Fearless Women by Elizabeth Cobbs

Author:Elizabeth Cobbs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

The Making of a Target

American law had long treated women as odd creatures, identical in their economic dependence, destiny as mothers, and need for male supervision. Until 1971, the Supreme Court judged women as a special class in response to every legal objection that doing so violated their Fourteenth Amendment right to equal treatment. When Susan B. Anthony and Virginia Minor tried to vote, courts ruled that being female disqualified them. In a myriad of ways afterward, the Supreme Court ruled that women, like children, could be excluded from a variety of adult roles. While the concept of “due process” meant the equal and fair application of the law to all citizens, the measure of “citizen” was implicitly male.

To courts, blanket restrictions on women seemed “natural, necessary, and benign,” in the words of one scholar. In Bradwell v. Illinois (1873), the Court ruled that states could ban females from specific occupations. In Minor v. Happersett (1874), it decided that states could deny them the vote. In Muller v. Oregon (1908), it agreed that states could place limits on their work hours, and in Goesaert v. Cleary (1948) that states could require a male presence at work. In Hoyt v. Florida, in 1961, the Court declared that women did not have the same right as men to a jury of their peers. As attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg remarked, prior to 1971 “the Supreme Court never saw a sex classification it didn’t like.”33

At the very same time, on criminal matters, courts held women to the exact same standards as men, resisting their perspective. For example, few judges understood that girls learned they were vulnerable targets of male assault the first time parents cautioned them to avoid adult men—and keep their legs firmly crossed at all times. Boys generally did not grow up with these warnings and their perceptions of safety did not form around them. When it came to the opposite sex, boys were generally encouraged to think like hunters, not prey. Courts exaggerated certain differences between men and women, while hardly acknowledging differences like this one at all.

Yvonne Swan was born in 1943 into the Sinixt Arrow Lakes Nation, following the matrilineal line of her mother, Lucy. She grew up in the northernmost reaches of Washington State, a region of blue lakes, gentle mountains, and tall ponderosa pine forests that soared straight to heaven. Bear cubs, deer, and friendly snakes peeped through the bushes looking for Yvonne, she thought, while bald eagles winged overhead. Indian lands surrounded her family’s one-bedroom log cabin, tucked safely on the Colville Reservation that twelve nations called home. The most famous were the Nez Perce, once led by the legendary Chief Joseph, who evaded the US Army longer than anyone had ever thought possible. Yvonne’s father Ted, a logger, hailed from Idaho, where his landless Chippewa-Cree and Assiniboine Sioux family had found refuge with the Coeur d’Alene people.

Although the reservation stretched farther than Yvonne could imagine, her mother taught her that the Canadian government had seized most of their tribal lands in the nineteenth century.

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