The Bad Old Days

I was raised by three of the strongest, smartest women I ever knew — who had no opportunity at all to advance. Contrary to the currently enshrined version of the Rosie the Riveter myth, even during World War II, women were generally not allowed to fill "men's jobs" that they could perform just fine. My mother went over to Pascagoula and got a job in Ingalls shipyard by tying down her breasts and pretending she was a man. Unfortunately, after she had worked there several months, she got a piece of metal in her eye. The doctor discovered she was a woman, and Ingalls fired her.

When I was a boy, we were dirt poor, with no electricity and no running water. In the farm country of post-war northwest Florida, education and jobs above store clerk or laborer basically didn't exist, even for men. My three female parents couldn't buy me nice clothes or toys or bikes, but they did their best to teach me to be honest, to be self-reliant, and to speak for myself — which of course was far more important. Watching them fight hard every day just to provide the basic necessities has had a huge influence on my view of women's rights.

Rural Florida might have been at the bottom of the opportunity barrel back then, but the rest of the country was not far ahead. About the only realistic career choices for the small percentage of women who sought work were schoolteacher, nurse, or secretary. The lucky few landed glamour jobs as airline stewardesses. Until the 1960s, female teachers were even subject to losing their jobs if they married.

Better But Still Imperfect Days

Thanks to women with guts and vision, those days have faded. This year, we have even seen a big crack appear in the ultimate glass ceiling, in the form of Hillary Clinton's historic run for the presidency. We still have a long way to go, though.

Work and Wages

In 2006, women were still earning only 77 cents for every dollar men earned. The disparity is worse for African-American and Latina women, who earn 62 cents and 53 cents for every dollar a man takes home. Not all of this difference is due to outright discrimination. Education, experience, child bearing, and child raising, for example, all help account for the difference. Still, the bottom line is that women earn less simply because they are women — and minority women earn even less because they are women and members of minority groups. Many of the same discriminatory and non-discriminatory causes are factors in both cases.

Nearly 10.5 million women, versus 2.5 million men, are single parents who have no realistic choice except to keep working. Single women who are heads of household account for 62 percent of American families with children in poverty and are more likely to hold sub-prime mortgages. Many work environments refuse to provide sick days that can also be used for children, family medical leave, flex-time, or other accommodations for care-giving responsibilities.

The gender differential flows over into the entrepreneurial arena. In 2002, women owned 6.5 million — 28.2 percent — of non-farm businesses. That 28.2 percent, however, accounted for only 6.5 percent of U.S. employment and 4.2 percent of business receipts.

As with other issues that have been the subject of attention and legislation, blatant discrimination and the old attitudes about the role of women have changed. Even now, however, sometimes subtle influences (including childbearing/child rearing decisions or circumstances, sexual stereotyping, and social norms) still funnel women into occupational or life decisions that are against their interests and abilities or cause them to leave the workforce against their wishes. We know these problems exist. Unfortunately, because of the lack of serious research, we don't know how big they really are, and we don't have a good handle on how to eliminate them.

Violence

Just as troubling as the issue of opportunity and wage equity is the continuing, shameful epidemic of violence against women. Although violence of all types appears to have abated somewhat in America over the past few years, it is still a major public health and criminal justice problem — and it is another area where we suffer from insufficient research. We do have some evidence that intimate partner violence accounts for about 64 percent of all violence against women, that more than half of female rape victims are younger than 18 when they experience either a rape or an attempted rape, and that 22 percent of women have been physically assaulted by a partner or date. These are depressing numbers.

We also know that many rapes and assaults go unreported, and that the likelihood of the arrest and successful prosecution of a suspect is far lower than we would like. Nor is justice a complete solution. Support systems must be significantly bolstered. We still have to do a great deal more to educate girls and women on how to avoid and protect themselves against violence, to provide better access to crisis and victim services, and to improve the quality of emergency and other medical care received by female victims.

The Way Ahead

A bright success story was brought to me by a volunteer campaign worker, a graduate of Georgia Tech. Traditionally a men's school, Tech decided to admit women in 1952. Today, half the student body and a large and growing percentage of the science and engineering faculty is female. In 1963, Tech became the first Southern university voluntarily to admit African-Americans. Today, according to the London Times, Tech is ranked 17th among the world's technical universities. Georgia Tech also graduates more black engineers — both men and women — than any other U.S. institution. This a story that can and should be duplicated in other schools, in industry, and in business in America.

America's treatment of women is a part of our serious economic problems. America's treatment of her female military personnel is a security issue, and the complex tangle of minority, racial, and women's issues is a justice issues. We can't come up with a "magic pill bill" that will solve all of these problems at once Nor can we pass legislation on any one of these issues without understanding that it will create ripples in the entire pool. When I speak of women's rights, by the way, I am not speaking of entitlements: I am talking about creating economic opportunities that will make America stronger.

The last time I checked, passing legislation is one of the things the U.S. Congress was created to do, as part of its charge to set policy for the country. Oversight is another way of setting policy, as Senator Harry S. Truman demonstrated in fighting profiteering during World War II. Leadership is a third. I intend to make my views clear to Northwest Florida, both north and south of US-90. I intend to talk and listen to people in business, industry, agriculture, the military, the environmental movement, county and town governments, community associations, civil justice advocacy groups, and anybody else I can find. Out of this communication will come leadership. Good officers usually understand this: First Sergeants always do. Mr. Bush's government has ignored this principle altogether and has pushed and bullied Congress aside. I will fight that no matter who is President.

As I said in my statement on health care, I will do all in my power to focus our system on preventive care and health education. That includes initiatives for battling ovarian cancer, breast cancer, and HIV/AIDS. I will work to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies, to help young people understand immediate and lifelong consequences of pregnancies, and to provide support for those who need to put their babies up for adoption.

When a woman is faced with an unsafe, unintended, or untenable pregnancy, I believe she has the right to make her own decision on what to do in the context of her faith, family, and life situation.

In Congress, I will work to

• close loopholes in the 1963 Equal Pay Act
• apply the same remedies to gender discrimination as to race and national origin
• examine federal agencies that enforce employment discrimination laws for their performance and actual funding requirements
• reassess Department of Defense policies on women's service, including combat roles, and on reducing sexual harassment and assault.

I know a woman — a grandmother — who graduated in 1964 from Longwood College in Virginia. At that time, Longwood had been a women's college for 126 years. Recently, while reading the inscriptions in the yearbook, her 19-year-old granddaughter asked, “Grandma, why did all the girls want to be airline stewardesses?" It's a very different day, but we still have fundamental, unanswered questions about why and what to do. We in Congress need to move quickly to frame the questions, ask them, and act based on the answers. Another generation of women is depending upon us, and we must not violate that trust.