[S]tories of sexism and empowerment and of the importance of celebrating women highlighted a panel discussion Friday marking International Women’s Day.
“For the last hundred years, women have been coming together every March to celebrate the economic, the cultural, the political and the social rights of women, and the experiences of a lot of different women,” said Vermont Assistant Attorney General Molly Gray, the event’s moderator. “That’s what we’re here today to do.”
The panelists at the event at the University of Vermont Alumni House were as diverse as promised.
Sefakor Komabu-Pomeie, founder of Empowering and Enlightening People with Disabilities, Africa, spoke about growing up in a culture that saw people with disabilities, like herself, as being cursed or devilish. Felicia Kornbluh, a women’s studies professor at UVM, talked about her start in activism, working as a journalist at the age of 13 in newly liberated Cambodia. And Denise Johnson, the first female Vermont Supreme Court justice, spoke about what it was like to enter the legal profession at a time when women made up just 2 percent of law school graduates.
Jill Krowinski, majority leader in the Vermont House of Representatives, remembered her first time going to Planned Parenthood in Burlington — for which she later was a lobbyist — and being frightened and outraged by the protesters she encountered on her way in. She said she thinks everyone has a certain event in their life that lights a fire in them, and that was hers.
Kornbluh noted the origins of International Women’s Day, which is celebrated on March 8 every year.
“I just wanted to give a short shout-out, as I’ve been telling my students this week, the original event International Women’s Day commemorates is the 1909 Garment Workers Strike in New York City, the so-called strike of 20- or 30,000,” Kornbluh said. “It was a Jewish, working-class women’s strike, in one of the most important industries in the most important city in the U.S. and it had reverberations around the country and around the world.”
When the conversation turned toward the modern day, Krowinski pointed toward the state legislation that she sees as being pivotal for advancing women’s rights.
She said she never thought she’d see the question of reproductive rights come up again in Vermont, but with the conversations over Roe v. Wade resurfacing at the federal level last year, Krowinski and other legislators met with groups like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU and decided that it was time to codify Vermont’s reproductive rights.
“This was the first time in 10 years that there was consensus around the table that it was time to act,” Krowinski said.
She also emphasized the importance of paid family leave legislation and an increased minimum wage in Vermont.
“The ratio of men’s to women’s pay may be a little bit better than it was, but we’re still dealing with the same issues: women don’t have enough money to go to work, pay their child care, pay their transportation, those are exactly the same issues we were looking at [at the beginning of my career],” Krowinski said.
Between the four panelists, there were success stories from just about every women’s rights realm imaginable — reproductive rights, sexual harassment, disability rights, and dozens of others. But they all agreed that the work that had been done just scratches the surface in terms of the equality women in Vermont still lack.
“Vermont is the only state not to send a woman to Congress,” Krowinski said. “Burlington has never had a woman serve as the mayor. We only have one woman serving in statewide office, out of five seats, and women hold 39 percent of the seats in the state Legislature. So if we’re talking about how to create equality, we can’t create equality if women aren’t at the table … and if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”
Correction: Jill Krowinski was the director of Vermont Public Policy for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, not its executive director.
