It’s time to say `sorry’ for excluding women from American politics
Last June, California Governor Gavin Newsom formally apologized to Native Americans for government having slaughtered, forcibly displaced and otherwise mistreated their ancestors.
In February, Newsom apologized to Japanese Americans for interring them and their forebears in World War II camps.
Has a government leader gotten around to apologizing for centuries of depriving women of equal rights?
It’s not my question. Turlock’s Janice Shaw asked it the other day in a phone call.
“It’s always disturbed me in my brain that we were treated unfairly,” said Janice, who is 73 and grew up near Sacramento in a time when “you did not speak out, you didn’t have a voice and you didn’t complain. A lot didn’t speak up, I think, because they were afraid of getting backhanded.”
In the 1970s, Janice found herself a single mother of three. She learned the hair dressing trade — earning less than male barbers — and taught other girls in beauty school. She heard elderly salon customers recall the days before women were allowed to vote.
This year is the centennial celebration of gaining that right across the United States; California became the sixth state in granting it nine years before the 19th Amendment passed in 1920. And March is Women’s History Month.
Janice’s question about a mass apology warranted some investigating.
American politicians appear to have made apologizing into an art form. In recent impeachment proceedings, we were reminded how Bill Clinton apologized to the nation for lying about Monica Lewinsky. Former Missouri congressman Todd Akin in 2012 apologized for his “legitimate rape” comment — opining that “the female body has way to try to shut that whole thing (pregnancy) down” — then took back the apology two years later.
City Journal a few months ago did a roundup of then-Democratic presidential candidates’ apologies: Elizabeth Warren, to Native Americans, for claiming Cherokee heritage; Joe Biden, for professing fond memories of working alongside segregationists; Kamala Harris for unintended consequences of a truancy law she championed; Pete Buttigieg for saying “all lives matter.” Since that article, Biden and Mike Bloomberg have apologized for behavior toward women.
And President Donald Trump isn’t about to apologize for anything, The Los Angeles Times says.
Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights has a web site documenting 755 “major political apologies” since the year 1000, defined as involving “states, nations or major political groups for significant public wrongs” and excluding personal offenses. It shows two dozen mass apologies to women — for example, Japan’s mea culpa to Korean and Chinese “comfort women” forced into sexual slavery during World War II. But the web site makes no mention of American women and their suffrage ordeal stretching more than seven decades.
It’s curious that the British Labour Party in 2018 issued a posthumous pardon and apology to long-ago English suffragettes, on the 100th anniversary of that country granting voting rights to women. That sparked a national debate over forgiving those still viewed by some as terrorists because demonstrations turned violent.
It seems silly that something so taken for granted today, like participating in democracy, could have caused such a ruckus back then.
Women have led us in the highest elected offices throughout Stanislaus County. They include former mayors Peggy Mensinger and Carol Whiteside (Modesto), Virginia Madueño (Riverbank), Pat Kuhn and Pat Paul (Oakdale), Janet Carlsen (Newman), Pat Maisetti and Becky Campo (Patterson), current Mayors Amy Bublak of Turlock and Deborah Novelli of Patterson, and County Supervisor Kristin Olsen; Paul previously also served as county supervisor.
It’s not just government leaders. Women participate more than men in elections — 55% of registered women, to 51.8% of men, in 2018, according to Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics.
And our League of Women Voters of Stanislaus County has always kept us informed of electoral issues and hosted candidate forums.
It’s hard to envision how local politics survived without women, back in the day. It’s hard to believe that no major government official has apologized for disenfranchising women from political life.
The National Women’s History Alliance, I thought, might have something. Assistant Director Leasa Graves said in an email that she couldn’t find evidence of an apology. “Considering we are still struggling to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed, I think it’s unlikely a formal apology has been given,” she said. (California ratified the ERA, which guarantees legal rights regardless of gender, back in 1972; most southern states and Utah and Arizona have refused.)
If you know something about this subject that Janice and Leasa and I don’t, please enlighten us.
It may not drive headlines like coronavirus. But it would be nice to know, and to finally hear.
This story was originally published March 18, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
