I think one thing that struck me in the videos and readings of this week is the ways in which we seem to continuously hand off our problems or assuage ourselves by relying on some tenuous good faith assurance that everything will be ok. In the case of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, yes we worked to ensure these things wouldn’t happen in America for the most part, but our solution was to merely pass this problem on to other countries, countries that our colonialist endeavors had already ravaged. Our solution wasn’t to say this must never happen again, it was to say we will never happen again here.
With the ERA there’s somehow also this similar feeling of passing the buck. Yes, we have made strides in women’s equality, some of that passing into law whether on state or federal level, but we still fail by not simply passing the ERA. We’ve passed the problem on in some way, put a band-aid on it and told ourselves that it’s good enough. But without passing something universal we allow all these protections we’ve built to be chipped away at. And if we were to pass the ERA, it would likely help change a lot of policy because it would be grounds to challenge a lot of discriminatory practice and law that currently goes unchecked.
I guess my point is that in some way they both seem like issues we’ve addressed on some but can’t do away with altogether because someone doesn’t want that. Our capitalist society doesn’t want to find a way to subsist without cheap labor, and our patriarchal society doesn’t want to give women firm strong ground to build their rights. I think what’s evident is that these problems always come back when they aren’t fully addressed.