Bella Abzug |
March 23, 1973
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Bella Abzug
Feminist Movement leader; US Representative (D-NY); Founder, WEDO (Women's Environment and Development Organization)
Good afternoon. You are the largest and the most attractive audience that I've ever spoken to in San Francisco. The last time I was here was in 1948. I was invited to speak on the topic, "Every Issue is a Woman's Issue." And, it was suggested that I could then talk on anything, but it raises some questions.
If a man were invited to address this forum would the topic be "Every Issue is a Man's Issue?" We are, of course, a majority of the population, us women, and there's no escaping us. Naturally, everything that happens in the country affects us just as it affects men. But to paraphrase George Orwell, we are all equal, only some of us are a little less equal than the others. By "us" I mean women, and so it happens that, purely as a matter of self-interest, women tend to feel more strongly about, and to act more vigorously on, the issue of discrimination, which has made us an oppressed majority in this nation, and indeed in all nations.
Ever since our country was formed by our founding forefathers, who rather consistently neglected to mention our foremothers, which neglect led ultimately to turning the founding mothers and the sisters and the wives into non-persons who were really not quite recognized as persons under the Constitution - and ever since then, which means from our beginnings, women have been shut out of the power structure of the United States. I'm glad to see so many of you here today. We have been almost invisible in government at all levels; in the courts, in the legislatures, on the boards of directors of banks and corporations and the executive councils of organized labor, among the elite of the academic world and the churches and, I suspect, even among the guests of The Commonwealth Club. I note that among the 66 distinguished speakers listed in your brochure as having been invited to address you since 1903, only seven are women. So I understand you left a few off. And of these, only three were foreigners.
I hope my presence here indicates that times are changing and the reason is that women are forcing change to take place. It was women who won the women's vote. It is women who are organizing women's political caucuses that helped to elect 20 percent more women to the state legislatures last November and sent five new women to the House of Representatives, including Yvonne Burke of California. There's women who have formed organizations like NOW and the Women's Equity Action League and Women's Political Caucus and other groups to fight for the adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment, to challenge integrated marriage, divorce and abortion laws, to expose inequities in the Social Security system, and to file literally thousands of complaints against employers and business corporations, universities and governments, charging them with denying equal opportunity to women and hiring, pay scales and promotions. Despite the adoption of the Equal Pay Act, it is a fact of American life that a woman earns 60 cents where a man earns a dollar. And a black woman or a Chicana earns even less.
It is, perhaps, in the field of credit where a woman is really made to feel like a non-person. However capable and reliable she may be, she is treated, solely because of her sex, as though she was totally dependent and unreliable when she applies for a loan, consumer credit or a mortgage. If she's married, she receives credit only through her husband. He may be unemployed, unemployable, gone, or even dead. Still she is often forced to get credit in his name. BankAmericard has recently adopted some guidelines, under considerable pressure, for its member banks, which I indicated to them just the other day (we had a big hoopla on this thing sponsored by the Ladies' Home Journal) that they're just guidelines and they have to become mandatory and legislation has to be enacted before we can really expect equal treatment.
I think one of the more quaint examples of the kind of responses women have received, there's one that is one of my favorites, the Equitable Trust Bank in Virginia. When it refuses credit to a woman, lends a note of charm by sending a letter of "congratulations on your marriage" to single cardholders, but spoils it by adding that "we must now delete your account number. Please return your card. Enclosed is an application for your husband." This is a situation I hope to change with equal credit opportunity legislation, which I've introduced into Congress, which seems to have gotten some interest aroused.
As women organize around women's issues, we welcome and frequently get the support of men who believe, as I have frequently said, that what is good for women (and as that fellow from General Motors said) is good for the country. But we don't look essentially to men for leadership or self-sacrifice in the course of equality of sexes. We have 15 women out of 435 members in the House of Representatives. We have a Senate of 100 members, which is now a no-woman's land. I have yet to hear of any incumbent or aspiring male politician who will voluntarily step aside, in his mass professions for equality, to make room in Congress for greater representation of women. Nor do I expect any to do so. "Ladies first" may be the practice in entering revolving doors and elevators, but the revolving doors lead women only into the outer rooms of the political institutions. And the elevators stop before they reach the upper floors of political power.
When men come up against the inevitable arithmetic of the political situation, that more women in the House and Senate means fewer men, idealism moves over for expediency, and we hear talk of a male backlash and audible discontent about so called quota systems. It never fails to amaze me when men, who all their lives existed contentedly with unwritten quotas that have effectively kept women and blacks and other minorities out of political institutions and out of jobs, begin protesting when Affirmative Action programs start letting them in. Then they trot out the charges of quotas and discrimination. It was even implied that women were taking over when they won 40 percent of the delegate seats for the Democratic Convention in Miami and 36 percent to the Republican Convention. Even though that still left 60 or more percent for men and even though the 40 percent and other of women came from a great variety of backgrounds and were supporting a variety of candidates.
Some of the more psychologically oriented feminists will tell you that we are all victims of our sexist society - men and women. Like women, men may be trapped at the stereotyped sex roles that cripple their personalities, suppress their natural talents, imprison them in demeaning relationships, and impose false values upon them - like this missile mystique.
Actually, I think that when we look at our society we see that it is not only sexist, it is also racist. It is still basically militarist. Right now we remain half in and half out of the war in Indochina, with the president even now hinting at bombing reprisals against the Vietnamese. It is a society dominated by a corporate power structure, as some of you here might know, that has a life-long devoted friend in the White House - not only at Chase Manhattan, and representatives strategically placed throughout the administration, and if you know what the plans are for the future, everywhere else. We see a society in which the rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, and lower middle class is being driven to the wall by inflation and wildly rising food prices. Today, many people accept, without much question, that we live in an affluent society, compared to other nations. The United States has the largest gross national product: more cars, more TVs, more phones than the rest of the world combined, sometimes more audiences. We eat more, spend more and, if you believe the TV ads, our only real problems are which model of car to buy, or which airline to use to fly off to a glorious vacation. By the way, we don't encourage women to be pilots. But in one of the more insulting and suggestive TV commercials, women can pretend to be airplanes, and invite men to fly them.
Those are the so-called happy problems. But millions of Americans have very real problems of just getting along. Among them are working women, who on average are at the bottom of the pay scale. Working people, in general, migrant farm workers, from five to eight million unemployed, especially the ghetto youth women and children on welfare rolls. And millions of senior citizens - most of whom live on average Social Security benefits of $50 a week. Production workers whose supposedly greedy and insatiable demands for higher wages were blamed for the rising cost of living were in fact earning, before taxes mind you, just $133.73 a week in 1970. The year before President Nixon ordered the wage freeze. That added up to about $6,800 a year. At the same time, the United States Bureau of Statistics was reporting that a family of four in an average American city needed a yearly income of $10,971 to maintain what was described as a moderately decent and healthy standard of living. That $4,000 gap in income explains why more and more married women are working. Like women who are single or who are heads of families, and those are the poorest families, they work not for self-fulfillment, but just to put food on the table and to pay the rent.
More than 40 percent of our workforce are women. I know that the popular myth is that we're supposed to be in the home - women's place is in the home. As a matter of fact, as a result of that when I first ran for office in 1970, I said, "This woman's place is in the House - the House of Representatives." The workforce of women are used primarily as a source of cheap labor. One union has estimated that industry saves at least $19 billion a year by discriminating against women, paying them less than men for doing the same work, or shunting them into lower paying job categories.
Meanwhile, this administration has served their masters well. Profits have been rising sharply since 1971. According to BusinessWeek, after tax profits for 1972, we'll probably hit a new high of $53 billion - 15 percent more than in 1971. In the auto industry, for example, profits were up 42 percent compared with the 7.8 percent increase in wages. Lumber and wood products industry profits around 65.5 percent. While wages were held to a 5.5 percent - the precise wage freeze formula imposed by the Nixon administration.
The result of such gross inequities is the gross maldistribution of income. Forty-five percent of all American families get 73 percent of the nation's total income. A majority, that is 55 percent, are left to share 27 percent of all income. The economic power of conglomerates rose in all directions. In any industry or product line, no matter how unrelated, the single guideline is profit. In the past 25 years we have seen the startling rise to economic supremacy of American based multinational companies and banks that operate subsidiaries and branches in foreign countries. They control about 60 billion American dollars in Europe and about 20 billion American dollars in Japan. They go abroad in search of cheap labor and untaxed profits and they don't give a damn if they leave behind in America, ghost manufacturing towns, workers without jobs and ordinary taxpayers carrying the tax load that they avoid.
These giant U.S.-based multinationals, as well as foreign companies and speculators who hold dollars, were responsible for the run on the dollar that occurred in the summer of 1971 and again last month. They began dumping dollars and buying other currencies. In cold fact, U.S. corporations put profits ahead of patriotism, selling their own country's currency in order to make fast profits and leaving American consumers with the burden of paying higher prices resulting from the dollar devaluation. Took a long time.
Now, I would like you to think back over the past four years and recall whether you ever heard President Nixon talk about any of this. Perhaps you'll say, thank God he didn't, it's so dull. It's unfortunate that listening to facts about profits, wages, multinational corporations and the economic exploitation of women can be so tedious. But I would suggest that I have been talking about the reality of American life.
While President Nixon is talking insulting drivel when he lectures us about the work ethic at the same time that his policies create unemployment; when he advises self-reliance even as he continues to pamper big business and the Pentagon; when he says the only alternative to his $12 billion slash in social programs is a general tax increase, even though he knows that closing up the tax privilege loopholes used by big business, the rich, the multinational corporations, could bring in billions of dollars.
According to George Meany - and you know he was neutral for Nixon - if we closed up those tax loopholes, we would have an additional $29 billion, enough to continue social programs and overcome our budget deficit. Philip Stern in his remarkable book The Rape of the Taxpayer estimates that tax favoritism, or what he calls 'welfare for the rich,' is costing us $77 billion a year. Because of these loopholes, we ordinary people pay not just our own taxes, but the taxes of someone like John Paul Getty. He almost pays no taxes himself, even though he makes $300,000 a day. The celebrated International Telephone and Telegraph Company, you may have noticed in the headlines, which treats the White House, the State Department, the Justice Department and the CIA like wholly-owned subsidiaries, paid less than $5 million in taxes to the federal government in 1971, compared with nearly 139 million to foreign governments. When they first made their $400,000 contribution to President Nixon's campaign fund I said, well, what would you expect? I mean, I suppose, you know, if I had $400,000, I might run the government for them, too. And then I used to go on and say, some friends of mine would ask me "When do you suppose IT&T is going to recognize Bangladesh?" The truth is I didn't know how truthful that funny remark of mine was until the other day, in the testimony before the Senate in their efforts to determine what should happen in another government with the use of our CIA. Incidentally, in 1970 ITT chairman Harold S. Geneen was the nation's highest paid corporate executive, with a salary plus bonus of more than $766,000. In 1971 - President Nixon's wage-price controls notwithstanding - he was awarded an increase to more than $812,000. No wonder that IT&T and Mr. Geneen have so much money to throw around and they seem to know in which direction to throw it.
Apparently, the Nixon administration wastes very little time worrying about Mr. Ganeen's self-reliance and no time at all thinking about tax reform but it has the lights burning in the Office of Management and Budget for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and Housing and Urban Development as administration management men, fired from corporations, figure out how to squeeze more from those who have the least - that 55 percent of the population that I was talking about earlier.
The current battle of the budget in which we in Congress are engaged is focused around several major issues. The president has proposed $4 billion increase or more in the military budget. We think it should be cut considerably and this is one of the proposals in the counter-budget being developed by liberals in Congress. The president is unconstitutionally impounding from $12 billion to $18 billion in funds appropriated by Congress for housing, economic development, water pollution and other social programs. Lawsuits have been filed challenging the constitutionality of this action. We are also pushing legislation that would prevent the president from impounding money.
And finally, there is the president's proposed dismantling of social programs to save about $12 billion. I say proposed, but in fact, the administration is already shutting down these programs without waiting for Congressional action. No milk for school lunches, no more rent subsidies or money for housing, Title I education funds slashed, neighborhood health centers closed down, mental health programs abandoned, basic medical research and post-graduate health training cutbacks, fewer youth jobs this summer, model cities, community action and poverty programs dumped, more money squeezed out of the elderly for Medicare. Nixon is even cutting back rural electrification, the New Deal program that brought electric power to the poor farmer and washing machines to his over-burdened wife. These cuts certainly affect poor people. They affect women, they affect the elderly, the handicapped and veterans. They also affect millions of other Americans. A sharp cutback in mental health funds and medical research touches all people. The freezing of funds for water and sewer projects will be felt most acutely in suburban communities, particularly in new developments. The freezing of funds for anti-pollution projects will impair the quality of the air we all breathe and the water we all drink.
The cutback in housing will eliminate at least as much new middle-income housing as low-income housing and will also mean fewer jobs for construction workers who are already suffering from one of the highest rates of unemployment in the nation: 9.7 percent. And this week on the Public Works Committee, of which I am a member, I've been hearing about the problems of how we can find a way to have decent transit in this country, not only highways, but highways and public transit systems. And we have the funds impounded in the highway trust fund and in any effort that is made to get mass transit funds in the existing act.
Perhaps the cruelest cut of all is aimed at the ten million working mothers, elderly, handicapped, and others who received childcare and other social services under Title IV of the Social Security program. This is being done in a rather sneaky way. Last year a $2.5 billion federal ceiling was imposed on these social services expenditures. That in itself created tremendous talk to so many people. Now the Health, Education and Welfare Department under Casper Weinberger is proposing new regulations that would deprive about three million people of these services and slice more than a billion dollars off that already inadequate ceiling. Think of it, a government that gives one tax break after another to the super rich is telling a working woman with a few kids that if she earns more than $5,400 a year, she is too rich and she can't send her youngsters to a subsidized daycare center. Her alternatives are to find a lower paying job, give up her job and go on welfare, or to leave her kids in makeshift arrangements. We have been working on this problem and I hope you'll all write to Casper Weinberger, and he's moving back with a little honor.
The other day I read an article in The New York Times about the men around President Nixon - Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Ziegler - their names, views and faces seem interchangeable. The article describes them as technicians, systems-oriented managers, administrators and advertising men. The kind of men who regard budgets as holy writ and computer printouts as life guides. They also have, says the article, short hair and are male chauvinists. That, apparently, is a revelation to the Times, but certainly not to those of us in Washington who have observed the Nixon administration and operation on such women's issues as childcare, health services, affirmative action programs and job opportunities. According to the Times, the Nixon men see themselves as just like the majority of Americans. Of course, the majority happen to be women. But we'll let that pass. I, emphatically, reject the claim that these soul-less technicians and corporation graduates represent either the needs or the aspirations of a majority of Americans - men or women. Behind the carefully cultivated facade of middle American value that this administration presents to the public - John Wayne movies, country music, football and Billy Graham sermons, I don't know where Bebe Rebozo fits into this, but somewhere - exists the philosophy and a power structure that is single-hearted in its devotion to the needs of big business and the military establishment, and that with all the short-sightedness of Calvin Coolidge or a Herbert Hoover neglects the needs of ordinary Americans. And you know what happened when they were around.
This is the issue that is at the core of what has been variously called the constitutional crisis and the budget crisis. President Nixon is seeking and gathering extraordinary power - far beyond those authorized by the Constitution - to prevent Congress from interfering with his economic, social and military policy. He is declaring his entire staff, both past and present, out of reach of congressional inquiry. He is intimidating the press and TV into silence, or at least a more acquiescent position. He is transforming the Supreme Court into his own image. Did you ever stop to think about this? We're almost going to be 200 years old and never once in the history of this country has there been a woman on the Supreme Court bench, albeit that bench metes out justice day in and day out to more than a majority of people who are women. When we raised this issue in the Congress, the women in Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, the president said he couldn't find a woman who was good enough. I have always answered to that, he couldn't find a woman who was bad enough.
He is substituting what he calls "efficiency" for what we call "democracy." I think he is interpreting his re-election as a mandate for reaction. I believe his objective is to bring us 1984 by 1976, to saddle us with a legacy of one-man rule, and possibly, one-party control. Whether he succeeds will be determined by the Congress and the American people. Right now the mood in Congress is very angry. Whether it will maintain that fighting mood right down to the finish and force President Nixon to back down depends ultimately on how angry the people get and on the kind of political leadership we can expect.
I am not going to excuse Congress, of course I wasn't there. Not having had a share of power it's much easier for women to see what could be done. But the fact is, that although Congress for a long time did advocate its power, it has suddenly turned around and found that it's impotent. And you know what a shock that is to discover that you're impotent. And once they've come over that shock there is a real determination and an anger to restore constitutional government to this country. Because no matter how you put it, it's not true, and it can't be, that in this great democracy of ours, to take the hard-earned tax dollars of the people in this country and to take the elected representatives, to whom the people of this country have entrusted these hard-earned tax dollars so that they could appropriate the needed programs that they need with that, no matter how you put it, when a president impounds the billions of dollars that he is impounding, he is really saying, forget those things, they don't belong to you, they belong to me. And indeed in the Constitution of the United States, the president has no such power. His power is merely to faithfully execute the law as we in the Congress enact it. And in so doing, he is saying to the American people, I don't believe in the constitutional form of government. And more and more, these executive actions of impoundment - the assertion of executive privilege on your right to know and the right of the Congress to know - is a major threat, not to a little bit of nicety. I mean, if some of you think that the Watergate scandal is a matter of Macy's spying on Gimbel's, you're wrong. It was essentially a very serious political intrusion and invasion and a subversion of the democratic process. And what is at stake in this country, be you a Democrat or a Republican, is the survival of democratic institutions themselves. And I come all the way out here to The Commonwealth Club, where I may or may not be liked, to make that message and to bring that message.
I bring this message because I believe that the effect of these policies, these budget cuts, these political intrusions upon democracy itself can be changed. And it is important that it be changed for all levels of the population, not only poor people and working people and women and minorities, but people in middle income and indeed those interested in the business sector of our life. No one can suggest that this is a healthy economy in which we find ourselves. Not even my husband, Martin, who is sitting over there and who's in the stock market, would tell you that. We're going to get him. In any case, I believe that whether you're in the city or in the countryside, in the rural area or the suburbs, that what is at stake - whether you're white or poor or black or Chicano - is the question of fighting for all of the people in this country. Fighting to make democracy work for all of the people. We are the biggest country, the greatest country, we have the largest number of resources, the greatest tradition of democracy. We have to put together a very natural coalition of people, regardless of party and their class and their race, to fight together for this great country. This issue is, indeed, a woman's issue, it is a man's issue. It is an issue for all Americans who believe that our nation should not be the private preserve of the rich, but a country that indeed belongs to all of us. Thank you.
Generously funded by:
Tom Campbell
Dee Dee Myers