I am impelled to write this out of fury as I watch American women’s right to affordable birth control (including abortion) get sacrificed in the Democrats’ push to pass a health care reform bill. I don’t even have much new to say on the subject that hasn’t been written elsewhere (see for example this post on doublex.com). In California, where I live, we have become used to watching a minority—Republicans—hold the will of the majority hostage through the rule that a 2/3 majority is needed to pass anything through the Legislature. This is exactly what is happening at the national level—a very small handful of Congresspeople—in this case, Democrats—has succeeded in holding the health care reform effort hostage to their outdated and misogynist views on birth control. Over 90% of American women use birth control at some point in their lives, and all of these women and their partners—representing a substantial majority of the country’s population—are going to be harmed by this perceived need to pander to a few legislators.

The phrase “be careful what you wish for” suggests that when one gets what one wants, there are usually unintended consequences that turn the moment into a Pyrrhic victory.  Certainly this looks like one of those moments for American women: take a big hit in the pocketbook, or even be forced by economic necessity to give up birth control altogether—which will be a catastrophe for many women and their partners—in order to get reform of a health care system that already discriminates against women (for example, in its pricing mechanisms). Yet even as I am placed in this double bind by Congress, I don’t find myself wishing I’d “been careful” and hadn’t supported the push for health care reform.  “Be careful what you wish for” implies an irreconcilable choice, but there is no sound reason why 100 million adult American women should not have both health care reform and insurance coverage of birth control.

I see this as a classic case of a technology that doesn’t have a powerful enough interest group behind it. Which suggests both that American women still have a long way to go in owning their fair share of political power, and that people should be much more skeptical about the socio-political mechanisms by which new technologies get adopted. If a small group can derail such an important and widely used technology, then in the case of a successful technology one should always look for the power groups that pushed it through and not just assume that it was bound to happen that way.

I find myself fantasizing about a last-minute rescue of the birth-control provisions of the health care reform legislation, or about some kind of constitutional challenge eventually going forward to the Supreme Court. The first fantasy is pathetic and the second—given the present makeup of the Roberts Court—seriously deranged. But fantasy is one of the pernicious side effects of political impotence.

For those of us who grew up in Massachusetts, immunized by long exposure to the national obsession with All Things Kennedy (sort of like 18th century milkmaids and cowpox?), this has been a long week of déja vu. Without detouring into the late Senator Edward Kennedy’s complex life, I want to consider why the media seemingly finds it impossible to refer to Kennedy without using the term ‘patriarch’—and, in at least one case that I stumbled across, ‘revered patriarch’. Of course, in our democracy there is no longer any legal sanction for the position of patriarch as head of an extended family, as that terrain of authority has been partitioned up among the much more modest scopes of “head of household,” “parent,” “guardian,” and the like, while expanding to include both men and women. In one sense, patriarch is now little more than an honorific designating the high influence within a family exerted by a senior male (although I should note that saying it is “little more than” an honorific does not do justice to the fact that by sheer repetition, honorifics reinforce the importance of the status that they assert).

However, the relentless appearance of the term coupled with Senator Kennedy’s name suggests that the word is doing other work as well, serving as code for what cannot be said otherwise. For one thing ‘patriarch’ makes visible a large number of otherwise irrelevant individuals by linking them up into a subordinate web: not just family, but abject family. It is impossible to use the word patriarch without envisioning a vast faceless horde milling about aimlessly, waiting for the patriarch to tell them what to do. Somewhere a Kennedy third cousin once removed is living some kind of life that has nothing to do with the ‘clan’, but evoking the word patriarch immediately sweeps this person into a crowd. One consequence is thus to make the patriarch’s position of informal influence seem larger than it may actually be. There is no question that Senator Kennedy was hugely influential in Congress, in the formal context of his job; but was he really the go-to guy for all those hundreds of random individuals linked by accidents of birth? To put it another way: doesn’t it actually put Kennedy down to suggest that he was influential because of progeneration rather than because of his own competence as a Senator?

Another function of the word patriarch in this particular instance may be to allow the media to underline the size of Senator Kennedy’s family—one of nine children himself, he has numerous near relatives in his own and the following generation—without getting bogged down in often fractious debates on family size in America. ‘Patriarch’ can thus serve as code for suggestions about Catholic fertility or male virility that the writer doesn’t want to explicitly adumbrate for fear of offending someone. It is left to the individual reader to decode the hidden text.

I believe that the chief work the word does in this context, however, is to express the realities of nepotism without going into the ugly details. Senator Kennedy’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, ruthlessly bought, bartered, and finagled his way to wealth and power, and then used both to further political careers for three of his sons. Their individual qualifications for the jobs they held aside, they each benefited from Joe Kennedy’s machinations on their behalf; and this pattern has been replicated in the following generation. Certainly nepotism is no new force in American politics; indeed, a 2003 article in Atlantic Monthly by Adam Bellow argues that this is a golden age of dynastic politics (Bellow sees political nepotism as a force for both good and bad). ‘Patriarch’ puts a normative face on this reality that serves to sweep it back under the rug.

I do realize that this is something of a basic gloss on Patriarchy 101; also that I have not addressed the rather dissimilar use of the word ‘matriarch’ in connection with the Kennedys. But I do find it interesting that not all the disquisitions on patriarchy over the last half-century could keep journalists of all stripes from reflexively grabbing for ‘patriarch’ as a term of admiration when Senator Kennedy died.

Enough, already.

I stumbled on an interesting post over at double X blog that roundly criticized much writing about how women have been affected by the economic downturn as “recession lite.” Its central complaint amounts to too much soft news, not enough numbers. The author—Linda Hirshman, a retired professor of philosophy and women’s studies at Brandeis—goes on to commend a number of feminist blogs and initiatives that are making a point of grappling with the relevant statistics, with an eye to affecting public policy.

I don’t know how accurate Hirshman’s overall picture is—though I picked up on it partly because I had long since become annoyed myself about all those silly depressionista stories about how Clipping Coupons Saves Thousand$! or When Mom and Dad Move In to Your Basement! Hirshman is mainly taking women writers to task for this, so I don’t know if she shares my (admittedly anecdotal) sense that just as much of this fluff is coming from men as from women writers but wants to hold feminist bloggers to a higher standard, or if she really thinks women writers churn out more anumerical fluff than men do.

If the latter is true, I am left wondering: is this one of the predictable downstream effects of an acculturation process that has pushed so many women away from mathematics in high school? Or an effect of longstanding gender assumptions in the publishing field, regarding both which stories women reporters should cover and which stories women want to read? Or both? Or, more optimistically, is the interesting story here to be found in the signs of a reversal, given that recent statistics show more women now take advanced math in high school and beyond (e.g. the 2008 study published in Science)?

OK, count me also guilty here of speculating about trends in the absence of good—make that: any—numbers. So tempting, and so dangerous…