Meetings
The CWPC is currently holding quarterly events. Times and places will be announced here and by email. Our next meeting will be held at
Please join our mailing list to be advised of our events. Contact Secretary and See us on Facebook at Capitol Women's Political Caucus.
Penny the Pig is making her grand reappearance at our September event. Bring your change for Penny.
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Our 206-2108 CWPC Officers:
Peggy Cochran, President
Vice-President
Sherrie Koechling-Burnett,Treasurer
, Secretary
CWPC members on the State Board: Peggy Cochran, CWPC President; Christy Garnett, Vice Chair for Political Issues; Amanda Good, At Large.
The CWPC area includes the counties of Cole, Boone and the contiguous counties of Audrain, Callaway, Cooper, Howard, Miller, Moniteau,Osage and Randolph.
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Spoken Like a Woman!!
GOOD NEWS,GOOD THINGS, GOOD FOR WOMEN
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"Why We Need the Equal Rights Amendment."
The Equal Rights Amendment
An opionion from a sister in St. Louis: I have been asked why we need ERA. I suggest you Google Equal Rights Amendment and you can find a lot of good information about why we need it and why (mainly thanks to Phyllis Schlafly) it was not ratified. Below is a summary of why we need the ERA. If you have not read Gail Collin's book, "When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present" please get a copy for yourself and one to pass on. (Iron Jawed Angels is a great DVD to appreciate the historic struggle women endured to win the vote. DM) IN SUMMARY: We need the ERA because we do not have it yet. Even in the 21st century, the U.S. Constitution still does not explicitly guarantee that all of the rights it protects are held equally by all citizens without regard to sex. The first - and still the only - right that the Constitution specifically affirms as equal for women and men is the right to vote. We need the ERA because the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause has never been interpreted to grant equal rights on the basis of sex in the same way that the Equal Rights Amendment would. The 14th Amendment has been applied to sex discrimination only since 1971, and the Supreme Court's latest decision on that issue in 1996 does not move us beyond the traditional assumption that males hold rights and females must prove that they hold them. We need the ERA because until we have it, women will have to continue to fight long, expensive, and difficult political and judicial battles to ensure that their rights are constitutionally equal to the rights automatically granted to males on the basis of sex. And in a few cases, men will have to do the same to ensure that they have equal rights with females (usually in areas of family law). We need the ERA because we need its protection against a rollback of the significant advances in women's rights over the past 50 years. Congress has the power to replace existing laws by a majority vote, and even judicial precedents can be eroded or ignored by reactionary courts responding to a conservative political agenda. With an ERA in place, progress already made in eliminating sex discrimination would be much harder to reverse. We need the ERA because we need a clearer and stricter federal judicial standard for deciding cases of sex discrimination. Lower-court decisions in the various circuits and states (some with state ERA's and some without) still reflect confusion and inconsistency about how to deal with sex discrimination claims. Sex discrimination should get the same judicial scrutiny as race discrimination. We need the ERA because we need to improve the standing of the United States globally with respect to equal justice under law. The governing documents of many other countries specifically affirm legal equality of the sexes (however less than perfect that ideal may be implemented) . Ironically, some of those constitutions - for example, in Japan and Iraq - were written under the direction of the United States. Our image is also tarnished by the fact that the Senate has still not ratified CEDAW (UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women). We need the ERA because we need to move beyond the struggle for it. We need to free the energies of the women and men who have spent countless hours, years, and even lifetimes working for this basic human right of equal constitutional protection. When we can redirect that energy and those resources to work on the many other challenges we face in common, we will truly have fulfilled the vision of suffragist leader and ERA author Alice Paul. | |||||||||
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Announcements
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The CWPC Bonnet Award
The CWPC "Bonnet" is bestowed on those who further the better interests of women and their issues. (Maximun # of Bonnets received in one effort cannot exceed 5, which indicates the highest commendation)
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama tapped federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court on Tuesday, making her the first Hispanic in history picked to wear the robes of a justice.If confirmed by the Senate, Sotomayor, 54, would succeed retiring Justice David Souter.
Administration officials say Sotomayorwould bring more judicial experience to the Supreme Court than any justice confirmed in the past 70 years.
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Our Foundation
The National Women's Political Caucus was formed in 1971 and is a multicultural, intergenerational, and multi-issue grassroots organization dedicated to increasing women's participation in the political process and creating a true women's political power base to achieve equality for all women. NWPC has over 25,000 members and affiliates across 38 states. Our own Missouri Senator Harriett Woods was the President of the National Caucus from 1991-1995. It is because of her and other great women who have gone before us, like Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan, that the NWPC has prospered and kept true to the original mission of the organization.
Missouri State Women's Political Caucus (MOWPC)
The Missouri Chapter of the National Women's Political Caucus has as its purposes the following
*To increase women's participation in the political process;
*To increase the number of feminist women in elected and appointed positions
*To support candidates who will work for women's issues and who will employ women in decision-making roles in their
campaigns and office staffs;
*To work for the repeal of laws which discriminate on the basis of sex;
*To win equality for women; and
*To draft and support legislation that complies with the principles of human equality and that concern the needs of women.
Links for NWPC and MOWPC
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Why Women Should Vote
The women were innocent and defenseless. And by the end of the night, they were barely alive.
Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden’s blessing went on a rampage against the 33 helpless wrongly convicted of “obstructing sidewalk traffic.” They beat Lucy Burn, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air. They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional affidavits describe the guard grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.
Thus unfolded the “Night of Terror” on November 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson’s White House for the right to vote.
For weeks, the women’s only water come from an open pail. Their food – all of it colorless slops – was infested with worms. When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for four weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.
Some women won’t vote this year because – why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn’t matter? It’s raining?
It is jarring to think Woodrow Wilson and his cronies tried to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn’t make her crazy.
The doctor admonished the men: “Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.”
What would those women think of the way women today use – or don’t use – their right to vote?
This is the story of our Grandmothers and Great-grandmothers, as they lived only 90 years ago. It was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote!
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FYI
POLICY BRIEF:
The Alliance for the Status of Missouri Women has published a Policy Brief “Closing the Wage Gap for Women Would Benefit All” to provide an insight into how newly introduced federal legislation – The Paycheck Fairness Act and The Fair Pay Act would impact Missouri women and their families. http://www.mowomensalliance.org/recent_reports
A series of papers written by Caucus member Pam Rich, which explains the CWPC history, can be found at:
http://whmc.umsystem.edu/invent/3957.html
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