KLAN?

I am a black American woman. I know the dimensions of my ghetto and would like to move about feeling at ease with all my neighbors, but I cannot do that if the bionic woman is going to be running on her implants and once a year wonder why I do not come out to play. She has got to consider how she feels about me telling her that she is privileged and that she is actively involved in enforcing my oppression. She has to seriously consider if it is truly important to her that there is a world of third world women that she cannot talk to because of her problem. That is a way to start -the same consciousness raising that we have used on sexism will take us down the road through racism. When that is done, we can look each other in the eye.

LITTLE

.. Donna Allegra Majority Report January 7-20, 1978

down there I became immediately rebellious. The older people tell you,, "When you see the white man and he say, 'shut up,' you shut up." But I wouldn't submit to it anymore.

When you were first imprisoned in Washington, what was that like? Was it an all-male prison?

No. The first jail they had there was all male except for one cell that they put women in. But you could go to the door and look right over and talk to the men all day. Then what they did was build another jail and the men are housed in one section and the women in another.

It is a state law that you are supposed to have female officers on at all times just in case a female prisoner comes in at four or five o'clock in the morning and has to be searched. After my murder trial (in 1975), there was a survey done and there

continued on page 15

What Price Virginity?

(Her Say)--The Women's International Network says it has extensively documented medical evidence indicating that all females aged four through eight in the African nation of Somalia are subjected to the painful practice of infibulation,

WIN says that the operation, without exception, is performed on all girl children. The operation involves having the external genitalia cut off, and then sewing the vagina closed, except for a tiny opening, "to demonstrate their virginity to the man to whom they are given in marriage." WIN that says many of these operations are conducted in government-sponsored hospitals and clinics--facilities which are operated with the use of funds from Western governments.

A report recently issued by the World Health Organization on the practice of infibulation called the psychological and mental damage to girl children subjected to the operation "catastrophic”.

WIN says it has sent petitions signed by thousands of women and men around the world to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, asking that all assistance, including military aid, to Somalia be stopped at once until Somalia's government corrects what WIN calls "ongong human rights violations,' specifically the mutilation of female children.

MARKS/AFS

NOW WORKS FOR ERA

In the long struggle for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, our opposition has chosen delay as their best weapon to defeat the Amendment despite public opinion. Their chances have grown better as the 1979 deadline for approaches.

ratification

But NOW initiated legal research on the history and validity of the deadline. The result was a startling discovery: the courts have ruled the deadline to be a political question which can be decided by a majority vote in Congress. In other words, if Congress wishes, it can extend the deadline.

The Equal Rights Amendment is not yet in the Constitution because the anti-ERA minority has played a better political game than the pro-ERA majority. The Equal Rights Amendment has become a test of strength between liberal and conservative forces in state legislatures. Consequently, the legislators' personal philosophies, as well as the wishes of their constituents, become obscured by the political pressure brought to bear on their ERA votes. The pressure is exerted by a fanatical anti-ERA axis composed of the John Birch Society, Conservative Caucus, American Party, "Stop ERA", and the Mormon Church. Much of the opposition strategy has been designed to delay votes and to tie up the issue in endless parliamentary and legal complications.

Against this political force, rhetoric is useless. ERA will win only through had, practical political organizing -the kind that the National Organization for Women has used for the past ten years to win victories for women in employment, credit and education.

The NOW strategy for ratification is broad and many-faceted. Some elements of the strategy are:

a battle to win a seven-year extension of the time period for ratification of the ERA. NOW's legal research plus scholarly affirmation of its position has resulted in a bill to Congress to allow seven more years to ratify ERA. NOW will conduct a campaign in 1978 to win Congressional approval.

painstaking analysis of the situation in each unratified state. Several states are just a few votes away from ratification; we will not waste time with impractical strategies where the chances are one in a million.

a combination of national and statewide pressure, so that the state organizing for ratification is backed up by money, talent and encouragement from across the country.

legal back-up for the ratification task force in each state. Legal experts must be ready to deal with any legal or parliamentary obstacle the opposition invents.

formation of a Political Action Committee that can make direct campaign contributions to throw out key opponents of the Amendment.

national fundraising to build a war chest that will pay the expenses of thousands of volunteer workers.

cpf

The Equal Rights Amendment is an inspiring ideal and it's a practical necessity for women who seek to be treated as full citizens of this country. Without the Equal Rights Amendment, the progress of women's rights could stop and take several steps backward. Recent Supreme Court decisions and Congressional actions show a callous attitude toward women's needs. Women's rights are not likely to progress either by new legislation or by far-sighted court judgments.

Electronic factories: hazards and harassment

"Whenever I see the new low prices on pocket calculators and digital watches, I think of the women who put them together, right down to their microcopic components women from Massachusetts to Mexico and Malaysia.

The growth of the electronics industry is related to the history of working women in San Diego, California. During World War II, the huge aerospace plants employed thousands of women who built 13% of the U.S. air defense--all the welding, rivetting, wiring and machine operations. After the war, when soldiers came home, women were forced out of the aerospace factories through layoffs and propaganda to "return to the home." Those who remained were shifted to wiring and electronics assembly, at lower pay. Unions did not fight to keep women in their skilled jobs. Gradually more and more work from aerospace was subcontracted to non-union shops where the women ended up, at the lowest wages.

Today, within the electronics plants, there is a clear sexual division of labor. Virtually all the low level assembly work such as soldering, wiring and loading (putting tiny cor..ponents in printed circuit boards) is done by women. Men, earning somewhat more, assemble the units into chassis and operate machines. This is not to say that conditions aren't poor for the male production workers too, but that they are kept divided from women through tiny crumbs of privilege. Above production are all the technical positions, almost all held by men. There is no mobility from production to any of those jobs.

The workforce is multi-national, but frequently jobs are stratified so that Blacks, Mexicans and Phillippinas are given the most tedious, menial and lowpaid work. Companies, of course, encourage racial divisions to keep workers divided.

"We have to use tweezers to place wires the size of an eyelash into a tiny area of the potentiometer (a type of component)--we make maybe 4,000 a day. At the end of the day, my eyes hurt and things just a few feet away look double."

Employers claim that women are most suited for the monotonous assembly work because of their small fingers and better eyesight (?). However, when it comes to paying them, they forget those special qualifications. Most plants pay assemblers minimum wages with 10 or 154 raises every six months or so, hardly keeping up with inflation or with the changing minimum wage. If women don't work 10 hours a day and Saturday, they lose their jobs or raises.