As Schoolhouse Rock put it so succinctly:
Oh, we were suffering until suffrage,
Not a woman here could vote, no matter what age,
Then the 19th Amendment struck down that restrictive rule. (Oh yeah!)
It was 88 years ago today that the 19th Amendment of the Constitution was certified, guaranteeing women the right to vote in this country. And this day brings cause to celebrate a huge step towards universal suffrage — or, put more simply, expanding the right to vote to every man and woman in America.
It’s stunning to think of how far we’ve come. In 1919, a woman couldn’t enter a voting booth. In 2008, a woman serves as Secretary of State. A woman serves as Speaker of the House. And America very nearly saw its first woman on the presidential ballot.
In recent years, women have consistently cast a majority of votes in presidential elections. In this exhilarating election year, women are once again poised to represent a greater piece of the electoral pie than men.
But sometimes the appearance of progress fails to tell the whole story.
There are still far too many barriers that stand in the way of truly universal suffrage. According to a census data analysis by Project Vote (PDF), restrictions on the right to vote, like state photo identification laws, are likely to harm women voters (as well as minorities, people with disabilities, and senior citizens) disproportionately.
They found:
- Women are more than twice as likely as men not to have a drivers’ license.
- One of every five senior women does not have a license.
- Of all Americans without a license, over 70 percent are women.
So let’s celebrate today, but never take our eyes off the prize, because we’re not there yet. The obstacles to full voting equality aren’t what they were, but they’re not what they should be: nonexistent. Until that day, we’ll have to keep fighting to end disenfranchising laws and practices that stand in the way of voting equality.
— James Freedland & Rachel Perrone
On August 8, Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) sent an indicting letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urging her to implement promptly the recommendations made by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) after its investigation into the abuse and exploitation of domestic workers, predominantly women, by foreign diplomats. The GAO report (PDF), released in late July, documents the State Department’s failure to investigate and address this widespread and longstanding problem.
Each year the State Department issues more than 2,000 A-3 and G-5 visas that allow diplomats to bring into the U.S. their "attendants, servants, or personal employees." Yet little is done to provide these workers with information or support that could protect them against physical, emotional or sexual abuse and trafficking. And even when the worker can escape from the diplomat’s home and tries to hold him accountable, she must overcome the so-far impossible hurdle of diplomatic immunity.
In light of these facts, Sen. Durbin demanded answers to a series of pointed questions about the State Department’s reluctance to take responsibility for the treatment of domestic workers after it provides them visas to enter the United States. He also correctly characterized as "unacceptable" the State Department’s long delays in providing information during investigations into allegations of abuse.
Senator Durbin also expressed concern about the State Department’s opposition to certain provisions in the Senate version of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) (S. 3061) which he has cosponsored with Senators Biden, Brownback, and others. One such provision would require the State Department to interview domestic workers before renewing their visas in order to ensure they are not being abused. TheState Department’s objection? The interviews would be too burdensome.
Durbin’s response:
"Why is this small burden not outweighed by the benefit of discovering whether domestic workers are being abused or exploited?"
It’s encouraging to see that there are still lawmakers willing to defend the human rights of those who are most vulnerable. Thank you, Senator Durbin, for calling the State Department to task for its utter disregard for the lives of women who came to this country to provide for themselves and their families and instead became modern-day slaves.
We hope Secretary Rice takes to heart Senator Durbin’s request to "act expeditiously and diligently to hold diplomats accountable for their actions" and to stop turning a blind eye to the impunity with which diplomats and members of their households abuse their domestic workers. And we will continue to work with Senators Durbin, Biden, Brownback, Representative Berman and others in Congress to preserve and further strengthen the TVPRA provisions that protect workers and hold diplomats accountable.
To read profiles of domestic workers who have come forward and to learn more about the ACLU’s work on this issue, check out: www.aclu.org/domesticworkers.
Earlier this week, the Government Accountability Office released a human rights report (PDF) documenting the abuse and exploitation of domestic workers by foreign diplomats in the U.S. As described by Kirk Semple on the New York Times blog, this is a widespread but largely hidden problem that is greatly exacerbated by the shield of diplomatic immunity and the government’s refusal to hold diplomats responsible even in the most egregious cases.
The State Department issues each of these domestic workers a special visa to come to this country to work for a specific diplomat, and the Department is well aware of the extremely vulnerable position this puts the workers in – both because diplomats’ homes (to which domestic workers are often confined) are off-limits to U.S. law enforcement and as a result of the power the visa arrangement gives diplomats over their workers’ ability to remain in this country. But thus far, the State Department has refused to accept responsibility for what happens to these workers once they have arrived in the U.S. Just last week, in a statement of interest filed with the court in a case brought on behalf of three Indian women enslaved by a Kuwaiti diplomat, the State Department, as it has in the past, insisted that United States courts can do nothing to hold foreign diplomats accountable for extreme human rights abuses, even when the abuses rise to the level of human trafficking and slavery.
The GAO report both documents and is itself an illustration of one of the key failures of the U.S. government to address this problem: there is no systematic tracking or protection of workers who are brought to the U.S. by foreign diplomats. The report is a first step towards documenting diplomatic abuse and exploitation, but in leaving out any details about the 42 cases it investigated, it fails to bring to light the reality of this problem. In November 2007 the ACLU created our own spreadsheet of the 59 cases we were aware of to date, containing as many details as we were able to access about the workers, diplomats, and types of abuses.
As Caroline Frederickson wrote yesterday on the Huffington Post, legislation is required to tackle the web of problems that have allowed these injustices to continue for so long.
To read profiles of domestic workers who have come forward and to learn more about the ACLU’s work on this issue, check out: www.aclu.org/domesticworkers.
The ACLU received this month a settlement compliance report from Management Systems, Inc., the Detroit property management company that illegally evicted Tanica Lewis in 2006 because of property damage caused by her abusive ex-boyfriend, against whom she had a personal protection order.
In the settlement, reached in February of this year, Management Systems agreed to institute a Domestic Violence, Dating Violence, Sexual Assault, and Stalking Policy, which prohibits the company from evicting tenants or discriminating against applicants on the basis that they are victims of any of these forms of violence. The policy also allows tenants to end their leases early if they need to flee violence and gives them the option of relocating to another property managed by the company.
We were delighted to learn from the compliance report that Management Systems has distributed the new domestic violence policy to tenants and employees, and even more significantly, that ten properties throughout Detroit managed by the company have already accepted the policy. This means that there are now 543 units available to tenants who need to relocate for safety reasons.
“I feel great because they adopted new policy changes and it can help other women or men in the situation that I was in so they won’t have to go through the things that I went through.”
— Tanica Lewis in a podcast interview
“There is a huge interconnection between homelessness and domestic violence; one study has shown that 90 percent of homeless women have experienced abuse in their lifetimes. The over 500 units that are part of the relocation pool are a great resource for survivors.”
To listen to the podcasts of Tanica and Sandra and to learn more about this case, go to: www.aclu.org/womensrights/violence/33989res20070221.html.
For more information about WRP’s work on sex discrimination in housing, check out: www.aclu.org/fairhousingforwomen.
This decision was a long time coming: Today the New Jersey Superior Court ordered the state’s Department of Corrections (DOC) to stop transferring women prisoners to the New Jersey State Prison (NJSP), a men’s supermax prison.
In March 2007, the DOC transferred approximately 40 women prisoners from the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women, New Jersey’s sole women’s prison, to the NJSP. As a result of this move, the women are deprived of the programming and services they received at Edna Mahan, and are subject to more repressive conditions than other prisoners incarcerated for similar crimes at either prison.
In December 2007, the ACLU Women’s Rights Project and the ACLU of New Jersey filed a lawsuit, Jones v. Hayman, charging that the oppressive conditions the women face at NJSP are unconstitutional and discriminatory based on sex.
While we’re thrilled with today’s decision, it didn’t come without some controversy. In March, we learned that James Drumm, Assistant Administrator of the NJSP, offered women prisoners sentence reductions in exchange for making false statements describing the conditions at NJSP as better than they were. After one prisoner told us about the offer, she was beaten by a prison guard. Women prisoners described a campaign of intimidation to punish and silence women who told us about what was going on.
The court’s decision will prevent the DOC from moving any more women into the men’s prison while our lawsuit proceeds. The court also granted our clients’ request to pursue their claims as a class action suit, and denied a motion by the DOC to dismiss the case.
It could not be more ironic that one of the buildings that contains the holding cells of the Brownwood State School – a high-security youth prison in central Texas — is called “Freedom Dorm.” Approximately 150 girls are currently incarcerated at Brownwood; nationwide, more than 14,000 girls are in prison on any given night. When you think of “juvenile detention centers” you might imagine something like a boarding school, but in fact, many facilities look much like adult prisons.
Girls are restrained with brutal physical force and are regularly locked up in solitary confinement — a punishment used for minor misbehaviors as well as for girls who express wanting to hurt themselves.
“If we don’t agree to get on the floor… they come in with the shield, they ram you against the wall, and then they throw you on the floor. I got my chin busted open — I had to get four stitches and I got my tooth chipped.”
— 16-year-old girl incarcerated at Brownwood
Especially given that almost every one of these girls has suffered multiple traumas — including sexual abuse, physical abuse, drug addiction, mental illness, poverty, and violence — it is shocking how the very system that professes to rehabilitate them utterly fails to provide them with treatment or education, and instead re-traumatizes them.
“The SA system is not at all what you would call protective toward an SA person. It stands for ‘suicide alert,’ but staff make fun of it and call it ‘stupid alert’ or ‘seeking attention alert,’ because they think that when we cut ourselves or when we try to commit suicide that we’re seeking attention even though we’re going through hard times.”
— 16-year-old girl incarcerated at Brownwood
The girls incarcerated at Brownwood receive virtually no professional counseling and are seen infrequently by psychiatrists, who often do no more than prescribe dangerous combinations of psychotropic drugs in high dosages. At Brownwood, some of the girls are seen by a “telecom†psychiatrist who conducts appointments via teleconference. As one girl put it, “How can you trust someone you can only see on TV?†Not receiving proper treatment and left alone with their emotions, many girls are driven to cut themselves, bang their heads against the concrete walls, and attempt suicide.
The response to these behaviors is physical restraint, pepper spray, and further solitary confinement.
In the hopes of bringing to light this broken system and changing these inhumane practices, five of the girls at the Brownwood prison, with the help of the ACLU, filed a lawsuit on Thursday against the Texas Youth Commission, which operates all youth prisons in Texas. The lawsuit charges that TYC subjects the girls to unwarranted solitary confinement, routine strip searches and brutal physical force. The filing coincided with the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s release of its 2008 KIDS COUNT Data Book, which features an essay on the need to reform the juvenile justice system in the U.S.
For more information on the ACLU’s work on girls in youth prisons, including excerpts of interviews with the girls held in the Brownwood facility, check out:
www.aclu.org/girlsinprison.
My name is Nikki Anthony and I just finished eighth grade at Breckinridge County Middle School in Kentucky. The ACLU is representing me, my younger sister, and five other students in a case against our school district and the U.S. Department of Education because our rights are being violated by my school segregating students by sex. I was raised in a house where rights are very important, and I was told, "if you don’t stand up for your rights then they will be taken away." People in the United States don’t tolerate segregation by sex in everyday life, and yet they want us to tolerate it in our school system when we are supposed to be learning what being free really is.
For this reason my family and I are attending the ACLU Membership Conference this June in Washington, D.C., our Nation’s capital. Most people look at the capital as a place that keeps our country held together and that’s the way that it should be. Our capital is the seat of justice and equality in our Nation — EQUALITY being the key word. Separating students into different groups based on sex is wrong, and it doesn’t make things equal for all students. Our society is not based on your gender, and the schools are supposed to prepare us for when we enter the real world. How does separating students by sex prepare us for society when society is not segregated that way?
One day before school started last summer, I went into the school to find out who my teachers were and I was happy with those results. All the trouble started when I found out that I had five all-girls’ classes, and my parents and I had no say in what kind of classes I was put in. The past two years that I was at Breckinridge County Middle School, we were given the choice to be in "gender-specific" or co-educational classes. My family and I had always chosen co-educational classes, but this year my rights and my fellow students’ rights were taken away because we no longer had the right to choose.
The even bigger problem is that the all-girls’ classes and the all-boys’ classes are supposed to be equal, but that’s not the way it worked at my school. The all-girls’ math class that I was in was much more advanced than the all-boys’ math class. The other part of this problem is that the single-sex classes were the only Algebra 1 classes in the eighth grade; there wasn’t a co-educational class to match the single-sex classes like there is supposed to be. We were offered the chance to switch into a new co-educational class but our teacher told us that the class would be made up of a combination of Algebra and Pre-Algebra students and would not move as fast as the all-girls’ math class. Most of the students, including me, were afraid to switch because we would not be moving at a pace that would challenge us and allow us to learn at our capability level.
My family and I are so excited about coming to Washington, D.C., for the ACLU Membership Conference. We can’t wait to meet other people who care about civil rights as much as we do. I am hoping to meet other young people who care about human rights. This trip means a lot to me and my family; we can’t wait to tell our story. I am also very excited to learn about the other types of rights the ACLU fights for!
Listen to a podcast of Nikki, her father Frankie, and sister Stacey, talk about their case.
Right now the Aperture Gallery in New York is showing “Architecture of Authority,” photographer Richard Ross’s collection of pictures that deal with some of the most pressing civil liberties issues of our time through the architecture and interiors of the rooms and buildings in which these issues are confronted. Ross gained unprecedented access to some of locations he shot, which include the United Nations headquarters, Abu Ghraib prison, a lethal injection execution chamber in Louisiana, several American prisons, immigration detention facilities and even Guantánamo Bay Naval Base.
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Photographs of the outside of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo take the viewer into a world of heat, dust and desert—Gitmo’s abandoned open-air shower stalls wrapped with barbed wire at Camp X-Ray, the outdoor housing units in Abu Ghraib’s Camp Remembrance—but once inside, images of the cold, hard, almost clinical edges of a Gitmo cell or the shackle chained to the floor of an interrogation room at Camp Delta dominate.
Ross writes in the afterword of the exhibit’s book:
“I remind myself that the people held here are prisoners or detainees, not necessarily convicts. Such nuances of language are important. At Abu Ghraib, as well as Guantánamo, there are detainees who have not been convicted. At Guantánamo, they are being indefinitely detained…detainees are in limbo, purgatory—they are nowhere men. Time stretches infinitely, governed by the caprice of the American rules. Jose Padilla is to the United States what Josef F. was to Kafka, a citizen held under a set of rules that keep changing. This fictionalized nightmare becomes our reality, our legacy.”
The exhibition is displayed to juxtapose the subjects in provocative ways. Ross comments on sex-segregated prayer in Islam with two photos: the interior of the grand Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, with its huge, multi-tiered circular chandeliers hung with glass candle lanterns and massive expanse of red carpet beneath a soaring domed ceiling, hangs next to a picture of a women’s prayer area in a mosque in Syria: a comparatively tiny area partitioned off by shower curtain-like fabric.
The overall issue of surveillance is present throughout. From a guard watch tower in a prison yard, to video cameras inside prison “rubber rooms,” and even the photos of the interiors of mosques, you get the creeping feeling that someone is always watching.
The surveillance theme also reflects back to the overall theme of the show: authority. Whether the authority figure is a preschool teacher, a prison guard at Abu Ghraib, President Bush, the United Nations, or God, the collection conveys a simultaneous respect for, and contempt towards, authority. The show also confronts how the buildings where those figures exist both establish and reinforce, but then sometimes undermine, their authority.
John R. MacArthur writes in the book’s forward:
“[W]hat provoked Ross to do this book was his horror at the sudden rise of hard, illegitimate authority in America, the abrupt lane change in our political culture that took place after 9/11. This self-righteous, vindictive, and reckless divergence by the Bush administration was aimed at justifying actions at once unconstitutional and shameful: torture, the suspension of habeas corpus, “preemptive” invasions, and bald-faced lying to Congress, the American people, and the world. I’m a skeptic by nature, but talking with Richard Ross for any length of time makes it impossible to doubt his political sincerity and his outrage over the transformation of American into a country that practices waterboarding in the name of liberty. “The United States,” says Ross, “is not America anymore.”
“Architecture of Authority” will be on display at the Aperture Gallery (547 West 27th St., 4th Floor) through July 31. After that, the exhibit will travel to the Nerman Museum of Contemporary in Overland Park, Kan., this fall, then will go on to the Goldstein Museum of Design at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul from February 7, 2009 through April 5, 2009. It will be at the Tampa Museum of Art from September 11, 2009 through November 8, 2009.
Today the ACLU filed an amended complaint in federal court charging that Breckinridge County, Ky., and the U.S. Department of Education are violating the law by allowing sex segregation in public schools. The ACLU lawsuit expands a previous lawsuit filed by a private attorney to include the Department of Education as a defendant for its role in encouraging sex-segregated schooling. School districts across the country have been touting the ‘choice’ that sex-segregated programs offer students and parents, but Breckinridge County is a perfect illustration of why sex-segregated education fails to offer a meaningful choice.
Nikki Anthony is a talented 8th-grader at Breckinridge County Middle School. She and her parents prefer that she be in co-ed math classes, learning to compete and work together with boys, which she feels will prepare her for high school (which is co-ed in Breckinridge) and the real world. But at the beginning of the school year, the school decided that what was better for her was to be in a girls-only algebra class. She was offered no choice, and her parents had no say in the matter.
Not surprisingly, there was protest from parents of the middle school students who had been assigned to either sex-segregated or co-ed classes with no parental input. In response, the school belatedly gave some parents the option to switch their kids out of the sex-segregated classes. But there was no co-ed algebra class for Nikki to switch into. All of the algebra students had been put into either the girls-only or the boys-only class; the only co-ed 8th-grade math class being offered was a pre-algebra class. Nikki couldn’t switch out of her math class without compromising her education because the girls’ class was the best math class in the school, moving at a faster rate than the boys’ algebra class. (This also means that boys did not even have the option of attending the best math class in the school.)
It was then that Nikki and her parents realized the real problem with sex-segregated education: it is impossible to ensure equal educational opportunities for all students when you create single-sex classes, even when there is still a co-ed option. When you separate students into two or three different sets of classes based on gender, inequality is inevitable. Sure, Nikki was given the ‘option’ to switch into a co-ed math class, but it would have meant repeating the curriculum she had learned the year before. She didn’t have a real choice.
Nikki’s situation illustrates the fundamental problem with the sex segregation experiments that public schools across the country have been conducting. Many districts are advertising sex segregation programs as new options for improving education that offer students and parents more choices. But what sex segregation really does is create inequality and deprive both boys and girls of the benefits of a diverse classroom. Furthermore, it diverts attention and resources from reliable methods of improving student achievement, such as reducing class sizes, increasing parental involvement, and improving teacher training.
Sex segregation is illegal and discriminatory, and we hope that our lawsuit results in public school districts halting these experiments and the U.S. Department of Education rescinding its 2006 regulations encouraging sex segregation in schools.
To listen to podcasts of the Anthony family and ACLU Women’s Rights Project Deputy Director, Emily Martin, discussing the sex segregation in the Breckinridge County School District and for more information on the Women’s Rights Project’s work on sex segregation, check out: www.aclu.org/sexsegregation.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that we “filed a lawsuit.” An amended complaint, not a lawsuit, was filed.
On April 23, 2008, the Senate failed to address important wage discrimination legislation, H.R. 2831, The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007. This bill faced a very tough procedural vote Wednesday night, which fell just shy of the 60 votes needed to move on to a Senate vote on final passage.
Had the Senate voted to address H.R. 2831, Congress could have restored protections for employees subjected to pay discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, and disability. The bill was intended to undo last year’s Supreme Court decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Rubber & Tire Co., in which the court ruled, 5-4, that workers filing suit for pay discrimination must do so within 180 days of their employer’s actual decision to discriminate against them. With its holding, the Supreme Court gave a free pass to employers who can manage to conceal their discriminatory decisions for 180 days.
Recognizing this rollback of civil rights protections, the House passed this crucial legislation in July 2007. Unfortunately, in a move putting politics before people, many members of the Senate blocked this bill from consideration on the merits. In addition, the administration issued a veto threat shortly before the vote.
The battle is not over. The ACLU plans to fight to have this important civil rights measure come before the Senate again this year and, if needed, next year. In a move necessary to bring the bill back up for reconsideration, Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is supportive of the bill, had to switch his vote to “no,” but he and other senators have vowed to bring this vote up again.
Many thanks to those of you who contacted your senators because of our earlier requests. We could not have gotten as far as we did without your help. Find out how your senators voted. If your senator voted the right way, please call them to thank them for their vote and urge them to bring this important bill back to the floor. If your senator did not support the bill, please let them know how disappointed you are that, especially in this time of economic belt-tightening, they did not stand up to help American workers earn fair wages.
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