O Washington
Jones, Arthur
O WASHINGTON Arthur Jones Politics for the Post-ERA Era The Equal Rights Amendment failed. But that didn't affect the quality of the bread at the Women's Community Bakery on Seventh Street SE in...
...Defeat came from a coalition that included virulent anti-communists too morally self-righteous to be called bedfellows...
...It says much for those at 201 Massachusetts Avenue NE that they intend to tackle the issue head-on...
...The scenario for the Administration's social policies could have been written for the Grand Guignol...
...There is a savagery and greed in the White House and Cabinet little short of lust...
...Women's movement supporters needing a morale boost should organize a good old-fashioned medieval style pilgrimage to Hollywood-on-the-Potomac...
...or that such network as it had lacked cohesion and leadership...
...antitrust's William Baxter permits price fixing...
...There's the self-explanatory Women's Christian Temperance Union and Women in Communications, Inc...
...The morning mixer is the heartbeat of the day's dough flow, if not cash flow...
...But blood theater transcends this into the absurd...
...WSP tries...
...McClendon's a NWP national council member...
...Sixty-five years ago, Alice Paul would ask the all-male press to withdraw...
...That's the view from the women's collective...
...none of them is now connected with it...
...Looking that far ahead puts defeat in perspective...
...Hagerty did not believe there was factual coverage five years ago...
...Women's Community Bakery, 202546-7944...
...What impact, for example, might the Equal Rights Amendment or the antinuclear movement or national health insurance have on the public mind if the proponents actually had the time and space to make their case...
...As a way station on the Washington pilgrimage, the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press is a provocative place...
...House conferees bow to pressure and approve nerve gas and MX production...
...We were angry," said Lynn Saoirse from behind the counter, "but we expected it...
...But the ideals are fixed: All permanent members of the collective (they do not live together...
...opposing the Clinch River Breeder Reactor and human rights certification for El Salvador...
...When Women Strike for Peace attempts to raise questions of sanity, what now can be said to attract attention to the lunatics...
...And they're overflowing with life at 201 Massachusetts Avenue NE, in a handsome red brick building...
...In August this year, a women-in-ministry parley in Saint Paul, Minnesota, excluded male reporters...
...Paul's legacy—she died only five years ago—is in the pin...
...In other words, the media should allow people— women—to take their case to the public in their own words...
...Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification...
...Defeat showed that while the women's movement had the guts and the votes, it didn't have the network...
...There is nothing hidden at the bustling old building on Seventh Street SE...
...certainly because there is a core of women in Washington who have what it takes to make a one-year commitment to a women's collective...
...No need to wait for the Chicago Tribune findings any longer: There was a decrease over five years in the number of ERA stories the Tribune ran...
...At Sewall-Belmont and NWP they don't forget it took McClendon-style militancy to get the Nineteenth Amendment passed...
...Men with a hammerlock on the better jobs and experience have the economic advantage...
...Even the marble and ivory doesn't disguise the rough message—some causes are worth dying for...
...Three women started the bakery...
...Constitution: Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex...
...And the answers may yield some fine clues to the future...
...NWP is often in the news somehow...
...Reach this Jeanne d'Arc and one has already walked by an honor guard of busts that includes Susan B. Anthony and Lucre-da Mott ("mother of the movement for the emancipation of women...
...The director wants the whole approach to communications changed...
...What we await is how...
...For example, the souvenirs include pins modeled on the jail door that held Paul and her fellow suffragists in 1917...
...Incidentally, pilgrims are asked to call ahead if they do decide on a NWP, WSP, Institute, and Bakery tour...
...Yes, I wanted ERA to pass...
...the Post Office promises post-holocaust mail delivery...
...For what Joe McCarthy did with "ideology," the anti-ERA sorts did with "morality"—distort, smear, and scare...
...the unemployed are nameless, formless, feelingless makeweights in a national bookkeeping game...
...It is early hours and long days...
...This mansion is Alice Paul's spiritual home...
...If WSP is active, it's also been pausing for breath...
...Here's a quick four-stop O Washington pilgrimage to some women's organizations...
...But in so doing, the anti-ERA forces identified something going on in America, a new Mc-Carthyism of sorts...
...The fact that they have to be a women's collective—in addition to their preference for working with women—comes all the way around to the economic rights ERA seeks...
...Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article...
...Their standing-room-only offices are a hodge-podged archive of WSP activities since then...
...Washington's political immorality can be discussed nowadays only in terms of the Administration's deliberate transgressions against the American people...
...Alice Paul's commitment to women's rights was lodged under her skin...
...In most organizations, men get the better jobs and women do not have a chance to gain experience...
...But the Women's Strike for Peace on Massachusetts Avenue NE gave a collective sniff of disgust and kept its nose to the nuclear millstone hanging around humankind's neck while gearing up its July-August Legislative Alert...
...The house is headquarters to the National Woman's Party, an arm of the suffragist movement well aware that the fight didn't end when women gained the vote in 1920...
...Pilgrims could keep a ready question on their lips as they move from one stop to the next: "After ERA, what...
...she was talking about improvement from whatever the level was...
...Why, then, has the bakery—think of it as the Women's "Community Bakery" rather than the "Women's Community" Bakery— survived for seven years...
...Yet the task that can't be avoided is to prevent Reagan from embarking on a "war to the death...
...It stems from her belief that "media owners give us the information they think it is important for us to know...
...It still happens...
...It has to be woven tighter—the opposition is formidable, for it had less to do with anti-ERA women than with those who actually defeated the Equal Rights Amendment: the Reagan-supporting, male-dominant, Nouveau Riche-Nouveau Right, creationist fundamentalists...
...Yet it's possible...
...The rest of the house is given over to offices...
...And here is pin money with a difference: Its sales support the Alice Paul ERA Fund...
...As the last stop on the pilgrimage, the Women's Community Bakery is the place to recall that the work for equality can begin wherever one happens to be...
...Allen's five-bedroom house on Ross Place, a tree-shaded and quiet spot scarcely an extension cord from a bustling thoroughfare, is five-bedrooms no more...
...the poor are uniformly "undeserving...
...And, as the Congressional Committee became the Congressional Union, and that the National Woman's Party, the work never stopped...
...The Women's Community Bakery...
...Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press, 202-9667783...
...Regarding the Reagan-Weinberger "Defense Guidance" plan to wage space-based real war against the Soviet Union while fighting a military, political, and economic war on Earth, WSP asks: "Is it possible that the Reagan Administration can still bandy about that worn-out phrase, 'We can't trust the Russians,' when the Administration is blatantly ignoring the international accords which have been such fine first steps toward a sane policy on space...
...WSP is supporting draft registration re-sisters and the freeze...
...Long, hard, heavy, sweaty work...
...The artifacts, books, and brochures serve to remind that woman's suffrage was a decades-old issue in this our favored land even before Alice Paul began the Congressional Committee in 1913...
...It's alive with women's groups: political, promotional, educational, social, financial...
...But that didn't affect the quality of the bread at the Women's Community Bakery on Seventh Street SE in Washington...
...But the stately Sewall-Belmont House on Capitol Hill swung open its doors as usual...
...The collective, however, is not totally involved in the ERA struggle...
...It would take a man, a Pollyar-thur, to find some good in the defeat of ERA...
...Possibly because it is a collective—the jobs are rotated every three months if possible...
...A scarlet-covered eight dollars' worth...
...James Watt defaces the nation's interior...
...As a shrine should, it reinforces belief by invoking historical references...
...Allen's operation attempts to whittle away at an entrenched institution's owner-calls-the-shots prerogatives...
...And the Sewall-Belmont House, a mansion on Capitol Hill, is a shrine to commitment and love and grief and women's issues...
...So WSP had a summer gathering to sharpen the focus of whatever must come next...
...ERA failed...
...When they tell about us, they are not giving our information but their information about us, reflecting their views about us...
...They've marked twenty-one years since they gained notoriety with an out-on-the-streets strike against housework, cooking, and conjugal sex to bring attention to the worries and risks from airborne nuclear testing...
...Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press...
...Out of deference to the Institute's Hagerty article, this segment of the pilgrimage closes with all three sections of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S...
...A Washington pilgrimage can prove that women's economic and civil rights issues are not simply alive and well, but have a strong head of steam...
...Which, in spite of the reintroduction of legislation for an Equal Rights Amendment, may have left some pro-ERA forces deflated...
...One has to consider the enormity of the Reagan Administration's pathological anti-commonweal cynicism to realize why WSP has paused...
...That good is offered here, for what it's worth...
...There's the Women's Institute for Limitless Living (career achievement, personal development) and the Women and Health Roundtable (coalition of women in the health field concerned with population planning, local medical care delivery, midwifery...
...The media, to Donna Allen, director of the Institute she started ten years ago, "do not mirror society...
...More, the McClendon confrontation should have reminded Reagan and the nation of what such NWP predecessors as Me-linda Scott, Women's Trade Union League president, reminded a Washington, D.C, mass meeting in 1914: "Men legislating as a class for women and children have done exactly what every other ruling class has done since the history of the world...
...Women Strike for Peace, 202-543-2660...
...ERA failed...
...First, the shrine: National Woman's Party...
...We kept right on baking...
...They represent only the owners' views...
...She would rather "the public obtain the information of the majority" by having "people speak for themselves...
...There's the Women's National Bank (founded in 1978, assets $17 million), and the Woman-to-Woman in Washington newsletter (promotes women in the arts...
...Said Saoirse, "We're a bit more radical than that...
...But I do believe that the entire fabric of women's rights will be woven tighter because of this summer's defeat...
...The woman who first introduced the Equal Rights Amendment was committed to organize, organize, organize, fight, fight, fight...
...Discriminate...
...Even if one's fingers just do the walking in the white pages of the D.C...
...I sleep in an attic," she said...
...one of the present group of ten is married) learn how to run every aspect of the business...
...But the women's movement hasn't...
...Some elements of the women's movement provided grist for the anti-ERA millers to magnify and grossly distort...
...The Times of London called WSP "the first blow of the living against the dead...
...Women Strike for Peace...
...Anyone who knows baking knows it isn't all great oven odors and tapping crusty bread out of tins...
...ERA failed...
...no, like the young women in the bakery, I didn't think it would...
...Five years ago, in eighty-one ERA pieces published during 1977 by The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, not once was the amendment quoted to explain its intent...
...But on Ross Place NW, a quiet cove in residential Washington, the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press was pulling together the July-August issue of Media Report to Women, which documents media oversights and insults, announces jobs in journalism open to women, and suggests master's thesis and doctoral dissertation topics appropriate for young scholars on the subscription list...
...Lynn Saoirse produced the work manual and the articles of incorporation, and does the accounts: Sales of $240,000 are projected for the current fiscal year...
...NWP's Sewall-Belmont House, 202-546-1210...
...Straight in through the black door and one walks smack into Joan of Arc...
...Only once in 1977 and once in 1981 was Section 1 of the ERA quoted...
...the Internal Revenue Service simplifies post-holocaust tax rates...
...It wasn't subtle...
...From these offices stream such compendiums as the Directory of Women's Media for 1982, a listing of all women's periodicals, presses, and publishers, even library collections on women, and arts, graphics, theater, and writers' groups...
...It is that pent-up energy, not dissipated when ERA fell, that's the best guarantee for ERA-one-more-round-and-we-really-must-win...
...telephone directory, two dozen organizations spring off the page without even benefit of a turn to the "national" listings (National Women's Employment Project, National Women's Health Network...
...Hardly surprising, then, that the current Media Report to Women has an article in which Sandra Hagerty "focused on whether or not the media [in this case the Chicago Tribune] has improved its factual coverage of the Equal Rights Amendment during the past five years...
...ERA failed...
...One antidote to feeling crushed or forsaken is Washington...
...Remember reporter Sarah McClendon recently doing battle in a prime-time press conference with President Reagan about female harassment in the Federal Government and the military...
Vol. 46 • October 1982 • No. 10
