real utopias

Introduction by Carole Boyce Davies: We (Still) Seek Full Equality!
As we commemorate Claudia Jones’s 100th birthday this year, it is fitting to reposition one of her most influential essays, “We Seek Full Equality for Women” (1949).

Before she apparently committed suicide, Ohio transgender teenager Leelah Alcorn wrote a note outlining the awful prejudice she endured. In memoriam, a powerful letter to Leelah.

I am probably a familiar type to you. I went to college, got a master’s degree, started a career, married, and had my first child late, at 35. I was working as editor-in-chief of a fiction magazine called Zoetrope: All-Story when I became pregnant.

In 1975, West Germany was often under varying degrees of lockdown. Roadblocks were set up at autobahn exits and identification was checked; groups of heavily armed police were seen in city centers holding machine guns and looking menacing; and airports were under armed guard. The reason given for this military-like presence was the existence of a leftist terror group known as the Rote Armee Fraktion. While the State response was disproportionate to the actual strength of the group, one would never know this given the governmental response. Besides the ever-growing presence of police in the citizens’ daily lives, there was also the creation of the Bundeskriminalamt, which was something like the 1970s German equivalent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and today’s Department of Homeland Security in the US. A powerful agency at its inception, its strength grew even more after the passage of the Radikalenerlass (Anti-Radical Decree) in 1972, which forbade civil employment for anyone the State considered to be linked to several primarily leftwing political organizations. The law, which reminded Germans of the Berufsverbot laws under Hitler, was opposed by a substantial percentage of the nation’s residents and was the target of a concerted campaign by writers, artists and intellectuals to end it.

There is no question that women and minorities are not at salary parity with white males in our business culture. They are not. But the prevailing myth that this is an evil plot to oppress us doesn't fly with me, because when you look under the covers of equal pay, things get much more complex. In sum, the current wage gap serves a purpose, both for businesses and for many women themselves; and in doing so it's undermining the interests and needs of us all.