The Glass Ceiling

Thirty days have passed, which has given me time for reflection and consideration of the adjustments that lie before us in our new reality. 

Here in America, I seem to always make more progress with my research and writing during the winter months. Weather and the lack of garden to attend to probably account for this additional “author time”. I’m currently drafting the chapter in my upcoming historical fiction sequel, The Gilded Age, that relates to the Irish immigrant's entry into this country during the 19th century. The more fortunate and entrepreneurial Irish settlers arrived in this country during the 1820-1830's. This is the group that my ancestors belong to. However, from the 1840-1870's, a potato famine occurred in the Emerald Isle causing hundreds of thousands of deaths from starvation. Still, no fewer than 1.5 million Irish were able to escape and arrive on our eastern seaboard.  

The Irish immigrants were not welcomed due to their willingness to work for lower wages. They displaced many of the African Americans on the east coast of their jobs. There were other Irish who moved inland, mostly through Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and were put to work in coal mines. The story is told of how mine workers back then were mainly divided into two groups, “Miners” and “Mine Workers”. “Miners” were mainly those from England and Wales and men who had been working the coal fields for some time before the arrival of the Irish. A caste system was carried over from the old days in Europe whereby the Irish immigrants became “mine workers”. Both miners and mine workers reported to work by 7am, the miners entering the shaft to free the coal from the seam face, and they were usually finished by lunch time, leaving of course, the mine workers to pile up the lumps, sometimes filling three to four cars, before the end of their shift at 6pm. It was not uncommon for the mine workers to spend most of their day working in waist-deep water and for their troubles, receive only one third of the pay for their labor. 

Irish immigrants were also used to fill up the factories that were burgeoning at that time in history. They also were instrumental in laying the railroad track for the Union Pacific Railway, which opened up the entire country in 1869. Needless to say, Irish lives were expendable and these immigrants were surely underappreciated for their hard labor. Matter of fact, they were despised and maligned. Most were condescendingly called “Bridget” and worse. The Irish labor activists, otherwise known as “Molly Maguires”, who were petitioning management within these large companies for better working conditions, were tracked down, prosecuted, and sentenced to death. The Irish mine workers who were either crushed by collapsing shafts or suffocated by leaking gases within the earth, were subject to a more excruciating death. And yet, it was the public’s prejudice against them as immigrants that affected all of the Irish. They were referred to as “damned drunken, ignorant papist”. At least the immigrants from this period of our history weren’t castigated as murderers and rapists who eat cats and dogs, which is the malarky we’ve just been witness to recently. 

In H.W. Brand’s book, “American Colossus”, he addresses another late 19th century prejudice in the chapter, “Meet Jim Crow”. Brand highlights the story of Ida Wells who was born into a slave family, eventually goes to live with her aunt in Tennessee, and becomes a school teacher. One day while traveling on the Chesapeake, Ohio & Southwestern train, the conductor had her physically removed from her first-class seat and placed in the smoking car against her will. A court case followed in which Ida was awarded $500 compensation for her troubles, only to have the Tennessee Supreme Court reverse the lower court’s order. Ida had to return the $500 award and ended up paying $200 in court costs. The famed Booker Washington weighed in on this incident, but in the end admitted that conscience might motivate some folks, but conscience is fickle. Brand writes, “Democracy was even less reliable than conscience ... (and) that democracy sooner or later expressed the will of the majority, whatever courts or constitutional amendments might declare. ... Blacks were a minority in America and always would be; for them to demand what the majority wasn’t ready to give was to spit into the wind.”  

Chief Justice John Marshall Harlan had his own thoughts on the subject. He would write the majority opinion (7-1) in the Plessy v Ferguson case stating that segregation did not perpetuate race prejudice. Quoting, “This prejudice, if it exists, is not created by law mandating separate railcars for the two races.” Justice Harlan alluded to a Pennsylvania Supreme Court case in his remarks, "To assert separateness is not to declare inferiority ... It is simply to say that following the order of Divine Providence, human authority ought not to compel these widely separated races to intermix.” Thus, began the “Separate but Equal” policy that became the law of the land in the United States. The Civil Rights legislation of the 1960’s officially struck down this notion that a separate section on public transport or restroom facility or even a drinking fountain could be passed off as equal. However, legislation didn’t change the prejudices that lie deep-seeded in the minds of many Americans. I attended a school in a small, almost entirely Caucasian community. I can attest that our schools were very much different than the mostly black community’s ones not too far down the road. A full decade after acknowledging separate is not equal, nothing much has changed the minds of the people.  

I have a confession to make. I was one of them. Back in 1980 I was attending university and was loosely aware that women had finally been granted their right to vote. The 19th Amendment to our Constitution was inserted on August 18, 1920. What I didn’t know was that many other countries around the world had already made this mental leap, that women should be considered “equal” enough to have the right to vote. By the way, New Zealand was the first self-governing country in the world in which the women had the right to vote. With Lord Glasgow’s signing off the “New Electoral Act” on September 19, 1893, the proverbial glass ceiling had been busted open. It just took Americans twenty-seven years to come to grips with this concept. It wasn’t for the lack of trying, as I write in my upcoming sequel how Susan B. Anthony crashed the Independence Day ceremony at the Centennial Fair in Philadelphia. She and two friends read their own version of the declaration of independence whilst the officials looked on in disbelief and a cannonade was exploding in the background in celebration of the moment. 

Back to my confession. I was fortunate to be an official attendee of the 1980 Republican Convention in Detroit. That was the one which first nominated Ronald Reagan. The evening events were concluded late and I was traveling by public transport back to my vehicle miles away. It was well past midnight. The bus was full of Republicans and I recall one lady turning to me and asking why I was wearing a button against the proposed ERA Amendment being added to the party’s platform? I knew the “party line” by heart and began the recitation I had been taught. She wasn’t buying the argument that women weren’t equal. Here’s a synopsis of what she and a few others refused to buy in to: “That the ERA conflicted with the God-given differences between men and women and disregarded traditional family and gender roles embedded in their religious beliefs.” Phyllis Schlafly was the most outspoken anti-ERA proponent. Her claim was that God’s mission for women was to give their families spiritual and emotional guidance and the Equal Rights Amendment threatened this mission and would also force women to question their value. Who else was pushing this appeal to men’s natural disposition to prejudice? - any number of religious groups including that of the fundamentalist Christians and the Catholic Church. 

Neither this pro-ERA woman nor I officially won over each other in our late-night debate, but I certainly could not have been considered a winner when I realized after she got off at her stop, that my car was in a lot two stops back! Yes, I was dropped off at some obscure Detroit neighborhood and had to find my way back at 12:30am. That was some penitence that I deserved and may elaborate on in a future blog, but I can vouch that people even today will hold on to their prejudice that women should not be treated equally in society, within the family, nor the workplace. I will never live down the shame I carry from that awful bus ride. 

So, reflecting back on the election result some thirty days ago. What chance did a daughter of a mix-raced immigrant family have of becoming the President of the United States? All good children are schooled up that anyone can become president in this land of opportunities, but what is the reality? How or when will these glass ceilings that hang over our nation’s immigrants, our citizens who aren’t Caucasian, and in general, women? If the rumblings coming out of our post-election/pre-inauguration are any indication, this current seemingly impenetrable glass ceiling is going to get double-paned. I sincerely hope that this isn’t the case, but we’re working with long-held, deep-seeded prejudices becoming once again du jour. I guess only time will tell.