'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'Men have to be reminded that women exist.'

-- Eleanor Roosevelt, in what New York Times columnist Gail Collins called a "tartly" delivered comment to reporters. It was made, presumably, in 1960 or 1961; the occasion, Collins writes, was the announcement of "the all-male list" of senior appointees in the new administration of President John F. Kennedy. (credit for March 1961 photo of ER and JFK) This criticism by Roosevelt -- among IntLawGrrls' very 1st transnational foremothers -- prompted Kennedy to issue Executive Order 10980 (1961), which established the President's Commission on the Status of Women. The work of the 3-year commission, which Roosevelt chaired till her death in 1962, has been complemented by Women in America, a report on women and girls in the United States just released by the White House Council on Women and Girls.

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

She genuinely sees her party as a vehicle for good and her pragmatism is not the least bit cynical. She is the most powerful woman in the country, the most fearless person on Capitol Hill and on track to be one of the most productive speakers in history.

-- New York Times columnist Gail Collins, extolling achievements of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Pelosi, a Baltimore-born San Francisco Democrat, became Speaker in January 2007, the 1st woman ever to hold that congressional leadership position. (credit for 2009 photo)

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

The early 1970s was a limiting time for women, but it was also, perhaps, a hopeful time. There was definitely a feeling in the air that women’s lives were changing in a positive way. There was a sense that everything was possible, that life for women was getting better, that if things hadn’t yet come together as well as they should have, they inevitably would. Down the line. Like, today.
Life for women has not come together.

-- The New York Times' Judith Warner (above left), in "When We’re Equal, We’ll Be Happy," an excellent consideration of the "unhappy" state of the modern American woman and an entrée to related works of interest, including A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, a just-released report by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress, edited by Heather Boushey and Ann O'Leary. (Also promising, though not mentioned by Warner: Gail Collins' new book When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present, reviewed here. And see a related op-ed, in today's NYT, here.)

(credit for photo by Jean-Louis Atlan; hat tip to Evelyn A. Lewis)

Voicing equality

Tucked at the bottom of Gail Collins' New York Times column this week, a wonderful anecdote.
Early in the commentary Collins (right) observed that "in the days of yore," Americans "would flock to listen to a two-hour speech from a state senator whose oratory was undoubtedly improved by the fact that, in an unamplified era, he could only actually be heard by the front quarter of the audience."
She ended by telling how one couple gave full voice to their support for equality:

... American women first got the right to vote, in Wyoming in 1869 .... [R]esidents were so proud of what they’d accomplished that when Wyoming became a state in 1890, the first speech after the celebratory parade was dedicated to the subject of suffrage.
Theresa Jenkins, who gave the address, got particular commendation for her delivery, which was so forceful she could be heard at the far reaches of a crowd that stretched back for four blocks. It turned out she had been practicing by standing out in the open prairie, giving her speech while her husband sat in a buggy, backing farther and farther away and yelling 'Louder!'

Two years later, Jenkins and a Wyoming colleague, Cora Carleton, both Republicans, became the 1st 2 women to attend a major party's national convention in an official capacity -- both served as alternate delegates in the Wyoming delegation. And to this day, Wyoming's known as the Equality State.

Will ITLOSe?

In a Halloween post available here (scroll down to the nicely named "Trick or Treaty?"), our Opinio Juris colleague Duncan Hollis predicted smooth sailing in the U.S. Senate for the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, about which we too have posted. 'Fraid he might be mistaken.
True, the Foreign Relations Committee has voted "aye" by a 17-4 margin -- more progress than the 1982 Convention, which entered into force in 1994 and now has 155 states parties, ever has made in the United States. (History of U.S. involvement in negotiating the treaty and thereafter here.)
Yet as noted in a comment by our colleague Andreas L. Paulus, University of Göttingen, Germany, at least 1 Republican foresees failure in the full Senate. "This treaty will not be adopted. There aren't the votes to pass it," Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) told the Associated Press. Echoing him in the same story was Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who's declared: "I am absolutely convinced it undermines U.S. sovereignty."
Lott's not alone in sounding the sovereignty alarm.
Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee's called U.S. involvement in the treaty "'the dumbest thing we've ever done,'" and staked out treaty defeat as "'[o]ne of the defining issues of our time,'" Gail Collins reports in the New York Times. A quick Google search suggests that Huckabee has a corner of the virtual world on his side. What's more, Collins writes, many of Huckabee's rivals for the Republican nomination are falling in line with him, notwithstanding that the treaty's supported by the United States' Defense Department, the State Department, and incumbent President.
Might be time to run up that stormy weather flag.