While visiting London earlier this month I was delighted to run across a statue of the great English suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst on Parliament grounds.
The United Kingdom's tribute to this indomitable reformer came as a welcome revelation, especially since this is Women's History Month. Pankhurst, witnessing three decades of unsuccessful agitation for the vote, revved up suffragists by founding the Women's Social and Political Union in 1903. Its motto was "Deeds, not Words."
Under her leadership, suffragists marched, spoke on street corners, leafleted and organized mass demonstrations. Attacked, brutalized and arrested for such benign protests as unfurling banners at political meetings, the suffragists became increasingly militant. By 1913, in order to win rights for women, more than a thousand British women, including Pankhurst, had been jailed. Some endured solitary confinement, broken health, force-feedings and, in one or two instances, even death. Considering their determination and sacrifice, these women would not be impressed with the status of their sisters in Britain or the United States today.
Conservative Margaret Thatcher's 11-year reign as prime minister, while shattering a significant glass ceiling, did not correspond with greatly improved representation of women in Parliament. Women currently make up about 18 percent of those elected to the House of Commons and are 16 percent of the House of Lords. Britons lag behind women in many other parts of the European Common, whose parliament is 24 percent female. Yet British women are doing better than their U.S. counterparts. Women barely make it into the double digits in the U.S. Congress. And our country has elected 43 consecutive male presidents. But American women are gaining strength and at some point will achieve full political equality.
Women tend to outnumber men on college campuses, and women are entering many professions in equal or greater numbers than men. Our country cannot afford to ignore the leadership skills of half its population.
Unfortunately, history proves how quickly rights can be reversed, social movements can disappear and dreams can be obliterated. Nearly three generations passed in America after the right to vote was won in 1920 before women walked through those doors opened for us by our foremothers. The backlash forces are in full swing today, exemplified by the March 22 Time magazine cover story, "The Case for Staying Home: Why more young moms are opting out of the rat race."
Are we in a time warp?
American women face a daunting laundry list of imminent political threats, foremost to abortion rights, with Roe v. Wade hanging by a swing vote on the Supreme Court. Bush has stacked the federal judiciary with right wingers appointed for life. His global gag rule is sabotaging reproductive health care for poor women around the world, while his domestic policies pander to far right agendas. Bush's jaw-dropping proposal to spend $1.5 billion to preach the panacea of marriage to impoverished single mothers is an insult to women. America's indigent mothers need opportunity, education, better childcare, housing and practical welfare -- not hackneyed lectures by the virtue police. Emmeline Pankhurst wrote, "If civilization is to advance at all in the future, it must be through the help of women, women freed of their political shackles, women with full power to work their will in society." This Women's History Month, we must pledge to work our will.
Annie Laurie Gaylor, who lives in Madison, Wis., is director of the Feminist Caucus of the American Humanist Association, and editor of the anthology "Women Without Superstition: No Gods - No Masters" (Freedom From Religion Foundation, 1997). This column was produced for the Progressive Media Project, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by the Tribune News Service.