Our New Deal grandmothers would weep at 2022’s women’s rights losses

Abortion has emerged as a top issue for tomorrow’s elections. Shocked candidates of all stripes took notice when voters in Kansas — a ruby-red state that supported Trump by 15 points in 2020 — turned around and voted overwhelmingly to keep abortion rights in their state constitution.  

President Biden declared that the first bill he would like to sign if Democrats keep control of Congress would be a federal law codifying Roe v. Wade’s abortion rights.  

What can we expect from Republicans if they take power? They’ve been clear about their goals at both the federal and state level. 

At the federal level, if they take charge of either House of Congress, it’s clear. Their half-century of insisting that abortion should be left to the states will be abandoned. They will be pushing to criminalize abortion nationwide — trampling the will of the elected representatives of the people of states like New York or Maryland. And even if it’s left to the states, women are still in the Republicans’ cross-hairs.

Women across the nation have been organizing to protect their hard-fought rights, which is inspiring to us, whose grandparents created the New Deal — Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, and Harry Hopkins, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s right-hand man and secretary of Commerce.  

Born in the 1880s, Perkins and Harry Hopkins’ first wife, Ethel Gross, spent the first half of their lives without the right to vote. Women needed permission from their husbands or fathers to be able to sell property, keep their own wages, or enter into contracts.  

As for Perkins, America’s first female cabinet secretary, FDR received a flood of negative letters — not about her policy views, but her gender. In the case of Gross, she was a leader of the movement for women’s voting rights, Hopkins was a social worker, and they spent their 1913 courtship attending suffragist meetings and marches together, bringing their wildest dreams to fruition just over a century ago. 

The role of women was greatly expanded by the New Deal and World War II. They led numerous federal agencies. During the war, 350,000 women joined the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps and over 6 million “Rosie the Riveters” worked in war-related jobs. Since then, women’s rights have consistently grown, never contracted. From Margaret Sanger’s fight for contraception rights to women’s constitutional right to vote in 1920 to the Equal Pay Act of 1963, to Title IX equality in education, to Roe, the trend has been inexorably forward, never backward. 

FDR spoke passionately about not only preserving basic rights but expanding them, to include universal freedoms innately possessed by all humans, like “freedom from fear” and “freedom from want.” Yet the emerging raft of state abortion restrictions is guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of women and health care providers. And they will inevitably apply only to low-income women, who cannot afford to travel to a distant state where abortion is legal.  

Eleanor Roosevelt was the prime mover behind the United Nation’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees the right to adequate medical care, regardless of gender, with special protection for “motherhood.”  

The notion of taking away freedoms that have stood for a half-century — rights belonging only to women, while men’s rights remain undiminished — would be unthinkable to Frances Perkins, Harry Hopkins, FDR and the rest of the New Deal creators. Like the universe itself, rights inexorably expand and are never supposed to shrink. 

Voters in Kansas — including huge numbers of Trump voters — obviously bristled at the notion of the government being able to take away any of their fundamental personal freedoms. They probably also were shocked at the unintended consequences of outlawing abortion — the notion that a woman suffering a miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy, or a girl who’s been raped, or a doctor ethically bound to take the best possible care of her patient’s health, might now face criminal charges. No longer would these medical decisions be entrusted to a woman (or girl) and her doctor, but now must involve lawyers, prosecutors and “local politicians” — all overwhelmingly male. 

Ultimately, if the United States learned anything from the pre-Roe and Prohibition eras (the latter repealed under FDR), it’s that taking away long-standing individual freedoms is very difficult to enforce, intrusive to monitor and certain to end in dangerous black-market alternatives and societal strife.   

Is Kansas predictive of how Americans will respond to the overturning of Roe? Will Americans tolerate the rollback of fundamental women’s rights of personal bodily autonomy, the privacy between doctors and their patients, or between married couples, or the deeply personal decision to bear a child?  

We’ll learn soon enough. As Eleanor Roosevelt observed: ”Women are like teabags. We don’t know our true strength until we are in hot water!”  

And as Justice Alito acknowledged in the Dobbs v Jackson ruling overturning Roe v. Wade: “Women are not without electoral or political power” — essentially daring them to make their rejection of the Supreme Court’s decision heard loud and clear at the ballot box. We believe Perkins and Hopkins, as well as President Roosevelt, would today be leading the charge to mobilize outraged women, as well as concerned men, to do just that.  

Vote for candidates who will preserve and expand personal freedoms. Do not accept backsliding. Vote to continue the ever-forward struggle toward full equality for women. 

June Hopkins, the granddaughter of Harry Hopkins, FDR’s secretary of Commerce and a leading architect of the New Deal, is a professor of History Emerita at Georgia Southern University, Armstrong Campus. Tomlin Perkins Coggeshall is the grandson of Frances Perkins, FDR’s labor secretary, and founder of the Frances Perkins Center.