There's More To Do

Two days after the nomination of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate for president, the Traverse City Record-Eagle printed an editorial published in The Detroit News lauding that accomplishment and the advances of women generally in politics and business.  Clinton’s victory “shattered the glass ceiling” of male domination of candidates for president, said the editorial, and constituted “an accomplishment American women in the 20th century could only dream of.”  So far, so good.

But then the editors turned to the subject of women in lower levels of politics, specifically women elected to seats in state legislatures.  That number “has skyrocketed since the 1980s,” they said, “growing from just a couple of hundred nationwide to 1,812 in 2016.”  That in itself is true, but before we suffer a shoulder separation patting ourselves on the back, we should note the fact that this year there are 7,383 seats in state legislatures around the country and that the 1,812 filled by women amount to only 24.6% of the total.  Moreover, women occupy only 20.9% of the seats in the Michigan legislature (31 of 148), the state thus ranking a puny 34th among the 50 states.

As far as I know, women comprise somewhere around 50% of the total population of both the United States and the State of Michigan.  There’s more to do.

The Somme, A Hundred Years Later

July 1 of this year marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme in World War I, one of the most horrific military engagements in the history of man.  The occasion caused me to retrieve from my bookshelf Peter Hart’s definitive history, The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front (2008).  In the preface, Hart makes this statement:

    The political imperatives of defending the bloated empire, the endemic racism and all-embracing casual assumption of moral superiority of the age, the overwhelming reliance on blunt threats ro achieve what might have been achieved by subtle diplomacy—these were all part of the British heritage in 1914.

Ring any bells?  That was Britain a hundred years ago.  Think United States today.