What DEI Has Done For You
Remembering partial victories (+ a history of pushback)
Welcome back to the This Day newsletter. Each week, a member of our team gathers together bits of America’s past and attempts to find a throughline that might add a little understanding to our current moment.
Here’s what happened over the week ahead in American political history…
May 1
1886: A general strike for 8-hour working day organized by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions begins
1958: President Dwight Eisenhower proclaims Law Day
1960: A U2 Spy Plane is shot down over the Soviet Union, causing the collapse of a summit conference in Paris
1934 : Eleanor Roosevelt is holding a series of meetings at the White House to plan out a number of camps for women that would give them skills and community as the country tried to claw out of the Great Depression
2003: President George W. Bush delivers his "Mission Accomplished" speech
May 2
1847: A US military ship, the USS Jamestown, was loaded up with food and other relief to sail to Ireland and help with the famine in that country
1972: J. Edgar Hoover dies in his sleep
1957: Senator Joseph McCarthy succumbs to illness exacerbated by alcoholism and dies
2011: Osama bin Laden is killed
May 3
1921: West Virginia imposes the first state sales tax
1951: Senate hearings into the dismissal of Gen. Douglas MacArthur begin
May 4
1776: Rhode Island becomes the first colony to declare independence from England
1826: Anne Royall begins publishing books and articles based on her travels around the country, talking to everyday folks about their everyday lives. She was able to gather stories and map society in a new way — and also received a lot of pushback for it
1886: A deadly riot between police and protesters breaks out in Haymarket Square in Chicago
1916: Germany responds to a demand by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and agrees to limit its submarine warfare
May 5
1847: The American Medical Association organized.
1893: The Crash of 1893 hits America. It was the result of a rapidly changing economy, heavy debt, and slow-footed governmental response. And it ushered in a new era in American politics.
1961: Alan Shepard becomes the first American in space
1969: In Boston, a group of women are meeting to share information about women’s health, which would eventually lead to writing a 193-page pamphlet, which would eventually lead to the book “Our Bodies, Our Selves.”
May 6
1882: The United States Congress passes the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States
1937: 35 people die in the Hindenburg disaster
1957: John F. Kennedy wins the Pulitzer Prize for "Profiles in Courage."
May 7
1945: Germany signs an unconditional surrender, ending World War II in Europe
1958: The “Coya Come Home” letter is published — a public letter written by the husband of MN representative Coya Knutson, demanding that she leave office and return to domestic life
1975: President Gerald Ford formally declares the end of “the Vietnam era”
1994 : During a town hall airing on MTV, President Bill Clinton is asked whether he wears “boxers or briefs.”
In which we take the above collection of events and find themes, throughlines, rabbit holes and more. This week, Nicole Hemmer weighs in.
In the past few years, “DEI” has become both a shorthand and a slur, divorced from its origins in civil and economic rights. But there are several anniversaries that we mark this week that remind us of how central diversity, equality, and inclusion are to U.S. democracy, and how hard won even the partial victories have been.
For instance, it was this week in 1969 that women were preparing to gather at Emmanuel College in Boston for a women’s liberation conference. One of the panels, “Women and Their Bodies,” had been organized in response to the frustrating experiences many women had with the healthcare system. Health science research was primarily done by men, and medical professionals, especially doctors, were also overwhelmingly male. As a result, the state of women’s health knowledge lagged far, far behind men’s.
The session was so invigorating, so full of ideas, that the women involved formed the Doctors’ Group, later renamed the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. They dove into research, particularly around reproductive health. Twelve feminist authors ultimate contributed chapters on topics like abortion, pregnancy, and post-partum depression, resulting in the book Our Bodies, Ourselves. The book immediately sold hundreds of thousands of copies, even without advertising. Rather than wait for some distant future in which women would reach parity with men in the health sciences, the Collective instead sought to elevate their knowledge and research from outside, launching a women’s health movement that has reshaped medical science in the U.S.
This week also marks the anniversary of the day in May 1934 when Eleanor Roosevelt began organizing training opportunities for women in the depths of the Great Depression. The signature New Deal programs launched in the year since her husband became president, like the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), primarily focused on unemployed men. But women, too, required opportunities for paid labor, especially in a decade marked by a plunging marriage rate, a rising divorce and abandonment rate, and breathtakingly high unemployment. These women were largely invisible to the men of the New Deal, but Eleanor Roosevelt understood that they needed assistance, too. She brought her idea to Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in a presidential Cabinet, and the two worked together to develop the idea. Derided in the press as the “She-she-she” alternative to the CCC, within a year, there were training camps across the country dedicated to training women in trades.
And finally, I want to mention one of my favorite episodes, from our first year at This Day. It revolved around Coya Knutsen who, inspired by one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s speeches, decided to run for Congress. In 1954, she won her race and entered Congress as one of 16 women in the House, the most that had ever served at the same time. But she also lived with an abusive husband, whose jealousy over her rising star led him to team up with her political rivals and write an open letter-slash-campaign ad known as “Coya, Come Home”:
Coya, I want you to tell the people of the 9th District this Sunday that you are through in politics. That you want to go home and make a home for your husband and son. As your husband I compel you to do this. I'm tired of being torn apart from my family. I'm sick and tired of having you run around with other men all the time and not your husband. I love you, honey.
Her opponent in her 1958 election used the letter, and her sex, against her, running under the slogan: “A Big Man for a Man-sized Job.” Coya lost the election by a thousand votes. She returned to Minnesota, divorced her husband, encouraging other women to pick up the torch she had been forced to lay down. “Just strike out," she said in an interview. "Go on out and try your wings. That's what I did.”
Knutsen tried to pass along her ambitions, but another woman would not be elected to Congress from Minnesota until 2000.
All of these stories that we mark this week remind us how hard-fought inclusion has been in the United States; the events of the past few months likewise remind us how easily women—and Black Americans, and LGBTQ+ Americans, and so many others—can be pushed back out of the halls of power: fired from their positions, erased from websites, removed from medical research. These fights from the 20th century are a timely reminder of why we will continue to fight back, and what’s really at stake when politicians talk about DEI.
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