Monthly Archives: September 2021

A demonstrator protests the incarceration of immigrants by CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). (Erik McGregor / Getty)

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When New Jersey passed a bill banning new, renewed, or extended contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in August 2021, it came as a shock. Just two years earlier, The Nation reported on the cynical profiteering of deep-blue counties where Democratic officials denounced the Trump administration while generating immense revenue by holding ICE detainees in county jails. While the passage of S3361/A5207 is a movement victorybringing New Jersey to the national forefront of immigrant justiceit raises the question of what abolishing ICE at the state level entails in the Biden era. Related Article

Resistance to ICE collaboration dates back decades in New Jersey, though the Trump years saw intensified activism, from county government meetings disrupted by songs and chants to civil disobedience in the streets. When the pandemic made ICE detention a possible death sentence, ICE detainees at all four New Jersey facilities launched repeated hunger strikes, with those on the outside offering support.

All of this resistance work reached both its peak and its nadir in November 2020, when the Hudson County freeholders (now commissioners) voted 6-3 to renew their contract with ICE over the unanimous opposition of more than one hundred speakers. They had publicly framed their 2018 two-year renewal as an exit path, but this time around, County Executive Tom DeGise invoked the incoming Biden administration as a reason to now extend the arrangement for up to ten more years.

The 12-hour county meeting was a feat of organizing, drawing speakers from every walk of life, including those who had been detained in Hudson County and spoke of its horrors, but it also reflected the lack of democratic accountability manifest in New Jerseys tightly run county machines, where incumbents are insulated from challenge. The Hudson showdown pointed toward the need for a state-level strategy, away from the impenetrable machine fortresses. It also solidified abolition as the movement consensus. However, the risk that ending ICE contracts could lead to transfer of detainees to facilities in other states, away from family or lawyers, has loomed. During the 2018 Hudson contract-renewal debates, the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project (NYIFUP), which provides pro bono representation to New Yorkers detained in New Jersey, argued against ending the contract. In 2020, NYIFUP instead took a neutral position. Staff unions, however, including many of the immigration attorneys who represent people detained in New Jersey, delivered a statement calling for the end of Hudsons ICE contract.

Concerns over transfers remained, but attention shifted to the ways ICE contracts also helped produce detention. When the New Jersey attorney generals office documented law-enforcement cooperation with ICE, it showed wildly disproportionate levels of ICE access to inmates, notifications to ICE, and even continued detention of people eligible for release in Essex Countyindeed, in the sanctuary city of Newark, where the jail resides. Asked to account for this, county officials explained, Because of our contract with ICE, the agency has staff that closely monitors the facility and all those who are housed there. They also falsely asserted that they were obligated to carry out ICE requests that an inmate be detained on a warrant.Related Article

The state bill met opposition from anti-immigrant groups as well as Hudson County Board of Commissioners Chair Anthony Vainieri, who claimed that without ICE revenue taxes will increasetestifying an hour before voting to raise his own salary. But immigrant-rights activists and organizations pushed hard for its passage.

And then, as the bill slowly progressed through a rocky, nerve-wracking series of committees and hearings, the political landscape of New Jersey suddenly changed. In late April, Essex County officials announced plans to end their ICE contract. This inspired Hudson County officialsthe very ones who had just committed to another 10 years of ICE detention five months earlierto declare themselves determined to end their contract. Bergen County stopped taking new arrivals, and the landlords who lease the Elizabeth Detention Center to CoreCivic, the infamous private prison management companyperhaps tired of the relentless phone zaps to Kean University and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, where they sit on boards and honorary positionsfiled suit to break their lease. Current Issue

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The bill finally passed in late June. It promises that New Jersey will, in time, abolish ICE. But while no new or renewed ICE contracts can advance in New Jersey, the new law does not immediately affect existing ones. Indeed, while Governor Phil Murphy hesitated to sign the billdragging it out over two months as he listened to lobbying from the New Jersey State Bar Association and took a vacation in ItalyCoreCivic squeezed in one final renewal of its ICE contract, extending its relationship with the Elizabeth Detention Center to 2023 (the lawsuit from the landlord is still pending). Early media coverage of Essex Countys decision uncritically reported press releases as fact; The New York Times inaccurately declared that Essex County was ending its ICE contract when it has done no such thing. Instead, it has merely depopulated the jail of detainees; its actual contract runs through 2026, and nothing prohibits it from resuming immigrant detention until then.

Meanwhile, New Jersey Democrats have mostly proven eager to distance themselves from ICEwithout applying upward pressure within the party to secure releases rather than transfers, the current top priority of immigrant-rights activists. The Essex County commissioners, to their credit, responded to community demands and issued a letter to Senators Cory Booker and Robert Menendez calling on them to use their influence to secure more-humane ICE policies, but few others have followed suit. Though Hudson County Commissioner Albert Cifelli repeatedly expressed concern about transfers in justifying the countrys ICE renewal in November 2020, for instance, he and his colleagues appear to have lost interest in the issue now that transfers are actually happening.

They didnt get the message, says Marcial Morales, who organized hunger strikes in Essex and Bergen counties and since his release from detention has helped coordinate mutual-aid funds for detainee commissary services and phone access. The law may be a win, but, he adds, we are calling for releases. Kathy OLeary, a longtime coordinator for the Catholic group Pax Christi, invites Booker and Menendez, with their influence over Bidens Department of Homeland Security policies, to join us in a campaign for just closures of the remaining facilities that results in fewer people in cages, not just in shuffling bodies so that counties and private corporations can continue to generate revenue from the incarceration of our community members.Related Article

Instead, Democratic officials have turned their eyes toward new revenue streams. The most galling aspect of New Jerseys rejection of ICE, for many activists, is that its premised on simply shifting toward new forms of carceral finance. County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo described the Essexs move as enabled by a lucrative new contract with nearby Union County to house its jail inmates, and Hudson officials openly hunger for similar contracts. Instead of rethinking county budget dependence on incarceration, they are trading one set of caged bodies for another. Its a perverse and disappointing way to abolish ICE, but the struggle continues. As Tania Mattos, an organizer with the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund who has played a central role in the Abolish ICENew York/New Jersey coalition, notes, it is absolutely necessary that ICE abolition and prison abolition work be fused together; only when we see these two issues as intertwined will it lead us to liberation and safety.

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New Jersey Hasnt Defeated ICE Yet - The Nation

I fully agree with Larry Elliott (So whats so wrong with labour shortages driving up low wages?, 29 August) and take issue with your correspondent (Letters, 30 August). As a former wages inspector, I well remember Margaret Thatcher and other rightwingers arguments for the abolition of the wages councils that set minimum rates in traditionally low-paid and usually non-unionised industries. Their arguments were basically the same that it would increase inflation.

It is surprising to me that so many people who I suspect consider themselves to be leftwing are opposed to poorly paid workers improving their pay. Inflation does not have to be a consequence of increased pay. When the wages councils introduced yearly pay increases, there was no subsequent increase in inflation. This was because the rates were still quite low compared to the average pay rates throughout the country as a whole. The decision to abolish the wages councils was purely ideological on the part of the government. We have legal minimum rates at the moment without any detrimental effects on inflation, and giving low-paid workers a decent increase will make very little difference.

As far as Brexit and the effect of mass immigration are concerned, it should be understood that a large majority of immigrants are from economically poorer countries than the UK and are predominantly working class and as such are in direct competition with British working-class people.

By contrast, middle-class employment is largely unaffected by immigration, with work such as university lecturing, the NHS, the legal profession and so on having recognised pay scales which are largely adhered to.

Using the perceived and spurious threat of inflation as an argument for preventing poorly paid workers receiving decent pay is wrong. Dr Robert NichollsHuddersfield, West Yorkshire

Have an opinion on anything youve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication.

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Threat of inflation a poor argument against wage increases - The Guardian

According to 2019 figures, on any given day, roughly 48,000 American youth are confined within detention centers, long-term facilities, adult prisons and jails, and other settings. Some of the children are 12 or younger, and many arent getting the rehabilitative help they need.

Its because of this, a family law expert at the University of Florida writes, that the juvenile justice system should be abolished and replaced with a system that supports cultural and systemic change.

In a forthcoming research paper, Nancy E. Dowd, the David H. Levin Chair in Family Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, argues that when a system is too far gone, reform isnt possible.

Burning down the house, she asserts, is the only response.

The current juvenile justice system is a failure for virtually all who come in contact with it,writes Dowd, who is also the Emeritus Director for the Center on Children and Families.

It does not serve the well-being of the children and youth committed to its care, reflected particularly in high rates of recidivism, subsequent involvement as adults with the criminal justice system, and negative educational and employment outcomes.

And she adds: It does not rehabilitate or correct, nor does it problem solve, and it does not increase societal well-being or safety.

Dowd begins by pointing out that, even though the incarcerated juvenile population has slowly begun to decline, the U.S. still has the highest juvenile incarceration rate in the world.

The paper observes that most children and youth in the system are not serious offenders; only one fourth of those incarcerated committed violent offenses.

Many of the adolescents have been detain for offenses relating to sex and substance use, but Dowd said this still raises the question about whether such behavior can be cured through punishment, when many ultimately mature and outgrow the anti-social behavior that got them involved with the criminal justice system in the first place.

Studies that have shown that juvenile incarceration increases the risk of recidivism later in life, and that it has contributed to adverse public and personal outcomes rather than community safety, the paper notes.

(But) rather than redirect adolescents toward positive development, the juvenile justice system prepares kids for the adult criminal justice system, Dowd writes.

Moreover, Dowd explains, the pandemic has added additional complexity, noting that incarceration doesnt help young people cope with the stresses created by the virus.

Dowd explicitly writes that there can be no discussion about abolishing the juvenile justice system without addressing the clear racial and ethnic disparities in Black youths treatment.

Even though general youth population rates have declined, the racial, ethnic and gender disproportionality of the juvenile incarcerated population has become even more pronounced, studies have shown.

This is visible every day in juvenile courts, Dowd writes. Black youth are 16 percent of the population aged ten to 17, but constitute 52 percent of juvenile violent crime index arrest rates, and 33 percent of juvenile property crime index arrest rates.

Dowd asserts that its important to remember that the Black Lives Matter movement is concerned as much with the treatment of young people in the system as adults. She cites the case of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, whose 2012 murder contributed to the formation of the movement.

Martin was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, Fla. He had been visiting his father in the community after receiving a ten-day suspension from his high school. Zimmerman believed Martin was a suspicious character, and following an altercation between the two, Zimmerman fatally shot Martin, a high school junior, in the chest.

The trope of the dangerous Black boy/man is at the heart of the ongoing murders of Black men and women, boys and girls, as perceived threats to white supremacy, Dowd wrote.

Trayvons death is linked to the history of violence against African Americans and has been repeated this year in the Georgia case of Ahmaud Arbery, circumstances that are eerily reminiscent of the slave patrols designed to control Black bodies and the complicity of communities and authorities in the violence of lynching.

This legacy makes it even more important to do away with a system that is especially damaging to Black youth, Dowd writes.

Dowd notes that abolition requires the elimination and replacement of what exists, rather than recasting or reforming the system.

This exposes the lack of resources and support, the need to create robust supports, and that those supports must be part of a broad commitment to deal with the overarching factors of poverty and race.

To accomplish this, Dowd writes, there should be a comprehensive New Deal for Children that would include healthcare, education, parental support, adolescent services, well-being and crisis support, as well as anti-poverty support through housing and public safety.

Not only would this help the people who are currently incarcerated get back on track with their lives, but it addresses the root causes of many forms of criminality.

Put simply, the framework that would replace current incarceration would be one that supports with resources, and helps take care of what a child needs, therefore never needing a carceral system, according to Dowd.

She writes that the failures of youth justice parallel the challenges faced by adults in the modern U.S. system of punishment, and both should be addressed simultaneously.

As we approach nearly a decade since Trayvons death, that anniversary should not be met with more lives sacrificed, but with significant, sustained, systemic, widespread change at the local, state, and federal levels to achieve racial justice and equality that values the lives of Black children and youth as well and guarantees to them that their lives matter as adults, Dowd writes.

The goal of abolition is not simply to dismantle the structure and culture of harm, but also to replace harm with support.

Nancy E. Dowd is the David H. Levin Chair in Family law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. Prof. Dowd is also the Emeritus Director for the Center on Children and Families, and teaches and researches critical theory, childrens rights, social justice, juvenile justice, family law, work/family policy, and nontraditional families.

The full paper can be accessed here.

Andrea Cipriano is a TCR staff writer.

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'Burn Down the House': An Expert Calls for Abolishing the Youth Justice System - Crime Report

SALEM, Mass. In a far corner of Howard Street Cemetery, in a little bump-out area off the side of the burial site, three gravestones memorialize three Black residents of Salem who played a role in the abolitionist movement.

Two are broken into pieces. Shards of stone are receding into the earth. A project to restore the markers is evolving into a larger effort to find and restore the final resting places for other African American families who were buried and long forgotten.

The three stones for Venus Chew, Prince Farmer (with unnamed wife Mary A. Farmer) and Samuel Payne all date to 1851 and 1852.

Rachel Meyer, a conservator whos worked in area cemeteries for years, said destroying the stones will also destroy history.

Apart from a few recently named parks, she said, no well-established streets or houses in this seaport settled in 1626 are named after members of the African American community.

The Howard Street Cemetery was established in 1801, originally called the Branch Street Cemetery, after an adjacent church, which dissolved in the mid-19th century.

There is ample evidence that the Howard Street Church served as a hub for abolitionist activities in Salem over the first half of the 19th century, but its hard to pay tribute to a site that is no longer there, local historian and blogger Donna Seger wrote at streetsofsalem.com this past spring.

I cant even come up with a photograph ... which is really frustrating as the church was the creation of Samuel McIntire, a famed woodworker with an entire historic district named after him.

The graves to be restored are in a corner of the cemetery. They occupy a square piece of land the city donated to expand the cemetery to bury African Americans and strangers, she said.

The stones in question have fallen over in time and were sinking into the ground when an area resident contacted Meyer.

It isnt like people dont know theyre there, she said. There are certainly people who know. Theyre all there together, broken and lying down in a way that grass keeps accumulating over them. Theyre being claimed by the earth.

On Wednesday, Meyer presented to the Massachusetts Archaeological Society, describing the stories represented under each gravestone and what she found when beginning the project.

When lifting portions of Chews headstone, she discovered fragments for another underneath. Some feet away, portions of another broken stone are well concealed by the grass.

Its kind of a muddled history at this point, and Im trying to piece it together, Meyer said in an interview. But the more I look, the more I find, and the more confused I get. Then I get off track because there are other stories in here that dont have anything to do with abolition.

Toward the end of the Society presentation, Meyer listed ways to help the project and ended on ground-penetrating radar, which she said would uncover some of the lost graves we have the names for but havent found yet.

Doreen Wade, president of Salem United, a group dedicated to preserving Black history and culture, said shes enthusiastically behind the project.

More than just repairing fragmented gravestones, she said, its repairing a fragmented story of Salems past.

To Wade, its clear the graves were segregated in the cemetery. Another issue is that many people were buried without any indication of their race, she said, meaning it was effectively buried with them.

In the Quaker cemetery, theres supposed to be African American headstones, she said, and were going to start looking into that as well.

For now, theres more immediate work to do. The restoration in Howard Street Cemetery begins Sept. 1, Meyer said, because the stone repairs cant wait.

As that plays out, research will endeavor toward identifying other graves.

Dustin Luca writes for The Salem News. Contact him at DLuca@salemnews.com.

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Work in historic cemetery will restore abolitionists' graves - Moultrie Observer

Election strategist James Carville famously told workers on Bill Clintons 1992 presidential election campaign that when it came to what voters cared about, there was only one right answer: Its the economy, stupid.

In the same year, the UK university sector underwent a historic change: the abolition of the binary divide between universities and polytechnics. This allowed the latter to compete for research funds, greatly elevating the stakes surrounding the research assessment exercise (RAE), conceived a few years previously as a transparent way to distribute research block grants. Ever since, when it came to giving early career academics advice about what would sway the votes of appointment and promotion committee members, there was only one answer: Its the RAE, stupid.

Thirty years on, though, there are signs that things are changing and not only in US politics, where culture and identity have long (ahem) trumped economics as drivers of voter preferences.

What is now known as the research excellence framework is no longer the only show in the academic town. As a marker of institutional prestige, it vies with its recently spawned siblings the knowledge exchange and, much more visibly, the teaching excellence frameworks as well as both national and international league tables (the latest iteration of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings is out today: see our news pages for details).

The REF itself is also at something of a crossroads, as our cover feature sets out, with a major international review under way even before the results of the latest exercise have been announced. Of course, agonising over the REFs accuracy, fairness and purview is nothing new, but some observers foresee a revision even more significant than the controversial adoption of an impact measure in 2014. With funders increasingly focused on team science and a government opposed to bureaucracy and focused on innovation, might we see the abolition of the REFs already reduced focus on individuals, peer review swapped for metrics and the impact element supersized?

Perhaps. But before any decisions are made, it is worth taking a step back and asking what the REF is for in the modern era.

Its funding purpose remains, but the government has shown itself extremely reluctant to raise the quality-related (QR) budget that the REF distributes; former universities and science minister Chris Skidmore saw it as a triumph when he succeeded in extracting a minor rise a couple of years ago. With most ministers much more inclined to allocate new funding to specific, announceable projects than to put it into a general fund over which universities have full discretion, it seems highly unlikely that much of the promised doubling of the research budget if it ever materialises will find its way into the QR stream. In financial terms, then, the REF stakes are in relative decline although the bill (250 million in 2014, according to the official estimate) is not.

University managers still value the REFs capacity to semi-officially identify areas of research that it would make sense for their institution to expand or contract. But many other countries manage their universities effectively without any comparable exercise.

This brings us to the key issue of quality. Early RAEs are widely credited for boosting the UKs research performance; administrators and politicians may fear that if the REF were abolished or underplayed, progress would start to unravel. After all, many UK institutions are already struggling to hold their ground in international rankings.

But that has more to do with other countries increased investments; no one seriously doubts the quality of UK research (and rankings are informed by more than just research, after all). Moreover, the modern academic world is very different from the one in which the RAE arose, replete with academics who had walked into a rapidly expanding sector during the 1960s and 1970s, often without so much as a PhD.

Competition for jobs is now such that the work ethic required for success is almost superhuman and probably achievable only by those for whom hard graft is the habit of a lifetime. Successful candidates are not the sort to put their feet up once they are in the door particularly as tenure in the UK was abolished shortly after the first RAE.

As one academic recently noted in THE, would-be academics have not only to publish well and extensively but also to win grants, do outreach, have impact and be good departmental citizens. We might also mention achieving top student satisfaction scores. Underperformance in any of those areas can be enough for an application to be rejected.

Its everything now, stupid.

paul.jump@timeshighereducation.com

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Is the REF still useful? - Times Higher Education (THE)

In the dystopian novel The Sleeper Awakes, by British author H. G. Wells, a character called Graham, a Victorian man, falls asleep. When he opens his eyes again, 200 years have passed. He sees nurseries everywhere. But so many orphans, he thinks to himself. Then he realizes that these children are not actually orphans; They are there, at the nurseries, because their mothers are working. And he remembers the old world, longingly: In our time, a woman was supposed not only to bear children, but to cherish them, to devote herself to them, to educate them all the essentials of moral and mental education a child owed its mother ... Only there was an ideal that figure of a grave, patient woman, silently and serenely mistress of a home, mother and maker of men to love her was a sort of worship ...

It is said that Hermeticism, derived from Batiniyya (Esotericism), emerged in Egypt thousands of years ago. This belief system was based on various treatises, known as Hermetica, attributed to a person called Hermes. It is believed that the Hermetica were written by members of the order of Serapis, headquartered in Alexandria. With the reprinting of these treatises in 15th century Venice, Hermeticism was revived, fueling the Age of Enlightenment.

The utopia of Hermetics is Novus Ordo Seclorum (New Order of the Ages). This is a vision of a socialist world state where property ownership, gender differences and the institution of family don't exist. Adherents of Batiniyya believe that God is hermaphroditic, both male and female. According to them, when the human was first created, it was immortal and bore traces of both genders. It became mortal when it was separated into two sexes, male and female. Consequently, in order to become immortal again, the gender difference has to disappear.

In the Gospel of Thomas, found in Egypt in 1945 and featuring an esoteric (Batini) style, and in the treatise of Clement of Alexandria, it is claimed that it was asked of Jesus when his kingdom would come. And he said: When the two will be one, and the outside as the inside, and the male with the female neither male or female.

Since there would be gender equality in this world under the rule of the Batinis, the concept of family would also be unnecessary. As such, Plato, one of the Hermetic Greek philosophers, desired the abolition of the nuclear family in his work Republic, in which he described his dream state. Thus, individuals that is, citizens would reach unity as a society. In this ideal, the children that the community needed were best obtained by men and women coming together, making women a means of reproduction, rather than falling in love with them.

The Batini project to abolish the family was founded on the most critical part of this institution, the woman. This is probably why the first person to use the term "feminism" was a socialist French philosopher Charles Fourier, who died in 1837. According to this French socialist, who wanted the nuclear family to disappear and children to be raised collectively rather than by their parents, a dictatorship of feminism and socialism would be established in the world and the dictator would reside in Istanbul.

Dialectic is explained in Kabbalah via the terms Chesed and Gevurah (Kabbalah is an esoteric discipline in Jewish mysticism, while Chesed and Gevurah are sefirots or attributes in Kabbalah). The sculptor's right hand, Chesed, carves the stone, while his left hand, Gevurah, holds the stone still. The right and left hands actually serve the same purpose while exerting power in opposite directions.

Adherents of Batiniyya are advancing towards the goal of the socialist New World Order with this method.

For example, just as the activities of radical religious people feed inter-religious dialogue; capitalism and communism, which are seen as thesis and antithesis, actually support each other for the synthesis of socialism. Therefore, both communism and capitalism have tried to pull the woman to business life by separating her from home and family.

Friedrich Engels, one of the authors of "The Communist Manifesto," states in his work "Origin of the Family": The first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society.

He continues: With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not.

International Women's Day, March 8, which is celebrated all over the world today, was first started as a communist holiday by Vladimir Lenin, former Premier of the Soviet Union in 1922 with the help of German feminist Clara Zetkin. However, capitalists, did not lag far behind them in appealing to women's feelings. In fact, they do not force women to work in factories and collective farms, as in communism. Instead, they resort to sweet propaganda methods, with slogans like "Strong Women" and "We Can Do It!"

As the French philosopher Frederic Lordon said in his book Capitalisme, desir et servitude ("Capitalism, desire and servitude"), in which he criticizes capitalism, that business systems capture the employee with passionate phrases such as self-actualization and empowerment.

The Hermetics started working, following revolutions around the globe, to reach the ideal of a new life, with new women in the New World. After all, if the nationalist movement could divide multi-national empires into states, feminism could divide the family into individuals. If the kings, who were considered the fathers of the people, could be deposed and the nations under their rule could be liberated, the father of the family could also be deposed and women could be liberated.

What happened to the Ottoman Empire was an example of this. The Young Turks, a political reform movement organized in Batini lodges, put an end to the Ottoman Empire by overthrowing Sultan Abdlhamid II in 1909, and established the New Turkey under the rule of Ittihat Terakki (Union and Progress Party). However, changing people was much more difficult than changing the regime.

Ziya Gkalp, one of the ideologists of the Young Turks, wrote about this: "After we made the political revolution, we were left with a second task: to prepare the social revolution!" The women's branches of Ittihat Terakki immediately started working. Women's congresses were being organized, and feminism propaganda was rampant with the removal of the control over the press.

In the Ikinci Merutiyyet Devri (Second Constitutional Era), where slogans of "freedom" and "equality" filled the air, clothing became the main indicator of women's freedom. Wide-skirted burqas began to be replaced by the "constitutional burqa," which revealed body lines. But even that was not enough for the Young Turks; Ittihat Terakki's media outlet Yeni Mecmua and Abdullah Cevdet's Ictihad magazine declared war against the veil. They claimed that there was no veiling in Islam, that this custom acquired from the Greeks.

Halide Edip, who was described by a 1917 British report as "a Jew defending Turkish women's right to vote," was the most famous feminist of the new Turkey. She wrote novels and gave speeches to change the role of women in society. Since men were at the front during World War I, women had to enter business life.

In one of her articles, Halide Edip said about this: Turkish women not only shed their veils but also took the place of men. They worked to feed their families and occupied vacant places. Turkish women entered banks, shops, and ministries. As such, Turkish women gained such freedom that their husbands, who returned from the war, could not put an end to it.

Halide Edip, who puts forth feminist messages in all her novels, also dealt with gender equality in her novel "Yeni Turan" ("New Crescent"). Ouz, the protagonist of the novel, was told by a woman, You will make us feel like women, his response was: Women? God forbid, I invented a new policy just to remove you from the guise of women.

Today, statistics show that in countries where women's employment is increasing, divorces are also increasing. While getting married and starting a family is getting more difficult every day, extramarital (or nonmarital) affairs are encouraged from a young age. Moreover, unlike in the Old World, men and women are no longer seen as two different parts that complement, complete and need each other.

Women, because they are removed from the guise of women as per Edip's phrasing, are considered to be a part that is the same and equal to men. So, has this Hermetic New World brought happiness to women? Are women happier now? It is unfortunately very difficult to claim this. Studies show that in countries where gender equality is highest in education and income, like Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway, rates of rape, violence and abuse are much higher.

In the film All About Eve, Broadway star Margo says: Funny business, a woman's career the things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman. That's one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: Being a woman. Sooner or later, we've got to work at it, no matter what other careers we've had or wanted. And in the last analysis, nothing is any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed and there he is. Without that, you're not a woman.

Who knows, maybe the strong woman is not actually the one standing on her own feet, but as in the Old World the woman who raises, nurtures and educates her children herself at home, and supports her man.

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New women of the New World Order | Daily Sabah - Daily Sabah