive state, was receding, encouraged to do so by a whole new layer of black politicians. With the economy in crisis and recession, both public and private employers began to attack their workforces to impose concessions, and unions were taking a big step backwards. This left the struggle of women fighting for the ERA isolated and more open to attack.
The Christian fundamentalist churches were the ones that took up the attack. Long one of the main props of segregation, along with and tied to the Ku Klux Klan, those churches had been forced backwards and even handcuffed somewhat by the struggle of the black population. In turning their attention against the struggle of women for equality, those churches were able to reenter the political scene. And the Republican party—long the minority party in the country, based essentially only on wealthier suburbs and some rural areas, and completely shut out of the Democratic-controlled "Solid South"—was about to pander to those churches in a bid to establish a solid mass electoral base for itself, especially in the South, where those churches were the strongest.
The little opposition that did exist in 1972 to the Equal Rights Amendment was concentrated in the Mormon church and those fundamentalist and evangelical Protestant churches that today make up the so-called Christian Right. With the ERA sent to the states, these churches took the offensive, setting up organizations whose original purpose was defeat of the ERA. Organizations like the "Eagle Forum," led by Phyllis Schaffly, began a widespread propaganda campaign, starting from the pulpits of fundamentalist and evangelical churches, carrying over into television ministries of people like Jerry Falwell, who declared "The Equal Rights Amendment strikes at the foundation of our entire social structure." According to Falwell, head of the self-proclaimed "moral majority," women who pushed for the ERA were launching a "satanic attack on the family."
But the campaign against the ERA was not carried out only or even essentially at the level of sermons, on TV or otherwise. The fundamentalist churches, which could turn out a solid voting bloc, even if it was a rather small minority, began to trade electoral support to the Republican Party; in exchange, Republicans in rural states worked to prevent the ERA from getting the remaining few state ratifications needed. In the two years following 1975, the move to ratification was torpedoed. Even though new states ratified, some states that had earlier ratified were attempting to withdraw their support for the ERA.
A Republican introduced the so-called "Family Protection Act" in the House of Representatives. Among other things, that act would have eliminated federal laws supporting equal education of boys and girls; and it would have required "marriage and motherhood to be taught as the proper career for girls." It also proposed to give tax incentives to women who had babies—IF they were married and IF they did not put their children in childcare but stayed at home to raise them.
The proposed law had no hope of passing, but it stood as a symbol of the intentions of fundamentalist churches. And it was used by fundamentalist preachers to round up more electoral support for the Republican party, which in turn was becoming more amenable to the demands of fundamentalist churches.
In 1982, the ERA failed passage, still three states short of the 3/4 needed when time ran out for ratification. What might have seemed like a surprise, Illinois’s refusal to ratify, was explained not just by rural southern Illinois, but more importantly by the role played in Chicago by the Catholic church, which also opposed the ERA, if not so vociferously as the fundamentalists.
Fundamentalist preachers were jubilant—and no wonder. They had parlayed their position representing perhaps 10 to 15% of the population into a political force that imposed their patriarchal views of "women’s place" on the whole of secular society. Spewing forth tirades from the pulpits against "feminism," they quoted Old Testament rules about women’s proper, that is, inferior, place in the family, as well as Paul’s New Testament exhortations to women to be submissive: "To avoid confusion and establish order someone needs to be the head, and God has ordained that this should be the man....Christ is subject to God, man is subject to Christ and woman is subject to man."
While the ERA was the original focus for fundamentalist religious forces, the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision on abortion provided the goal around which they really mobilized.
The Roman Catholic Church originally took the lead on the issue, circulating in 1975 the "Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities," a campaign to be carried out by every priest in every parish. The aim of the Catholic hierarchy was not simply to bring back into the theological fold those Catholics who did not subscribe to the church’s views on abortion and birth control—a number which has always been sizeable. Today, according to National Catholic Reporter, 58% oppose the church’s position on abortion, and 75% oppose it on birth control. The Catholic Church has never pretended to be democratic toward its own adherents. But it was now trying to impose its dictatorship over all women, pushing to change the laws of secular society, making them conform to Catholic dogma on the issue of women’s reproductive rights.
The Catholic hierarchy soon joined forces with Protestant fundamentalists, despite their long-standing sectarian enmity toward each other. Priests and ministers railed against women who wished to control their own bodies—from the pulpit, from the TV and radio studios and in state legislative bodies. The fundamentalists weighed on that part of the Republican party which their solid voting bloc put in office, particularly in non-urban states. And the Catholic church did likewise with the parts of the Democratic party in states like Texas, New York and Illinois where Catholics accounted for a sizeable voting bloc.
The faithful were bused to Washington D.C. in a "March for Life," carrying pictures of bloody fetuses, black crosses, coffins and toy babies on sticks—all those trappings with which the right wing seeks to demonize women who demand the right to choose abortion.
In Reagan’s 1980 election platform, the Republican Party endorsed so-called "pro-life" judges and an anti-women’s reproductive rights amendment, misnamed the "Human Life Amendment." That platform, which also included the reversal of Republican support for the ERA, marked the real engagement of the whole Republican party to fundamentalist Christian forces—which has turned into an outright marriage under the advisers guiding George W. Bush. Democrats denounced the Republicans, without taking a clear stand to defend all the rights to abortion and birth control that women had gained. How could they? Many of them had already voted for the limitations being put on those rights.
In any case, the anti-women’s reproductive rights amendment never won a majority of votes in Congress, much less the 2/3 vote it needed to send it on to the states. But the publicity it gained in the early 1980s provided fodder for the religious troops, who had already begun a real assault on the right to abortion in ways both legal and extra-legal, digging away, finally leaving little behind except a shell.
The ink had barely dried on the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, when the churches went knocking on the politicians’ doors. The very first one to open up to them was Democratic Senator Frank Church, known for his supposedly liberal stance on many issues. Within days of the decision, he proposed an amendment to a funding measure, which the Senate quickly passed and the House ratified with the support of most Democrats and Republicans. In the euphoria following Roe v. Wade, that measure may have seemed innocuous to many people, but it has since proved to be the basis for the single biggest limitation set on abortion. It allowed medical providers (including not only doctors, nurses and other support personnel, but more importantly, the owners of hospitals and clinics) to "opt out" of performing abortions or sterilizations if these medical procedures violated "their moral or religious beliefs." Very quickly, 46 of the 50 state legislatures passed similar "refusal" statutes. Such a limitation has never been set on other medical procedures—at least until a similar "opt-out" was extended to pharmacists whose "moral" standards are violated by dispensing birth control medication.
The ultimate consequence of this one proposal is that abortion is simply not available for most women in the country, at least not unless they travel great distances—and when they do that, they then run into other obstacles, including residency requirements, waiting periods, etc.
In the first place, Catholic hospitals immediately moved to take advantage of the opt-out. This is not insignificant: four out of the ten biggest hospital chains and health care systems are owned by or are under the control of the Catholic church. Regardless of what doctors working in those hospitals might have wanted, they were prevented from carrying out abortions because the Catholic church refused to let them do it. But publicly funded hospitals and clinics also followed suit in one state after another, as politicians intervened.
As for those doctors who carried out abortions in their own offices, most of them have now dropped abortion from their practice. The biggest reason was not their own "moral or religious beliefs," but fear of the murder, violence, legal harassment and intimidation that has been carried out by religious zealots in a blood vendetta against medical providers. And the legal provision letting big hospital chains and clinics "opt out" is what opened the door for the violence and intimidation to be carried out. It turned the doctors who did choose to provide women with abortion into stationary targets for the "right-to-life" zealots—for whom murder, arson, disfigurement and psychological harassment are all justified by their "mission from God." At least eight abortion providers have been assassinated since 1993, with attempts made on the lives of 17 others. There have been over 4200 violent attacks on clinics reported to the police: bombings, arson attacks and assaults. Then there were the regular disruptions and harassment at clinic entrances—since 1977, over 92,000 have been serious enough to require police response. This doesn’t take into account web sites that post the names, addresses, phone numbers, names of family members of doctors and other people who work at women’s clinics that provide abortion—along with pictures of the women who enter the clinics.
In the year 2000, 87% of counties had no abortion provider, with none at all in 97% of the country’s rural counties, and the situation is undoubtedly worse today. In that same year, eight states had five or fewer abortion providers for the whole state. Today, in Mississippi, there is only one clinic in the whole state that provides abortions, with doctors who come in from outside Mississippi, and that’s in the northern part of the state. In the southern part of the state, along the Gulf Coast, the only abortion providers are midwives—forced to act illegally, of course, and working in an unsafe environment without access to antibiotics, etc. In such situations, medical personnel take their lives in their own hands.
Speaking at a 1993 camp organized in Indiana to train religious zealots how to attack women’s clinics, Randall Terry, the head of "Operation Rescue," had this to say: "I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good.... Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a Biblical duty; we are called by God to conquer this country. We don’t want equal time. We don’t want pluralism." At another session, speaking of doctors who perform abortions, he commented: "Intolerance is a beautiful thing. We"re going to make their lives a living hell." (Both of these comments were reported in the Fort Wayne, Indiana News-Sentinel.)
Some fundamentalist organizations publicly reproach the violence Terry and others like him use to close clinics, but they don’t reproach his results—and that shows what society would be like if they were able, in Terry’s words, "to conquer this country," to make it "a Christian nation."
In the more than 30 years since Roe v. Wade, the legal situation regarding abortion has become a patchwork of restrictions, which taken altogether severely restrict access to legal, that is, safe, abortion. The single biggest of those restrictions was the so-called Hyde amendment—which forbade Medicaid from paying for abortions for women without financial means. In 1976, the last year before the amendment took effect, 300,000 low-income women obtained abortions through Medicaid. In the first two years after it went into effect, Medicaid paid for only 3,000 each year. And while Republicans were its major sponsors, it had to pass through a Senate that was controlled 60-37 by the Democrats, and a House, controlled 291-144 by them.
Only two months after the Hyde Amendment took effect, it claimed its first victim: Rosie Jiminez, a 27-year-old mother and low-paid factory worker who needed supplemental welfare aid as well as Medicaid. Denied payment for an abortion under the new rules, and unable to come up with the money for a legal abortion, she went to a "back-alley" abortionist, and died for her efforts, leaving a child behind. She was not the last poor woman to fall victim to Mr. Hyde.
According to a 1994 New England Journal of Medicine report: "Serious complications and death from abortion-related infection are almost entirely avoidable. Unfortunately, the prevention of death from abortion remains more a political than a medical problem." And on this issue, the politicians have taken their cue from reactionary religious forces—who have been pushing on state legislatures, while raising millions of dollars to contribute to politicians who support the imposition of a religious agenda on the country.
If these religious forces succeed in imposing their agenda on the whole of society, they will take us back to the period before Roe v. Wade, when, according to figures supplied by NARAL (the National Abortion Rights Action League), there were almost as many abortions performed annually as there were in the years after the Court’s decision. Legal or illegal, there have been around a million abortions performed year after year, but with this difference: over 90% before 1973 were illegal, most of those performed under unsafe conditions. Obviously estimates of illegal abortions can only be educated guesses. But what has been documented are the 350,000 women a year who arrived before 1973 in hospital emergency rooms as the result of botched abortions, and the number of women who died each year, ranging from nearly 1,000 to as many as 5,000.
Pretending to speak for "life" is nothing but a cynical ploy by religious zealots who are ready to leave a trail of dead female bodies in their wake.
It’s obvious that abortion is a difficult procedure for the women involved—not because it’s particularly difficult on the medical level, but because of what is implied by it: abortion means the cutting short of a potential life. And the women who choose to undergo it because they see no other option would be the first to say it. Logically, someone who wanted to eliminate the necessity of abortion would be pushing as hard as possible to make birth control methods widely available, without any restrictions.
But this is exactly the opposite of what the religious opponents of abortion push. They have used their influence, whether on school boards or on legislatures that fund public hospitals and clinics, to severely limit access to or even knowledge about birth control methods.
Today the science curriculum in schools is being tied up by religious fanatics. The most well-known example is their attempt to interfere with the teaching of evolution in biology courses, using not only their control over many small local school boards, but the influence they exert over school book publishers. But even more widespread is religion’s control over what is taught in health courses. In many districts, teachers are prevented from presenting any clear discussion about human sexuality and are precluded from even mentioning birth control to teenagers.
On this issue, the Republican party in recent years has stood openly as the mouthpiece for religious fundamentalists, praising virginity, proposing abstinence in place of birth control, and devoting quite sizeable amounts of money to pushing these reactionary ideas, while using the offices of the executive branch to widely block provision of birth control means. Although, if anyone believes that Republicans are the only ones, all they need do is listen to Hillary Clinton, who poses as a supporter of women’s right to abortion and birth control, but who speaks out of the other side of her mouth in praise of abstinence, hoping to win over the votes of fundamentalists.
Preaching abstinence and preventing access to birth control does not lessen teen-age sexual activity, but it has contributed to the terrible rate of teen-age pregnancy in this country. The U.S. has the highest rate of teen-age pregnancy in the developed world, nine times as high as the Netherlands, around four times as high as Germany, France and other European countries. It’s not because the level of sexual activity is higher here among teenagers—every study shows that’s about at the same level as other industrialized countries. But because birth control is so much less widely available here, especially for unmarried teens, the U.S. has a teen pregnancy rate similar to that of many underdeveloped countries where methods of birth control are also not widely available. There are almost 900,000 teen-age pregnancies per year in the United States, with all the terrible consequences awaiting most of those teens—and their children, if they go on to deliver them. One of those consequences is that the U.S. also has the highest rate of teen-age abortion for an industrial country—by far.
The anti-abortion activists may pretend their aim is to protect the "life" of the unborn child, but what life are they protecting when they try to prevent women from using birth control methods to avoid becoming pregnant? It simply shows their hypocrisy and misogyny. And their concern for the "unborn children" is all the more hypocritical since they have none for living children—they have pushed Congress or the states to eliminate every program that has benefitted children: Headstart, pre-kindergarten, reduced-price breakfasts and lunches in schools, school nurses, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, child health care coverage, access to day care, etc.
Today, even in the case of rape, an emergency contraceptive is not proposed in the majority of cases to women, including teen-agers, who are brought into emergency rooms after the rape. The "moral and religious beliefs’ of the religions that run these hospitals preclude doctors in them from offering it. Public hospitals have been prohibited from using it by politicians, pandering to fundamentalist religious forces. And even Wal-Mart, it seems, has religious scruples about birth control, since it refuses to stock Plan B, the emergency contraceptive, in its pharmacies.
The weight of these retrograde forces on all of society couldn’t be more evident than in the recent scandal involving Plan B, the emergency contraceptive. The political hack heading the FDA reversed the 23-4 decision made by the FDA’s scientific panel to make Plan B widely available without a prescription. The doctor whose so-called "scientific expertise" was used to buttress the action was W. David Hager, a religious fundamentalist gynecologist who says he advises his patients who have difficulties with menstruation or menopause to... pray!
The way the Catholic hierarchy and fundamentalist Protestants argue against birth control tells volumes about the misogyny that runs like a bright red thread through their dogma. In 1991, Cardinal Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI, declared that eliminating the church’s ban on contraception would "damage marital fidelity." In 1994, Janet E. Smith, a Christian fundamentalist professor of philosophy at Dallas University, warned similarly: "contraception violates fertility and caters to the animal propensity for self-indulgence."
What is this but the reactionary idea that sexuality should serve only the purpose of procreation, and that women, starting with Eve, are the temptresses who would lead men into sin?
Christianity has been practically obsessed with these ideas, even up to our day—which explains not only the refusal by the Catholic church and most fundamentalist sects to allow women to control their own reproduction and their own bodies, but also the complete and often violent disdain toward homosexuality.
Of course, Christian fundamentalists are not the only ones to hold such views. The burka and the chador in those countries where Islamic fundamentalism rules stand as stark symbols of the same attitudes, behind which are such barbaric practices as the stoning to death of women for adultery or "honor killings’ by a member of a woman’s family for her perceived "loose behavior." And comparable to the Islamic chador, is the orthodox Jewish practice requiring women either to completely cover their hair or to shave it and cover their heads with a wig—as is the Old Testament requirement of stoning adulterous women. (And Orthodox Jewish men still pray every day to their god, thanking him for not making them women!)
Despite differences stemming from the times in which they were born, all the modern religions are misogynist by nature. It’s not an accident, but rather an expression of the needs of the class societies in which they were born and evolved.
For as long as human societies have been divided in classes, they have this in common: they are based on the exploitation of one class or classes by another. Exploitation leads inevitably to oppression and injustice of all kinds, and not just against the exploited class. And this includes the oppression of women, who are oppressed simply because they are the ones to bear children. The existence of classes requires the ability of the ruling class to at least transmit the wealth accumulated through exploitation to the next generation, and that has brought into existence all those practices aimed at assuring paternity: that is, the insistence on virginity, the repression of "adulterous’ women (but not of men). It’s what led to "keeping women in their place," that is, confined closely within the home and the family. And that is still true, today, in the capitalist epoch, where inheritance still defines class.
Religions and their institutions have played an important role in supporting exploitation, and enforcing these fundamentally inegalitarian relations within societies, as well as making the victims, including women, accept their victimization, justifying it in the name of whatever particular god they call upon.
It’s all the more true in a period such as today, when reactionary ideas once again predominate. In 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention added Article 18 to its "Profession of Faith and Message": "A wife is to submit graciously to the servant leadership of her husband, even as the church willingly submits to the leadership of Christ. She has the God-given responsibility to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation." Such statements have been part of Christian dogma since the 2nd century, and of Jewish dogma before that. But the fact that the Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination in the country, formally reiterated it at the end of the 20th century shows us how much we still live in the shadow of those backward conceptions of women’s role.
All of the religions today have fostered fundamentalist tendencies, resting on ideas that take us backwards thousands of years. Like all the fundamentalist tendencies, Christian fundamentalism in this country seeks to control through religion not only the opinions, morals and private behavior of its own adherents, but the entire political and social life of the country, that is, secular society. In the words of Randall Terry, they want to "conquer this country" and impose by force patriarchal relations between human beings. Christian fundamentalism, like the other fundamentalist tendencies, is essentially political, offering itself in service to a repressive state against the whole of society.
These patriarchal relations pave the way for violence against women, including the violence that rains down on many women daily within the family structure. And that violence is justified by the most retrograde disgusting ideas, among which is that women somehow deserve the physical abuse.
Look at the way rape itself is still thought of in many milieus, not as a violent act, but as something that women brought on themselves by lewd behavior, or at least as a mark of their shame because they didn’t defend their "virtue." It’s not very long ago that the courts themselves treated rape in that way—in many backward areas of the country, they still do. The expression that a raped woman is "damaged goods’—what is that, but the expression of the backward idea that a women is a commodity who loses her value when she "surrenders’ her virginity.
According to U.S. Justice Department records, which obviously understate the case by several magnitudes, one woman is raped nearly every minute in the United States. Not counting rape, nearly three million women were physically attacked, 848,000 of them by men who were linked to them in 1998. That’s almost eight times the reported incidents of domestic violence against men. And 1320 women were killed that year by their domestic partners, almost four a day, and another 3,000 by other people, half of them known to the murdered women. What is particularly significant, given the opposition of the Catholic church and most Protestant religions to divorce, the women who were most at risk for being killed were married women in the middle of divorce proceedings.
Obviously, domestic violence is not restricted only to the milieu of religious fundamentalists, and first of all because it’s not only religious fundamentalists who have patriarchal ideas about the family. But they are the ones who openly preach that women and children must obey the master of the house, a patriarchal attitude that justifies violence by men and submission to it by women.
Criminology studies have well documented, including a 1995 study appearing in the Journal of Psychology and Christianity, that the patriarchal conception of the family is the single best predictor of violence against both women and children.
Studies of battered women regularly show that the women who are most likely to continue staying in violent home situations themselves are the women who accept, in the words of the Baptist creed, "to submit graciously to the servant leadership of her husband." This is in part a reflection of the ideology, but it’s also a reflection of the fact that women in patriarchal families are much less likely to work outside the home in anything other than incidental jobs. In passing Article 18, the Southern Baptists insisted that women must get the approval of their husbands to work outside the home. It should be obvious that without financial independence, it’s less likely that a woman will find the way to escape a battering husband.
And it’s not just a question of violence against women. Children from fundamentalist homes are also subject to more violence than other children. Many of the same fundamentalist groups involved in attacks on abortion pushed to have a "parental rights’ bill in Congress in 1995. Among other things, it would have prevented government from interference with, that is, bringing criminal proceedings against, people who use physical force to discipline their own children.
In other words, these people would use government to impose a religious dictatorship over everyone’s behavior—but they don’t accept any control by a secular government over their own behavior.
The attack being waged by religions against women ever since the mid-1970s is reminiscent of earlier such attacks, then also led by religions. During most of the 1800s, birth control was legal in this country, even if obviously it was much less technically sure than today’s measures. And abortion also was legal—to be more exact, the law took no note of it since it was performed by mid-wives. In the 1800s, on the legal level at least, woman’s reproductive situation was less proscribed than it is even today. As long as so many of the new factories were peopled by women while immigration provided for a steady rapid increase in the population, women’s ability to work was more important to growing capitalism than their readiness to produce children. And the fact that women worked gave them some independence. Moreover, so much of the country was still a frontier country. On the one hand, this meant that women worked equally with men on farms; on the other hand, women were in short supply in many states. In consequence, they were much less restricted in those regions. It’s certainly not a coincidence that women first got the right to vote locally precisely in those frontier kind of states—Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Idaho—decades before the 19th Amendment passed.
It’s not to say that religion did not play an important role during that period—although again less on the frontier, than in the Northeast and the South. Nor did women have anything like equality of rights. In many states, they didn’t have control over their own money when they married. And certainly, in most states, especially in the Northeast and the South, they didn’t have the right to vote. But for most women, the situation was less oppressive in the mid-1800s, than it was to become in the early 1900s. The main reason for the restrictions that developed against women was the further development of American capitalism and, with it, the capitalists’ harsh response to a growing working class movement. After the mass struggles of 1877 (which took the form of insurrections in many cities) and 1894 (the generalized strike for the 8-hour day), the capitalists realized they needed not only a police force to keep the new working class in line, they needed a moral police, that is the church.
With the arrival of the immigrants, came the Catholic church, with its fanatically patriarchal attitudes toward women, ready to preach the capitalist order to the workers it influenced. Patriarchal attitudes certainly always existed among the small Protestant sects in the countryside. But it wasn’t really until the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s that those religions were really imposed on the population. With so many small farmers being driven off the land, and expressing their discontent in the growing populist and socialist movements, a kind of orchestrated "religious revival" was pushed forward to compete for adherents.
Every fight made in this country to extend the democratic rights supposedly written into the Constitution for "persons’ has run up against religion. The indictment to be made against churches would fill many books—in just this country alone. Organized religion provided the justification for the slaughter of Indians, for slavery, for the oppression of women, for child labor, for the near servitude of share-cropping, for the impoverishment of labor, for official Jim Crow segregation, for the anti-immigrant campaigns of the 1920s and the anti-communist and anti-trade unionist witch-hunts of the 1950s. For every religious individual who played a role in the movements against these ills which proceed from capitalism—and there were many—he or she was far outweighed by the hierarchy of the churches, and the numbers of their adherents whom the churches set in motion to block the extension of democratic rights and to attack people fighting for those rights.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the initiators of the 1848 Seneca Falls Woman’s Convention, the first organized expression of women’s demands for equal rights, and a fighter against slavery in the abolitionist movement, long battled against the influence of religion. Primed by the experience of those fights, she issued this challenge to American women in 1885: "You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman....Man, of himself, could not do this; but when he declares, "Thus saith the Lord," of course he can do it. So long as ministers stand up and tell us Christ is the head of the church, so is man the head of woman, how are we to break the chains which have held women down through the ages? You Christian women look at the Hindoo, the Turkish, the Mormon women, and wonder how they can be held in such bondage....Now I ask you if our religion teaches the dignity of woman? It teaches the abominable idea of the [fourth and fifth] centuries—Augustine’s idea—that motherhood is a curse, that woman is the author of sin, and is most corrupt. Can we ever cultivate any proper sense of self-respect as long as women take such sentiments from the mouths of the priesthood?"
When she was counseled to adopt the stance of other activists in the movement for women’s suffrage, who understood the role played by religion in imposing an inferior position on women, but said nothing publicly for fear of antagonizing religious people, Stanton responded: "This much-lauded policy [of keeping quiet] is but another word for cowardice.... Reformers who are always compromising have not yet grasped the idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand on."
Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, early feminists like Stanton, later fighters against racism and the oppression of women like W.E.B. DuBois, IWW militants like Big Bill Haywood and Joe Hill didn’t set out to take on religion. But they did so when they discovered that religious institutions of their day were a positive obstacle to social reform.
Revolutionaries from the time of Marx and Engels on have insisted that religion won’t be done away with by decree, that it will survive until the class society that requires it is done away with. In the words of Engels, in Anti-Duhring: "when society, by taking possession of all means of production and using them on a planned basis, has freed itself and all its members from the bondage in which they are now held... only then will the last alien force which is reflected in religion vanish, and with it, religion itself."
But they have also know known what a nefarious role religion has always played, and recognized their obligation to oppose what Marx called the "opiate of the masses." The working class movement, when it was most conscious of its obligations, always took this as one of its tasks. That necessity has not changed—it’s all the more necessary today, as religions seek to impose, dictatorially, their dogma over all of society.