Web Letters | The Nation

The War on Women's Futures

Women and collective bargaining rights

Besides abortion rights, few commentators have noticed that limiting collective bargaining rights for public employees disproportionately affects women, since they make up the vast majority of nurses, a significant majority of teachers and a significant percentage of other public employees. Your article made reference to it, but it would be good if much more emphasis could be place on this aspect of the “War on Women” being conducted by the Republican Party with the help of some so-called Democrats.

William Morgan

Shippensburg, PA

Mar 25 2011 - 12:49pm

The War on Women's Futures

What they're afraid of

As a professional actress, I tour nationally with a 1912 script (by Suffragist Marie Jenney Howe) called “Someone Must Wash the Dishes: An Anti-Suffrage Satire.” Howe used a term now so obscure that my audiences rarely even request a definition: “Race Suicide.” Having heard Melissa Harris-Perry interviewed on NPR, and subsequently reading her column “The War on Women’s Futures,” I plan to volunteer that definition at each future performance. I knew the early-twentieth-century white majority feared woman suffrage would reduce the number of “real” Americans in proportion to the more-propagative immigrants. I hadn’t before realized how frighteningly that fear is reflected in the rhetoric of today’s Tea Party House members.

Michele LaRue

Secaucus, NJ

Mar 9 2011 - 12:25am