Linda Silver Dranoff is a precedent-setting lawyer, an empowering author about law, public policy and women’s rights, and a successful feminist activist for equality and family law reform. She is the author of Fairly Equal: Lawyering the Feminist Revolution. Linda has been honoured with the Order of Canada, Order of Ontario and Law Society Medal.
Her latest effort is Fairly Equal: Conversations Toward a Feminist Future - A new web series that looks at today’s threats to women’s equality rights and warns that we cannot take past advances for granted.
Linda begins the conversation by describing how women were viewed by the law well into the 20th century. Women were considered property - effectively owned by their husbands - under the law until the 1970s.
We talk about the many areas women’s rights have advanced in the intervening decades - including progress in bodily autonomy, family law, employment equity, and more. But equality between men and women is still a distant goal. Even though laws pay equity laws have been on the books for four decades with the infrastructure to enforce them, women’s wages have advanced from 64 cents for every dollar men earn to only 68 cents.
Linda concludes our conversation by providing some advice for those coming up in the world who want to continue working towards the goal of equality between the sexes.
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Part the first:
ReplyDeleteIt must really suck for most men never to have had truly consentual, uncoerced sex in their lives! Unless that's what gets them off? In any case, time to double down on the looksmaxxing, guys, because politically, legally, financially free women don't take haircuts, and women find very few men appealing on an NSA (no strings attached) basis...
Choice feminism is bullshit. You are of course free to choose to be tradwives, ladies, but you can't call yourselves feminists if you're dependent on men, given other options. Want to potter around the house all day instead of toiling at a soul-destroying, infantilizing, wage-slave job? Make your nut and quit. But if you're dependent for money on a man, you are buttressing the patriarchy and undermining feminism! Enjoy the Feminine Mystique until you re-discover the Problem Without a Name the hard way!
I love the tautological argument that if we discount all the reasons for which women make less (more likely to work fewer hours, make different career choices, less likely to negotiate hard), they actually make the same as men! Never mind that choices aren't made in a vacuum, and choosing high-paying careers makes no difference if no one will hire or promote you. Or that the free caregiving that men won't do but expect from women cuts into the number of paid hours women can work. Or that women are punished for leaning in unless they're under the protection of powerful men, as Sheryl Sandberg was (didn't you know they were just sucking up to Larry Summers, girl?).
Let me unpack the old chestnut about capitalists always hiring the best people for the least money, when given the opportunity, and therefore if they could get equally/more qualified women for less, they'd only ever hire women: Only if lower women's pay compensated for the real or perceived extra costs of having women in the workplace. If the men on the factory floor, in the mine or in the corporate office make trouble/quiet quit in protest, this is a cost. If women are seen as sexual harrassment distraction/lawsuit timebombs, this is a cost. Mat leave and the mommy track are costs. If clients/customers/competitors won't accept dealing with women, this is a cost. Capitalists pay extra for preferred candidates all the time, and these preferences don't need to be related to how much work gets done on paper, nor how well. And women are never preferred for any job worth having...
Part the second:
DeleteIt's not enough to get half the marital home and half the assets accumulated during the marriage upon divorce - women must have equal control of family resources during the marriage! We are only beginning to pass laws against coercive control, and l would like to see 100% of abusers' assets become forfeit instead of half... In the meantime, all women need to have a secret escape fund that absolutely no one knows about! And to freeze their eggs and withhold babies until they get a fair deal...
Patience and percolation are insufficient without sustained, organized action/pressure over time, but they're necessary, given what we know about how tipping points of change are reached. And the mean girl shit into which women are socialized doesn't help, so understand male negging (brainwashing/browbeating women into believing that they have no value unless they're perfect tens, when the truth is that men find most women broadly appealing on an NSA basis) and develop the wide arms-length networks (with both men and women) that men have. Much has been said recently about men needing more deep friendships with other men of the type women have with other women. Perhaps they do. But it's also true that women need larger networks of superficial contacts with other women, because that's what gets men ahead! Maybe the reason men have few deep male friendships is that these require vulnerability, exposing them to the BFF/enemy mean girl dichotomy, which would leave them exposed while conquering the world or climbing the corporate ladder?
Could we at least tackle some low-hanging rape law fruit immediately? It would be trivial to disallow the unsatisfied men's needs, extreme intoxication and rough sex defenses in criminal trials from a policy perspective. And while the burden of proof must fall on the accuser/prosecutor, it must also be logical. Hence requiring victims of rape to prove they did not consent, when given that this is a negative proposition, it is impossible to do so, is a reductio ad absurdum. Sex is a contract whether we like to admit it or not, and in contract law, when someone is accused in the breach or absence, the burden of proof of the contrary falls on the defense. So prove she consented, fuckers!!!