Equal Pay Quotes
Vladimir Lenin. This is a classic Lenninism where he argues that the basic principles of Communism solve all problems. He never explains how the abolition of private property would lead to female freedom and independence. Nor is this point argued by other Marxist advocates. It was an almost knee-jerk opportunistic reaction not unlike modern conservatives for whom lower taxes are the cure for all ills. The fact that married women were considered the private property of their husbands was amenable to much less drastic solutions than the elimination of private property. Indeed, we have simply abolished wives from the property class and left other property private.
There was a movement to pay married women who were housewives to compensate them for the time they spend in, if nothing else, educating and bringing up male children who were educated. It was they who transmitted the values and many experts agree have more to do with a child’s education than the schools do. So this important and critical societal task was not remunerated as were all others. At the time, even many of the feminists held the view that society would be better off if women were homemakers and brought up the children. However, without any pay (and at the time few or no rights to a husbands earnings of assets) she was bound to be a second class citizen. That idea of housewife compensation obtained almost no support, and the only way for women to gain some kind of position and equality was to work outside the home—the condition that became the norm about 30 years after this was written.
Many of the male mathematicians were already working for the military or defense industries or still in military service. The University Of Pennsylvania Moore School of Engineering was working on trying to design and build a programmable computer that was to be the ENIAC computer. This was one of the very early computer development projects and mathematicians were desired to write the programs to control the computers and make them do something. But at the time, ironically, male mathematicians and engineers, wanted to design and build the computers—all of the early computers were built in a laboratory by scientists and engineers not by workers in a factory. Those were the prestigious and “interesting” jobs. Doing the programming most men assumed would be uninteresting, scut work, and so this project, out of desperation, came up with the radical idea of using women. And so the first computer programmers were mostly women. The irony was that once it became clear how creative and exciting computer programming could be, and its critical importance, the men flooded into the field and a decade later almost everyone thought that computer programming was a man’s profession, and there was a very common bias that women would not make good programmers. However, the people (men) who thought that did not know that the first computer programmer was a woman—Ada Lovelace {641640} and the earliest programming pioneers in America were mostly women.
The recent FBI directors have had a difficult legacy to cope with. In the 1930s throughs the 1960s, the FBI (under J. Edgar Hoover), worked very closely with Southern, Racist, Law enforcement agencies who were constantly covering up and often participating in assaults and lynching of Blacks. Hoover, despite the fact that he was a closet gay, projected a very masculine FBI image and would not have female agents. Even in the Civil Rights movement local FBI offices were working closely with Southern law enforcement to suppress the Civil Rights demonstrations. Nationally, the FBI was not only illegally surveilling Martin Luther King, but Hoover who despised King actually had agents try and blackmail him and pressure him into committing suicide. So the legacy was not good for hiring women of Blacks and Jews, Hispanics, Asians and other minorities as well. Even when Comey made this statement, he was dealing with a group of highly conservative and racist FBI agents who were illegally leaking information that would help to swing the Presidential election to Donald Trump, who was opposed by most women and almost all blacks. So Comey had to persuade new recruits to enter the Bureau despite the legacy and existing component that would not be very comfortable for them. At the same time, the educational qualifications for the FBI were very high (unlike most local and stat law enforcement agencies). Most people who could meet them, could easily qualify for other jobs that paid more than the FBI so it took a good bit of desire and commitment to get anyone to join.
