Cuba USA

Las gringas - American Curios

by David Brooks

source La Jornada

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.

Despite the United States self-praise for the fact it may soon be having a woman president; for its recommendations to and judgment of other countries for the way they treat women and respect their rights; for its major political statements in defense of gender equality at work, education and the arts; and for the decades of struggle for economic, social and political equality of women, in this superpower women have not achieved wonders.

Women still earn 79 cents for every dollar men make and although the gap has narrowed in recent years, according to the US Census, their income is only 78.6 percent of what men earn. At the same time, women have a higher poverty rate. One in three American women (42 million with their 28 million children) lives in poverty, or on the brink of it, according to the Shriver Report and the Center for American Progress. About two-thirds of minimum-wage workers are women.

Even in the highest spheres of this country gender inequality is manifest. Jennifer Lawrence, the superstar Oscar winning film actress, denounced the lack of pay equity between male and female actors in Hollywood, after e-mails hacked from Sony revealed that she received far less than her co-stars.

In another part of the elite, it is worth remembering that in 2005 Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, former Treasury Secretary and former head of the World Bank, argued that women, for genetic reasons, did not have the same ability as men to occupy the first ranks in science and mathematics.

On the other hand, conservatives continue to wage war against the basic rights of women, including control over their own bodies. Besides pursuing their battle against abortion in the courts and state legislatures, they have now launched a frontal attack on Planned Parenthood, the national organization which provides services and reproductive health education, especially for women, founded almost a century ago. With fabricated pretexts, the attack now includes legislative investigations and police actions (last week the Texas authorities raided the offices of the organization) and attempts to block state and federal funding for their services, which are vital for young women without resources.

Sexual violence against women is a plague in this country. Nearly three out of 10 women have suffered sexual rape, physical violence or persecution by their partners, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC). The same source estimates that nearly one in five women has been raped in this country (19.3 percent). Some 38 million women have suffered physical violence by their partners during their lifetime. According to a new survey by the Association of American Universities, 23 percent of female students reported that they have been victims of assault or sexual harassment.

In the country with the largest prison population in the world, one million women are in jail or under some kind of control by the criminal justice system. They are the fastest growing sector of the prison population (today there are eight times more women in jail than in 1980, with the war on drugs as the main factor). In fact, of the 500 000 women prisoners worldwide, one third are in US cells (figures by ACLU and the Sentencing Project).

It is true that Hillary Clinton could be the first woman to hold the presidency and she, of course, uses this factor in her campaign. There is no doubt that more women occupy the highest positions in the political and economic spheres of the country. There is a record number of women in Congress (104 of 435 seats), although only 26 women are chief executives in the top 500 companies of the Fortune list (5 per cent), reports the Pew Center.

But if a more fundamental transformation in the political and economic structure of this country does not occur, things will not change much, even with a woman in the White House. Perhaps what is required --and it seems to be a popular-culture obsession-- is a super-heroine. Wonder Woman will soon reappear, this time in the new film Batman and Superman.

The Wonder Woman comic character was created in 1941 by Harvard psychologist William Moulton Marston, with the purpose of presenting to young people a model of a strong, free and courageous woman and to counter the notion that women are inferior to men, since the only hope for civilization is more freedom, development and equality for women in all fields of human activity, according to a press release in The New Yorker at the time. Wonder Woman´s origin, obviously, was the mythical Amazons, whose matriarchy was defined by peace and equality until it was conquered by foreign men.

By the way, Marston was related to feminist leader Margaret Sanger who in 1914 founded the magazine Rebel Woman, where the term birth controlwas used for the first time and who insisted that the right to be a mother, regardless of church or State, was the basis of feminism. A few years later, Sanger and her sister opened the first birth control clinic in the country, in Brooklyn, which later became known as Planned Parenthood. Wonder Woman, reported The New Yorker, is based not only on the feminist utopian fiction, but was inspired by Sanger.

In other words, Wonder Woman represented a movement, and everything indicates that it is time for her return, not only to the screens, but to the streets.

David Brooks reporter / correspondent exclusively for La Jornada

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