Suffrage, labor rights and the equal rights amendment are all related because their goals are on gaining rights for an exploited group and preventing the exploitation of those groups. These and other labor rights issues are also a matter of gender justice, because every group includes people of all genders. Also, it is mostly women who are being exploited when it comes to things like sweatshops and labor rights. Teen and child workers are also very common. Similar to the Triangle Waistshirt Factory story, hours are excessive, conditions are very dangerous and wages are very low. How much has this changed? On the surface we act like we are morally better because we have laws against child labor here in the U.S. now, but all we really have been doing is outsourcing as a loophole, to continue to exploit cheap labor “legally.

The “Triangle Returns” video talked about a workers protest in Bangladesh (working for companies like Walmart and Gap) Their workers’ non-violent protest over wages was quickly hit with a wave of police brutality. The workers were beaten, hit with rubber bullets, sprayed with water, etc. This made me think of all the anti-facists marches happening the last few years, and the police would come out and do the same to the protestors. The c0ps will never stop doing that. They don’t serve us, they only serve the ones in power aka the Oppressors.

I think issues continue to play out similarly today. There will always be a group against the activist group/movement. During the time of the introduction of the ERA, anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly founded the organization “STOP ERA” (an acronym for “Stop Taking Away Our Privileges”) to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment. Her belief was that an equal rights movement was somehow stripping her and other women of their free will and rights, I find this mindset that “giving one group rights takes away from the other” remains common today. An example I have in our current political climate is that some people think that the statement “Black Lives Matter” means that white lives don’t matter. They interpret the statement as Black people think they are more important than white people, when the true intent is a call for black lives to be treated the same as white lives, especially in legal situations.
Schafly also was said to have, “[told] her audiences that the ERA would eventually lead to a future of gender-neutral bathrooms and women being drafted into the military, she successfully made many people think twice about what constitutionally mandated equality of the sexes would mean.” It’s funny to know that that is kind of right where we are at today, but it’s not as horrifically astounding earth-shattering as she played it out to be with her fear mongering