A Look at Women and Unemployment
Cover Story
William J. Davis, SJ, Joe Roos 2-01-1986
The far-reaching tentacles of the U.S. surveillance network.
The Editors 2-01-1985
Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 1985. EYEPRESS via Reuters Connect
Sojourners interviewed Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and archbishop of the Anglican Church in Johannesburg, South Africa by phone on December 24, 1984.
Joyce Hollyday 11-01-1984
At a women's meeting in Sojourners Community a few years ago, we were discussing the vulnerability that we feel as women in an inner-city Washington, D.C. neighborhood.
"It's easiest to be friendly to children, and also easy to be warm to women and older people. But when I see a young man coming toward me, I feel myself closing in. I'm never sure whether to smile or speak or look right past him. I usually just look at the ground."
This comment got us sharing with one another the encounters that had brought us face to face with our own fears and powerlessness, and which had left us with a lamentable posture of vigilance in a neighborhood that we call home.
Each of us had experienced verbal assaults on the street. Some of these were violent, others couched as invitations—and all were aimed at our integrity.
Some women spoke of places that still held fearful memories: a bus stop where an exhibitionist once approached, a bank of shrubbery from which a man shouting obscenities emerged, a corner on which an attempted rape was fought off. We shared experiences from other times and settings: an inappropriate examination by a male doctor in the D.C. jail after a peace witness arrest, sexual advances from a college professor, a rape in an apartment and another behind a house. And we added to our own experiences those of other women we knew.
Ginny Soley 11-01-1984
Statistics indicate that violence against women is on the increase—across all class and color lines. It is not clear, however, whether the statistics reflect an actual increase in the number of incidents of violence or an increase in the reporting of such incidents. Some people think that the rise may even reflect the ongoing clarification of what constitutes an act of violence.
One example of this kind of clarification is a crime that is sometimes referred to as "soft rape." Clearly a misnomer, the term is used to describe a woman being coerced or forced into having sex with a man with whom she has a relationship. While this kind of male aggression has been considered normal and even expected in the past, women increasingly are reporting such experiences to rape crisis centers, and those occurrences are reflected appropriately in the statistics.
While sexual violence may in fact be increasing, it is also true that such violence is being brought to public attention as never before. Thanks to the women's movement, what was once considered "private violence" is becoming a matter of public knowledge and concern.
At the same time, psychological testing and research are revealing that what were once considered the psychotic thoughts and behavior of a handful of deeply disturbed men are the attitudes and actions of many men who are considered normal by all other criteria. In one study of thousands of men conducted by Neil Malamuth of the University of California at Los Angeles and Edward Donnerstein of the University of Wisconsin, only one-third of the men said there was no possibility that they would be violent toward women. Sixty-six percent were found to have what the researchers called a "conquest mentality" toward women that might result in violence.
Liane Rozzell 11-01-1984
Women in almost every culture and segment of society experience violence—from both individuals and institutions—that is directed specifically at them as women. In the United States, women of color—Hispanic, Afro-American, Asian, and Native American—experience violence that is specifically focused against them because of both their race and their gender. When misogynist violence combines with racism, the result is a unique and deadly threat to women of oppressed races.
Throughout the world, and especially in war, rape has been an instrument of racial conquest and oppression. Groups of men from one race have attacked women of races they deemed inferior. The toll has included Jewish women who were raped by German troops, Chinese women raped by Japanese soldiers, Bengali women raped by Pakistani soldiers, Native American women raped by white settlers, Afro-American women raped and terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan and other groups, and Vietnamese women raped by U.S. soldiers. These systematic attacks on women often included mutilation and murder, and they were part of a general pattern of terrorism against the population involved.
In these cases, the racist underpinnings of the assaults are beyond doubt. The attacks against women represented an extreme humiliation of the race to which they belonged. Women, in the minds of their attackers, were either property to be sabotaged or subhuman because they belonged to an enemy race.
Susan Brownmiller, in her book Against Our Will, quotes a Vietnam war veteran who in a panel discussion described the systematic rapes that were conducted by U.S. troops under the pretext of "searching" Vietnamese women. After the veteran described the mutilation and murder of one particular woman, the moderator asked him, "Did the men in your outfit, or when you witnessed these things, did they seem to think it was all right to do anything to the Vietnamese?" The veteran replied, "It wasn't like they were humans … They were a gook or a Commie and it was okay."
Louise M. Garrison 11-01-1984
This has been written in tears: Tears of a 4-year-old who doesn't understand what Daddy is doing. Tears of a 6-year-old who is told, "It won't hurt much longer." Tears of an eight-year-old who is told, "Stop crying it doesn't hurt any more," or, "If you don't stop crying, I'll give you something to cry about." Tears of a 10-year-old who hears, "If you don't do this to help me, I'll leave; and then you, your mother, and your brother will have no food or place to live." Tears of a 12-year-old girl who prays that God won't make her pregnant (and prays that prayer for seven more years). Tears of a 14-year-old who prays that God will wipe her father off the earth.
Incest is the subject I have more knowledge of than any other. It is also the subject that is the most difficult to write about. By so doing, I leave myself exposed, stripped of all pretenses of who or what I am, and therefore, totally vulnerable. But so vividly do I remember the abuse, so strongly do I understand the need to feel affirmed as a child of God, and so powerfully am I moved by the Spirit of God, that I am persuaded to bring light to a crime that must be an abomination unto God.
Most children, it seems, know little about fear. As a parent, I do everything in my power to protect my son from fearful situations. I suspect other parents do likewise.
But fear is a state of being that an abused child knows intimately. An abused child lives in fear created by someone who professes to love him or her.
Judy Webb 11-01-1984
My heart quakes within me,
and the terrors of death have fallen upon me.
Fear and trembling have come over me,
and horror overwhelms me.
And I said, "Oh, that I had wings like a dove!
I would fly away and be at rest
I would flee to a far-off place
and make my lodging in the wilderness."
For had it been an adversary who taunted me, then I could have borne it;
or had it been an enemy who vaunted himself against me,
then I could have hidden from him.
But it was you, a man after my own heart,
my companion, my own familiar friend.
We took sweet counsel together,
and walked with the throng in the house of God.
My companion stretched forth his hand against his comrade;
he has broken his covenant.
—Psalm 55:5-8, 12-14, 20
Two policemen were standing on the elevator. I stepped on, wondering what had brought them to my apartment building. A robbery, a rape—"What happened?" I asked.
"Just a domestic," one of them replied assuringly. Just a domestic. In the shelter for battered women where I had lived and worked, "just a domestic" meant black eyes and disfigured faces, broken bones and traumatized children. Sometimes it means a miscarriage, maybe even a woman's death.
I cannot think of this violence—violence against women that takes place at home—without remembering women I have known: Anna, Barbara, Linda. I think of how they suffered, how God suffered with them, and how often those around them stood by in silence.