The first episode of ‘Looking Back, Moving Forward’—a new podcast from Ms. Studios hosted by Carmen Rios—will examine the growing political power feminists hold as voters and candidates through numerous interviews, including with Fordham Law Professor Julie Suk, author of We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment (Skyhorse Publishing, 2020).
The first episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward comes out next week, on July 4, and examines the growing political power feminists hold as voters and candidates through interviews with Allison, pollster Celinda Lake, New Mexico State Sen. Angel Charley, constitutional law scholar Julie C. Suk, RepresentWomen founder Cynthia Richie Terrell, and Ms. contributor and gender in politics expert Jennifer M. Piscopo.
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That dehumanization remains an inextricable part of our most powerful governing institutions. “Misogyny is a system, patriarchy is a system, by which people who are in power extract benefits and value from people who have no rights,” Julie C. Suk, professor of law at Fordham University School of Law and author of After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do about It, explained to me. “In our nation, that meant enslaved African Americans and women who did not have rights but were expected to basically take care of our posterity, just to quote the Preamble of the US Constitution, to do all the reproductive labor necessary to perpetuate the nation throughout the generations.”
“Even when we corrected that,” she added during our conversation around women’s limited political power, “by way of the 19th Amendment and by way of the amendments that were adopted after the Civil War, creating formal equality or a formal right to vote, unabridged on account of sex, [it]was not enough to dismantle the vast infrastructures, enforced by law, that continued the extraction of value and the expectation that women perform the reproductive labor and raise the nation without compensation and without other important rights. … Even if we formally have the right to vote and we formally have equality, the entire infrastructure by which women have been excluded from real participation in decision making and power, that continues.”