Page 59 - ECOlogic Book

“Woman did not receive the constitutional right to vote in the United States
of America until 1920. Iroquois women had always possessed suffrage, as
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the early feminists well knew.”

The important role for women in government, a key element in the Great
Law, was a major omission in the U.S. Constitution. National events in the
past year have shown how crucial an omission it was.

And this is where Pan comes in. This year, 70 women ran for office in
Michigan’s primaries, and women are running for U.S. congress in record
numbers. Many say this is in response to the Thomas/Hill fiasco past year,
where it became abundantly clear that women do not hold positions of real
power in this country. “For women, the focus on the Thomas hearings
shifted from ‘Is he qualified?’ to ‘Who is making the decisions in this
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country?”

While Thomas/Hill may have been the catalyst, in a recent U. S. News and
World Report poll, 51% of all women voters felt the Thomas-Hill controversy
will be important in deciding their vote), I think it goes deeper than that. I
believe this volcano began to rumble quietly during the Iraq war. Many
women who had never before questioned the judgment of the men in their
lives were quietly horrified to see the exuberance with which they embraced
this war. Certainly I don’t want t imply that all men loved this war. Many
did not. Yet, while I haven’t seen any polls that reveal a gender gap on the
Iraq war, I believe there was one and it was large.

Never before had it been so plain that war is a male game. Where were the
women when congress was deciding to go to war? Where were the women
commentators, the women investigative reporters, the women “authorities”
who were interviewed on TV during those incredible three months? Women
were so conspicuously absent from the entire process that an interstellar
viewer of prime time TV might have concluded at that time that this was a
culture in which there were no women.

The war also highlighted how different the concerns of women are from
those of men. Women, as a group, have a higher priority for health care
and education. They tend to be “more liberal on nuclear power and the

71 IBID.

72 Woods, Harriet, “Opportunities Amid the Anger”, June, 1992 Detroit News, quoted in The National Voter.

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