Friday, December 31, 2010

On the subject of young feminists

Here is a blog by a 25-year-old lesbian feminist medical student that I just discovered. She also wrote a really interesting post about the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell.

Friday, December 10, 2010

Pauli Murray and the Indivisibility of Human Rights

Pauli Murray was a friend of Mary Daly's, mentioned several times in Daly's intellectual autobiography, Outercourse. They seem to have met during the time when Murray was teaching at Brandeis University, and Daly was less radical than she was to become later. As time went on, their approaches diverged. Daly left the Catholic Church and became an advocate for woman-only theorizing and activism. Murray, emphasized reconciliation among warring groups, and in 1977 became the first African American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest. I'm not sure if these two women remained friends as their opinions diverged, but I would love to have been able to listen to a conversation between the two of them.

With that in mind, here is a term paper that I wrote about Pauli Murray for my US Women's Movements class:

Pauli Murray and the Indivisibility of Human Rights

At the close of the Civil War, the movement that had worked to gain freedom for enslaved African Americans and rights for all women was split by the controversy over passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the US Constitution. These amendments sacrificed the goal of universal human rights in order to achieve a needed, but much more limited objective: political and voting rights for African American men. However necessary this compromise might have been, it had the tragic result of setting up antagonism between activists for the rights of African Americans and activists for the rights of women.

Nearly one hundred years later, this tragedy nearly repeated itself in the controversy over Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed job discrimination by private employers on the basis of race and other categories. As a joke, or perhaps as an act of sabotage, Rep. Howard Smith of Virginia added “sex” as a protected class under Title VII. Supporters of civil rights for African Americans worked to defeat this amendment. But then Pauli Murray, an African American lawyer and activist, wrote a powerful memo supporting the inclusion of sex as a protected class.

“The human rights `revolution’ transcends the issue of discrimination on basis of race or color,” she began. “Women’s rights are a part of human rights.” (MacLean, 70). Murray’s memo played an important role in helping this provision pass the US Senate (Murray 1987, 358). In this situation, she acted as a reformer. In other situations, she acted as a radical activist, such as when she was arrested and jailed in 1940 for violating a bus segregation law in Virginia, or when she helped lead nonviolent direct action to desegregate Washington DC restaurants in the 1940s. But whether her tactics were reformist or radical, her goal was always the same. Pauli Murray believed that human rights were indivisible, and that unity and reconciliation were the path to liberation.