West Des Moines Democrats Ponder '60s-Style Bra Burning to Fight 'GOP War on Women’

In the 1960s, when women burned their bras in a symbolic gesture to gain equal rights, Saundra Ragona helped strike the match.

“It wasn’t just drugs, sex and rock and roll,” Ragona, still an activist at age 70, said as a group of West Des Moines Democrats gathered in her living room for an Obama for America community organizing meeting.

“In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, civil liberties were very important,” Ragona said, turning her mind’s eye to the change she helped achieve through protest marches, sit-ins and demonstrations as a coed at the University of Iowa and Drake University.

“We came away from it thinking we had pretty much won the fight, but we haven’t. It’s just gone underground.”

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A half-century later, Ragona wonders what swift, metaphorical kick in the pants it’ll take to awaken women to the threat to these hard-fought-for rights?

Ragona and the half-dozen other women – and one man who says the masculine gender must be part of a reinvigorated fight for equality – struggled with the question.

They kicked around ideas from slapping duct tape across their mouths to represent the muting of their voices (too tired a cliche) to donning suffragette costumes (young women might not make the connection) to shrouding themselves in burkas (culturally insensitive and a potential backfire).

What they agreed on was that something has to be done to reignite the fire.

The hard work of five decades ago is unraveling, Ragona said.

“The mere fact that a committee of men gathered to discuss women’s future lives, that it didn’t include one woman, is outrageous,” she said. 

Divide Women and Appeal to the Base

To her core, Lorraine Garner believes Republicans have no interest in overturning Roe v. Wade and turning back the clock to the time of coathangers.

Rather, she thinks all their talk of doing so is a gambit conceived by a political strategist to widen the divide between the parties, to pit women against one another and to dupe extremely religious Republican women into thinking they’re finally going to something about abortion.

“They’re willing to lose some rights as long as they get Obama out,” Garner said. “Theyr’e just leading them down the rabbit hole. They’re never going to do anything about abortion.”

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“Every election year, they drag it out so they can talk to their base,” Kathi Phillips agreed.

“Just to work them up,” Garner responded.

In the 1950s and 1960s, when these activists were growing up, The Pill revolutionized life for women, giving them more reproductive freedom than their mothers, grandmothers and matriarchal ancestors.

What Options Do Women Have Beyond Planned Parenthood?

“They went over the line when they went after contraception,” Garner said.

Even among women of Catholic faith, whose bishops make up a powerful lobby opposing birth control, “you just don’t see families of 10 and 12 kids,” she said.

Garner says she – and most of her friends, whether left or right of or smack dab on center – are offended at the idea that abortion when used in the place of contraception.

“But if my 14-year-old is raped, I am not going to make her go through that,” she said hypothetically. “They would rather have her lose her life.

“When they talk about putting Planned Parenthood out of business, they say women can go somewhere else for birth control, but where in the hell are they going to go?” Garner said, her brown eyes blazing.

“Give me a name.” 

Men's Voices Important, Too

The man in the crowd, Frank Santiago, said men have a stake in the fight, too, because they’re fathers who also have interests – and choices – in controlling the size of their families.”

“Don’t sell men short,” he said. “They’re affected directly by this.

Santiago said men are no less offended than women by attacks women’s rights.

“Are we going to have to start all over and go back there again?” Garner asked – rhetorically. The hour was getting late, and there were still calls for Obama to be made.

It’s a question for another meeting.