A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times

34 | The Wisconsin Uprising and Women’s Power: Report from Madison[*]

As the historian looks at things, the present is always history in the making. In a deeply personal sense, we look back at the Wisconsin Uprising of 2011 as one of the most exciting moments of our time. As an extended phase of social mobilization, it was important in itself, but it was also fascinating because it both reminded us of and so starkly contrasted with the mobilizations some forty years before.

Teaching Assistants’ Association rally at the state capitol, Madison, Wisconsin, February 14, 2012. Peter Patau (Creative Commons)

When Wisconsin governor Scott Walker opened his assault on collective bargaining in February 2011, few people realized it would open the door not only to stirring protests but also, in their wake, to the 2012 election of Tammy Baldwin, the first woman to represent Wisconsin in the Senate and the first openly gay senator in US history. She had been backed by many women’s organizations since her first run for Congress in 1998, but Walker’s successful attempt to roll back the collective bargaining rights of three hundred sixty thousand public-sector workers brought together an unprecedented coalition of labor and women’s groups behind her.

Walker’s bill, the 2011 Wisconsin Act 10, also called the “Budget Repair Bill,” exempted some unions—those of safety workers, the police, state troopers, and firefighters—whose members were mainly men. Instead, it focused on unions where women predominated: teachers, health workers, and public-sector clerical workers. Nationally, by 2011, women represented 57 percent of the public-sector workforce. More than 80 percent of teachers, nationally and in Wisconsin, were female, and 90 percent at the elementary level were women. In 2010, there were 54,510 registered nurses employed in Wisconsin; 95 percent of them were women.

Women unionists quickly took their place at the forefront of the 2011 Wisconsin Uprising. The president of the Wisconsin branch of the National Education Association, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, set up a phone bank and e-mail system and reached out to other unions, including those in the private sector. The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), representing sixty-eight thousand members, started running busses to Madison from distant parts of the state. Meanwhile, Madison Teachers Inc., the city’s major union in education, considered its options. On Wednesday, February 16, 2011, as protesters were filling the capitol rotunda, about half of Madison’s forty-seven hundred teachers called in “sick” so they could join the demonstrations at the statehouse.

The teachers—as well as health workers—objected most strenuously to the de facto destruction of their power to negotiate nonwage terms of their contracts as they had for decades. Excluded from bargaining, then, were workplace issues such curriculum, class size, schedules, and support staff—in short, the daily life of the classroom.

Huge contingents of students showed up—not so much college students as middle- and high-school students. They marched miles to Capitol Square, interspersing chants of “We are the students, the mighty, mighty students!” with cries of “Union power!”

Alongside the unions, members of women’s organizations entered the fray. Prominent was Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, which early on recognized Walker’s longstanding opposition to reproductive rights. Amanda Harrington, the organization’s spokesperson, had reviewed Walker’s nine-year record as a member of the Wisconsin Assembly and correctly concluded that he would act aggressively to show “across the board opposition to women’s health” and fulfill his long-standing antichoice agenda.[1] Harrington was joined by members of the Wisconsin Alliance for Women’s Health and 9to5 Milwaukee, a grassroots organization helping to shape policy making about the transition from welfare to paid labor. Members of the Wisconsin National Organization for Women also turned out in large numbers.

The protests continued as the “Recall Walker” movement shaped up. Women mobilized to collect nearly one million signatures supporting a new election to oust Walker from office. Nonetheless, throughout the protests and recall efforts, the significance of gender in the Wisconsin Uprising remained under the radar.

As we looked around in spring and summer 2011 at crowds gathered in Madison’s Capitol Square, numbering as many as one hundred twenty-five thousand people—and at other big rallies held as late as spring 2012—we saw a large contingent of the sixties generation. It was rather like looking at ourselves, and not only because of the college-looking types on hand. Union retirees were heavy in number and celebrated by fellow unionists and the rest of us; considerable numbers came from neighboring states or distant northern zones of Wisconsin. Among the thousands of aging figures, quite a few had the 1960s demonstrator look, or at least we thought so. Perhaps it was because absolute strangers would say things such as “I’ve been waiting forty years for this” or even “If it never happens again, I’m happy to have lived long enough to see it.”

During the great antiwar mobilization in Washington of April 1965, when we were in our twenties, we remember looking around at how many people around us looked old, or seemed to, in our eyes. Actually, they were veterans of the 1930s and 1940s social movements—some of them, amazingly, marching in their World War II military uniforms. It wasn’t much like that in US antiwar demonstrations of the later 1960s, except in some big cities. There were always peaceniks working hard in the community here, and they could be found in Milwaukee, Waukesha, La Crosse, and Superior, especially as the public views of the war changed and blue-collar America turned against continuing the invasion of Vietnam. But the Democratic Party—even most of its liberal edges, including the editorial board of Madison’s Capital Times—disliked campus demonstrations at least as much as they disliked the war, and they did nothing to encourage the Movement, except to urge calm until the next election. Mostly, at that time, we were the young, the restless, and the longhaired—not to mention the smell of marijuana and the sounds of antiwar music coming from the neighborhoods just off the University of Wisconsin campus.

Coming back to Wisconsin 2011 and our moment in the sun, it is surely impossible to overestimate the multigenerational nature of the crowds: women in their nineties being pushed by their daughters or granddaughters and babes in arms, perhaps our strongest defense against the threat of official or unofficial violence.

It is likewise impossible to exaggerate how unsixties this made us feel, in the sense that we were not a bunch of antiwar and antiracist youngsters cut off from the bulk of an older population. Back then, Madison was the place many Wisconsinites, particularly rural and suburban, looked upon as the epicenter of sin, sodomy, and socialism. But now, we—the crowds of 2011—looked normal to us.

One year later, though, the broader Republican agenda had become even bolder and clearer. By the winter and spring of 2012, women’s rights were evidently at the center of things, not only in Wisconsin, but in many of the states that had a solidly Republican majority in their legislatures. Republican legislators introduced bills cutting or eliminating funds for family planning programs; allowing employers to deny health insurance coverage for contraception for religious reasons; requiring mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds for women seeking abortions; and introducing “personhood” amendments that defined life as beginning with conception (or, in a proposed Arizona bill, two weeks before conception), thereby jeopardizing Roe v. Wade. As women began to mobilize against what came to be known as the GOP’s “War on Women,” the leadership of women and the significance of gender in the protest movement became more visible.

Almost immediately after taking office, Walker had targeted Planned Parenthood. His “Budget Repair Bill,” which passed finally in June 2011, blocked state and federal funds from going to any of Planned Parenthood’s twenty-seven health centers around the state, which had served seventy-three thousand women annually. These new restrictions cut off general health care, not abortion services, which were already barred from receiving public funds.

In December 2011, Walker targeted the Wisconsin Well Woman Program, which for seventeen years had provided uninsured women aged forty-five to sixty-four with no-cost screenings for breast and cervical cancer and multiple sclerosis. Administered by the state Department of Health Services, the program had contracted with Planned Parenthood, which then became, in four counties, the only provider available to approximately one thousand women. Walker decided to end this relationship.

Wisconsin joined Indiana, Kansas, and North Carolina to become the fourth state to enact such legislation. The Guttmacher Institute, which collects data on this subject, reported that in 2011, in the fifty states combined, legislators introduced more than eleven hundred reproductive health- and rights-related provisions, nearly 70 percent of them intended to restrict access to abortion services.[2]

These bills went far beyond abortion policy: they reined in sex education in the public schools. Wisconsin was one of several state legislatures that passed bills including “abstinence only” clauses. In Wisconsin’s case, individual school districts could choose to inform students of contraceptive methods but were required to state that abstinence is the preferred and only truly effective means of preventing pregnancy.

A Wisconsin state senator introduced Senate Bill 507, a measure designed to “emphasize nonmarital parenthood as a contributing factor in child abuse and neglect.” Wisconsin Republicans also rolled back the mechanisms for women to file claims against employers for wage discrimination.

Thanks to the investigatory work of the Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy, many are aware that the uncanny similarity among the bills being introduced in state legislatures nationwide stems from the relationship between legislators and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which was founded in the mid-1970s to provide Republicans with drafts of model legislation. ALEC-drafted bills included voter identification, concealed carry, right-to-work laws, bans on collective bargaining for public employees, the loosening of charter school regulation, rollbacks on environmental protections, and a host of other probusiness policies. Although Walker denies it, his “Budget Repair Bill” and many other measures passed in the 2011–12 Wisconsin legislative session drew directly from ALEC’s template.

At its meeting in December 2011, some six months after the Wisconsin Uprising, ALEC presented its members with a package of six model bills restricting women’s reproductive rights, and these bills continue to make their way through various legislatures. The chief GOP sponsors in Arizona and Virginia—the states that have passed the most dramatic bills—are high-level ALEC functionaries. In fact, David and Charles Koch, the petrochemicals tycoons notorious for their vast contributions to diverse conservative causes, have invested heavily in ALEC. That association is telling. Women’s health, it turns out, is not merely a “social issue”—it’s an economic one, under direct attack from organized labor’s biggest enemy.

Thus, during spring 2012, women who had mobilized in the Wisconsin Uprising took an openly feminist stance against the “War on Women.” Through Facebook, Twitter, and several key blogs, particularly UniteWomen.org, women followed the developments in the states where Republicans held legislative majorities and began to organize as women. UniteWomen sponsored more than fifty events nationwide and encouraged women to vote in the fall elections. In Wisconsin on March 13, about six hundred women quickly mobilized at the state capitol to protest the Wisconsin legislation that effectively took abortion coverage out of the Obamacare insurance exchange. Their “Mad as Hell Rally” was called by Planned Parenthood under the slogan “Women Watch, Women Rally, Women Vote” with the support of a broad alliance of health professionals and advocates. On that day, the Republican-controlled state assembly brought up for a vote several measures to further curtail abortion rights and to end comprehensive sex education in schools. By this point, recall efforts begun by the Wisconsin Uprising had successfully narrowed the Republican edge in the state Senate, and the “Recall Walker” campaign was in full swing—leading to the disappointing June 5 loss by Democratic Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett as Walker beat the recall.

Still, there was momentum. By fall 2012, a neighboring state provided another example of the ability of women working in the public sector to push back. More than 76 percent of Chicago teachers are women. As successors to the nation’s first teachers-only union, founded in 1897, and to the nation’s first teachers’ strike, waged in 1902, Chicago teachers attracted nationwide attention when they walked out and won a new contract that included pay raises and a new evaluation system. The Chicago teachers’ strike in September also showed the power and leadership of Karen Lewis, a unionist known for her street-fighting smarts and her determination to block Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to take over the Chicago public school system and pave the way for privatization. In Wisconsin, public-sector unions found common ground with their Illinois counterparts. Wisconsin teachers rallied in Madison and Milwaukee to show solidarity and then went by bus to Chicago’s lake front to join what was described as a “Wisconsin-style rally.”

On November 6, 2012, the enthusiasm of the election-night gathering of Senate hopeful Tammy Baldwin’s supporters could hardly be contained. Thousands massed to watch the results, cheering for every state called for Obama and going wild when Ohio fell into line. By this time, Baldwin led in the Wisconsin polls, but her opponent, former governor Tommy Thompson, would not accept defeat and delayed conceding. Finally, he had to admit the triumph of the woman his campaign repeatedly maligned as “the most liberal member of Congress.” Baldwin was gracious in accepting her victory but did not back down. She had run on a pledge to represent the powerless against powerful interests and now stepped to center stage. “Make no mistake,” she shouted over the raucous crowd, “I am a proud Wisconsin progressive.”

The rest of Wisconsin proved not so progressive, lining up once again with other purple states. Although Obama and Baldwin won, Republicans took back the state legislature, overturning the gains made with the earlier recall elections. The new Republican redistricting map, along with huge campaign chests, took some of the luster off the moment.

On that front, we were defeated in much the same way that the most democratic and radical impulses of the 1960s and 1970s were defeated. Due to the Wisconsin Uprising, the state’s Democrats were prodded forward, and some of them boldly took the initiative and deserve credit for opposing Walker. But then the normalizing power of big money, along with the dull, unidealistic, unappealing, centrist quality of what can be called the “business Democrats,” failed to offer the kind of alternative that might have won the Walker recall and shifted the political momentum of the state in another direction.

Our movement was not large enough to encompass the thirteen poorest counties of the state, whose voters chose Walker at the cost of endangering the public schools and health services that they urgently needed. The voice of Rush Limbaugh and the television ads in football season—paid for by the Koch Brothers—were more powerful than anything we had to offer. It wasn’t 1932. The system had not failed dramatically; it was only wound down from factory towns to ex-factory towns, and Tom Barrett, running against Walker in spring 2012, was no Franklin Roosevelt, to say the least.

The Wisconsin Uprising was an extraordinary exercise in popular democracy. It brought back to mind Obama’s extraordinary popularity in 2008 and the sense that a different America was possible. But it also brought back countless smaller efforts, from support movements for Third ­World struggles to ecological initiatives (halting an open-pit mine adjoining Indian lands was one of the last big, short-term effects of the 2011 mobilization) to student struggles. The chancellor of the University of Wisconsin had conspired with the new governor to protect our institution to the detriment of others in the state and also at the expense of the teaching assistants’ association, which was as much as abolished. And she had worked to militarize the Madison campus, bringing Pentagon-related cash and personnel. We protesters were, as in 1968, struggling to save the university and surrounding community from corruption and subtle devastation, and that struggle continues.

Despite the setbacks that followed, the mobilization to stop the GOP’s “War on Women” brought feminist activism to the center of US politics in a way not seen since the 1970s. Much remains to be done. Baldwin presented herself as a candidate who has fought for justice and equality for women not only in the United States but throughout the world. And she had a record to back her claim, having represented Wisconsin in Congress for fourteen years. As a member of the Congressional Caucus on Women’s Issues, she focused on pay equity, domestic violence, reproductive rights, and women’s health care. She won her Senate race with a 10 percent gender gap. She is now one of a record number of twenty women elected to the Senate. But as she said at her election-night victory party, she entered this campaign not to make history but to make a difference.