Forces of history

So leave the flat I own - and no man had to countersign my mortgage, as would have happened before the 1970s.  Thank you feminism.  Go to work where they can’t fire me without jumping through a lot of hoops - so here’s to you employment legislation and trade unions that pressed for it.  Hang out in the pub with male friends - there you go, changing social customs.  I’m grateful to  a good state school system for my education - my parents both left school at fourteen.  

So when this African immigrant chambermaid went to her employers and the New York police because, she says, a rich important white man had assaulted her, what forces lay behind that action.  The civil rights movement for black equality.  Rights of employment.  Feminist consciousness raising that put about the notion that a woman’s body is her own possession.  An idea that in the USA everyone, high or low, is supposed to be subject to the law.  Perhaps even the knowledge that Barrack Obama, president of the USA. is of recent immigrant stock (so recent, that his enemies insist he wasn’t born in the USA at all).

This makes people like Bernard-Henri Levy with his indignation that his superior friend, Strauss-Khan, should be treated like other people and Jean-François Kahn and his "Why all the fuss? It's merely a bit of hanky-panky with the help” seem to be from a very ancien regime - the age of chivalry, say, where you‘d parade your romantic devotion to a grand lady and then think nothing of raping a peasant.  To the tumbrils, both of them.

Update:-

One very important fact has been largely absent from the coverage of the sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and, until latterly, leading candidate to be the next president of France. The hotel housekeeper whom he allegedly assaulted was represented by a union.

The reason that this is an important part of the story is that it is likely that Strauss-Kahn's alleged victim might not have felt confident enough to pursue the issue with either her supervisors or law enforcement agencies, if she had not been protected by a union contract. The vast majority of hotel workers in the United States, like most workers in the private sector, do not enjoy this protection.

Read the whole article and follow some of the links eg here:-

Housekeepers and officials with the main hotel workers union, Unite Here, said that housekeepers were often too embarrassed or scared to report incidents to management or the police. Sometimes they fear that management, often embracing the motto “the customer is always right,” will believe the customer over the housekeeper and that the worker may end up getting fired.

Ms. Babbington said a co-worker once encountered a naked guest who chased her around the room. “She was just panicking,” Ms. Babbington said. “She was very new in the country and she demanded to talk to the police. Her manager sat her down to calm her down and told her not to call the police, that it wouldn’t be good for the hotel.”

I do remember when I was young working as a waitress and customers thinking it was all right to stroke me, as if I was a pet cat.  I'm sorry I didn't spill their food all over them.

Comments

[Frank S]

I suspect all these movements you refer to were merely jumping on a bandwagon already underway. The wests has a long tradition of respect for women, for the poor, and for capturing these in laws. Laws capable of ongoing improvement. No need to credit 'feminism' with anything except giving some disturbed people a platform to rant from. In fact, they and such as the trade unions have arguably done more harm than good. For example, it is not at all good for our economy that all these hoops have to be jumped through in order to fire someone.

[Sarah AB]

It is possible that it is too difficult to fire people in some circumstances - but I agree with the post. Reading The Jungle or The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a good reminder of what happens when you just leave such matters to 'the west's ... long tradition of respect for ... the poor'. Some people *would* have been looked after by a benevolent squire type who would have jumped in to perform the role of the welfare state. But if you had a landlord who was only out to make money - then what?

[Recusant]

I'm not sure we can count The Ragged Trousered Philanphropist as data, rather than a communist's tendentious screed.

[Gareth]

That the chambermaid can get justice is - in world-historical terms - an amazing thing; and it's unimaginable without the confluence of people and ideas we label feminism. I think the two influential merdes referred to demonstrate it's not happened by default.

[Rosie]

@FrankS
And who got these bandwagons going in the first place? Did they start moving all by themselves? Whatever the West, or anywhere else thinks of poverty and women, the (even comparatively) rich, privileged and powerful aren’t that keen to give up their wealth, privileges and power, and it usually takes a lot of effort by dedicated people to get them to do so.

There is a habit of thinking that what seems like obviously natural and reasonable - women voting for instance, or blacks having equal rights - must have always seemed so. But the same people who think that would have thought, at the time, that women and blacks were natural inferiors, and that it was an offence against nature and civilisation to oppose that thought.

Without looking for it, this came across my eyes yesterday:-

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/09/charms-eleanor-roosevelt

It’s about Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1930’s and 40s:-

“She could urge him to demand civil rights legislation for blacks, but could not overcome his argument that the Southern states were so vital to the Democratic Party’s political success that it might be disastrous to anger them. Not that a civil rights campaign would have had overwhelming support in the North either, for “the greatest generation” was also a profoundly racist generation with a segregated army and a fresh history of race rioting between factory workers in Northern industrial cities.

Eleanor’s compassion earned her incessant abuse from those who were contented with the uncompassionate side of American culture. The Southern press cudgeled her relentlessly for speaking up for racial equality. “

“Speaking up for racial equality” wouldn’t be a big deal for the President’s wife today, but it was then. Do you think we got here by no-one doing anything and it would have happened like a river running to the sea?

[Building Materials]

A common story these days. This kind of thing happens all the time. It should'nt matter if you are black or white, going to work to a job you probably don't like is bad enough, let alone that happening.