|
With an increasing number of groups using the month of March not only to teach about women who have contributed to the historical development of the United States but also to our country's current and future development, National Women's History Month has really become National Women's Recognition Month (h/t to a commenter who mentioned this phrase on The Confluence). If we lived in a fully equitable and fair country, we would not have the need to set aside a single month in which to note women's contributions - noting women's contributions would be as commonplace as noting men's. We don't live in that society yet. So, as with all contemporary social justice and civil rights movements it is essential that we each and all use National Women's Month as an opportunity to remind ourselves and others that the fight for the full recognition of women as equal citizens continues.
 For 2009, The National Women's History Project has honored many women who will be remembered by history but who are working now in myriad ways that deserve recognition. Learn about the honorees here. The 2009 theme is Women Taking the Lead to Save Our Planet, and I personally was pleased to see that once again Hillary Rodham Clinton's name appears among a long list of other women:
"Hillary Rodham Clinton
b. 1947
Secretary of State
New York USA
While serving in the United States Senate, Senator Clinton worked to secure federal legislation to protect the environment both on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee and as the senior Democrat on the Fisheries, Wildlife and Water subcommittee. She co-sponsored the Petroleum Consumer Price Gouging Protection Act and Close the Enron Loophole Act to enable the President to declare an energy emergency and trigger federal gouging protections. http://www.ontheissues.org/hillary_clinton.htm#Environment
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Hillary_Rodham_Clinton"
But as pleasing as it is to me to see Secretary of State Clinton recognized for actions she took serving in the Senate, the entire list of women honored and their respective accomplishments make me proud.
I have repeatedly stated that my desire to see Hillary Rodham Clinton elected president was not rooted in the fact that she is a woman; but that the way she and her supporters were treated because she is a woman has galvanized me to do whatever I can to see that women's emancipation becomes a reality. Whenever I read the lists of what women have accomplished, I realize how important it is that we create a world in which the deck is not stacked against women - imagine how much more might get accomplished. |
|
 (Left, Judge Morgen Christen.)
Yesterday, Governor Sarah Palin announced the appointment of Anchorage Superior Court Judge Morgan Christen to the high court in Alaska. Judge Christen will be just the second woman named to the high court in the 50 years since statehood. Some will emphasize the Sarah Palin angle of this story, because of differences between Christen's social values and Palin's. But to me, that is not the big part of the story. The big part of the story is that even in a state with a relatively small population, there was a woman jurist about whom any Governor, regardless of her or his own ideology, could say would make an outstanding state Supreme Court judge.
"Alaska's Supreme Court bears the awesome responsibility of ensuring that our court system administers justice in firm accordance with the principles laid down in our state Constitution," Palin said in a written statement. "I have every confidence that Judge Christen has the experience, intellect, wisdom and character to be an outstanding Supreme Court justice." (emphases mine)
Alaska, like most states, has a procedure by which it produces a set of candidates from whom the Governor may select a high court judge - in other words, there are are checks on the Governor's choices. Under the state Constitution, Palin had to select from among the nominees sent to her by the seven-member Alaska Judicial Council. To get on the map of such a Council a judge has to have demonstrated professional excellence and, usually, shown involvement in the community more generally.
Judge Christen fits that bill based on the public write-ups I could find readily. This one comes from an Alaskan philanthropic foundation whose board she sits, the Rasmuson Foundation:
Judge Morgan Christen was appointed to the superior court in Anchorage in 2001. In 2005, she was appointed Presiding Judge for the Third Judicial District. Judge Christen currently co-chairs both the Child in Need of Aid Committee and the Probate Rules Subcommittee for Involuntary Mental Health Commitments. She serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the Rasmuson Foundation and the Alaska Community Foundation.
Prior to being appointed to the bench, Judge Christen was a litigation partner at the law firm of Preston, Gates & Ellis from 1992-2001. She worked as an associate attorney at Preston from 1987-1992. Judge Christen clerked for the Honorable Brian Shortell after she graduated from the Golden Gate University School of Law and received her undergraduate degree in international studies from the University of Washington.
Judge Christen's previous professional experience includes service as a Lawyer Representative for the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference, service on the Alaska Bar Association Disciplinary Committee and as President of the Anchorage Association of Women Lawyers. Judge Christen has been a member of the Anchorage Rotary Club since 1994 and is a former member of the Board of Directors for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Alaska. In 2004, Judge Christen, was awarded the Light of Hope award for work on behalf of Alaska's children, and the Chamber of Commerce Athena Society Award. In 2004, Judge Christen and her husband, Jim Torgerson, received the Outstanding Philanthropist of the Year award from the Association of Fundraising Professionals Alaska Chapter. Her special interests include family, hiking, traveling in Alaska, reading and cooking.
While this bio demonstrates that Judge Christen has been active and involved in both the judiciary and broader Alaskan civic activities, what I, as a lawyer and law professor, find most striking about it is, in some respects, its essential ordinariness in terms of the credentials one would expect a state high court appointee to have. This in no way detracts from Judge Christen, who has clearly worked hard to extend her reach outside the four walls of courtroom, both to influence and to learn about her state and its different demographic sectors. This is exactly what we should want from jurists - people with competence in the courtroom in and interest in goings-on outside of it. So I applaud Judge Christen's decisions to get to know both the Rotary Club AND the Anchorage Association of American Lawyers; to have worked on behalf of children and on behalf of Alaska's business community. She will be deciding cases involving interests related to all kinds of Alaskans and this brief biographical sketch indicates that she's taken the time to get to know a cross-section of the citizenry.
Now it happens that Judge Christen, in the 1990s, was on the board of Planned Parenthood. And a conservative Christian group, the Alaska Family Council, decided to apply pressure to Governor Palin to get her not to appoint Judge Christen to the Supreme Court. This is what the Alaska Daily News seems to find most noteworthy, or at least most newsworthy, about Judge Christen's appoint. (The paper's headline: Palin bucks pressure in Supreme Court appointment; Selection went against push from Alaska Family Council.)
But the real news here is that a sitting Governor simply picked an apparently competent jurist with a range of ties to the state's community and that the Governor and the judge are both women, and both women are in the positions they are in by virtue of fairly ordinary career paths, career paths that have, however, led each to some fairly extraordinary positions. |
|
|
In 1903, Elizabeth "Lizzie" Magie patented the game that eventually was eventually adapted for mass sales by a man named Charles Darrow. Magie's game, patented under the name "The Landlord's Game" was designed to illustrate economic principles based on what Magie regarded as the iniquitie of landlordship and the economic advisability of a single tax, based on land values. (source: Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money 2008, p. 230) Below, are some versions of the game board patented by Magie (Philips was her married name). The first is from 1904, the second is from 1924. Monopoly as we know it was not produced and sold until 1934. (Ferguson, 2008, p. 231)
Magie-Phillips' version of the game was meant to be more instructional than recreational. Some university professors even adopted a modified version for classroom use. (Ferguson, p. 231).
Meanwhile, Magie-Philips already had a relationship with Parker Brothers, the game company, which had issued another game she invented called Mock Trial. Although George Parker declined to buy The Landlord's game from Magie-Philips in the 1920s, he did encourage her to seek patent protection for her invention. (source)
When Parker Brothers decided to buy the patents for Monopoly from Clarence Darrow, the company also bought out Magie-Philips' patents recognizing that Darrow had been seen a version of The Landlord's Game (Ferguson, p. 231), which had gained a cult following in the northeastern United States. (source)
"Parker Brothers gave joint credit, in company publicity, to both Darrow and Magie-Phillips until the patents expired in 1953." (source) |
TODAY
Those women that do choose the engineering profession ... find that it's tough being a woman engineer. Fact is, the U.S. engineering workforce is predominantly composed of white males. And ironically, though women make up more than half of the U.S. population, when it comes to the engineering workforce, they comprise only about 8%, according to the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). Believe it or not, this percentage shows an improvement over the mid-1980s, when the proportion of females in the engineering workforce was less than 6%. [source, 2000
Sherry L. Koucky, the co-author of the article from which the above quote comes wrote, in an accompanying editorial:
Amy Higgins and I wrote the article, and while researching we discovered some inequities ranging from how girls are educated to how women are treated in the workplace. When I expressed opinions about this to some of the men in the office, they accused me of being full of venom on this issue. But I'm not angry. Surprised and enlightened, yes. I could rant and rave about how women will never bust into the Old Boy's Club, but that's beating a dead horse and will not solve the issues Amy and I unearthed.
For those of us who work in in male-dominated fields (and according to domination measured by equal wages that's virtually all women), Ms. Koucky's experience - offering information to men about women's circumstances in a shared field meets with accusations that woman is "full of venom" or shrill or (presumably wrongly) angry will sound familiar. If you read Koucky's and Higgins article you will see how strange it is that she was attacked by male colleagues, especially scientists who are supposedly interested in empirical data, since the article considers a range of hypotheses for why women not only are so underrepresented in engineering, but are underrepresented in the more highly remunerative areas of engineering.
In recent years, according to an SWE survey of 2,000 male and female engineers, women engineers typically have started their first engineering jobs at salaries equal to or greater than those of their male counterparts. After about eight years in the workforce, however, those women still pursuing an engineering career earn less than men. This disparity widens the longer these women stay in the workforce. Some experts believe the salary difference is due to women not advancing into management at the same rate as men. Others believe that family responsibilities have caused women to remove themselves from the workforce for a period of time and that they never make up the difference. The SWE survey produced other interesting findings:
* Women engineers are more likely than men to work in a manufacturing sector, while men work in consulting.
* Women engineers tend to work for large engineering employers while men work in smaller firms.
* Men are more likely (40% versus 14%) than women to pursue and obtain registration as professional engineers.
* 51% of male engineers feel that they participate in management decisions while only 32% of female engineers feel this way.
Most experts agree that survey results such as these reflect a glass ceiling a perceived barrier preventing women or minorities from moving into top management positions that they can see, but never reach. In fact, research from the Federal Glass Ceiling Commission, as well as testimonials, support that today's American labor force is gender and race segregated, and that white men fill most top management positions in corporations.
YESTERDAY
(Woman engineers in the 19th century)
Elizabeth Bragg received the first engineering degree awarded to a U.S. woman when she graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a civil engineering degree in 1876. I have not found much information about Ms. Bragg's career. A more famous woman engineer from the period is  Emily Warren Roebling. Roebling's name is inscribed on the Brooklyn Bridge as one of its builders. After both her father and husband suffered incapacitating injuries during their work on the bridge, Emily Warren Roebling stepped in to see the job through.
The Brooklyn Bridge might not have been built had it not been for Emily Warren Roebling. Most history books cite her father-in-law John Roebling and her husband Washington Roebling as the bridge's builders. Early into construction in 1872, however, collapsing bridge timbers crushed John Roebling's legs, leaving him incapacitated. Soon after, an illness paralyzed Washington Roebling. With both men out of commission, Emily Warren Roebling took over. Under her husband's guidance, Emily had studied higher mathematics, the calculations of catenary curves, the strengths of materials, bridge specifications, and the intricacies of cable construction. She spent the next 11 years supervising the bridge's construction.
The Brooklyn Bridge opened to great fanfare in May 1883. The names of John Roebling, Washington Roebling, and Emily Warren Roebling are inscribed on the structure as its builders.
I certainly do not mean to be venomous but if Emily Warren Roebling's name is inscribed in on the bridge itself, how come "most history books" do not list her as one of its builders? |
|
Subscribe to RSS Feed
