User:Tschoultz/sandbox

Article Evaluation: Judith Heumann

 * Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?
 * Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added?
 * The article talks about a few cases that Heumann was involved in, but it does not state what the cases are. I think that the names of the cases should be added and links to articles about them if they are available on Wikipedia. I think that there should also be information about her being co-director of the World Institute of Disability.
 * What else could be improved?
 * A few of the links are broken in the article. When you click on citation 16, the link does not work.
 * There should also be more information, if possible, in the personal section of her page.
 * Is the article neutral? Are there any claims that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?
 * The article is neutral and there does not seem to be a bias toward a particular position. The page mostly lists things she was part of, but does not go into detail about the effects of what she did.
 * Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?
 * I think her personal story is underrepresented and the work she did through different jobs.
 * Check a few citations. Do the links work? Does the source support the claims in the article?
 * Several of the links in the article do not work. The sources are not very credible. Many are links to other websites, which is not a credible source for Wikipedia.
 * Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?
 * Many of the facts are not referenced with a reliable reference. The information comes from other websites instead of a reliable source. Only one of the sources is a book.
 * What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic?
 * There are not any conversations behind the scenes about how to represent this topic. There has only been a modification of a broken link.
 * How is the article rated? Is it a part of any WikiProjects?
 * The is rated "S" for being a start-class article. It is part of the WikiProject Disability and WikiProject Biography.
 * How does the way Wikipedia discusses this topic differ from the way we've talked about it in class?
 * This topic has not been discussed in class, but I thought it would be relevant because Judith Heumann helped created laws that protect people with disabilities. She is a woman who fought for change for a large group of people and has had a large impact on society.

Linda K. Kerber
I chose Linda K. Kerber because I wanted to expand on the sections that mention her work, but do not explain what the books are about. I would like to explain what they are about on her page because there are not separate Wiki pages for each book. I would also like to add more information about her because there is very little written about her life.

Reed v. Reed
I would like to expand more on people's contributions to the case and what has been said about the case by the people who were involved. I will also try to add information about the legacy of this case.

Drafting Edits
Linda K. Kerber:

Kerber's book, No Constitutional Right to be Ladies, discusses the different court cases and laws that have impacted women throughout history through 5 chapters.

Chapter 1 is about the court case involving Anna Gordon Martin's property, Martin v. Commonwealth. Anna Martin was an American citizen who owned property in the United States. After the Revolutionary War, she moved to England with her husband, William Martin, because he was a loyalist and was in the British army. They fled the country with their children and left all her property behind. James Martin, their son, later sued for the property because it was not granted to him once he moved back to America. Martin's place in society was ambiguous because he believed that he was an American citizen since he was born in Massachusetts, but a court stated that he was a British citizen. This was a problem because "under the common law, only citizens could own or inherit land."

Through this court case, there is a discussion about women's obligations and their duties to their families and the state. James Martin was claiming that the property was rightfully his because his mother was a citizen of the United States and it belonged to her and gave her the ability to pass it on to her heirs. “Yet because she had fled the Revolution, the state of Massachusetts did not think the property should be returned to her.” It was argued that Anna did not have a choice in fleeing the country because she had an obligation and duty to follow her husband. The importance of feme-covert in society created the belief that women's obligations to their husbands came before their obligations to the state. “The judges spoke in terms of deference, of obligation, if what women owed to their husbands, what men had a right to demand of their wives.” James Martin was able to gain ownership over his mother’s property because the court agreed that she followed her obligation to her husband, which took precedence over her obligation to the United States.

Chapter 2 discusses vagrancy laws after the Civil War and the actions of the Freedman’s Bureau. The Bureau was created to help freedpeople, but “its agents held varying ideas of what independence and ultimately citizenship ought to mean for freedpeople.” Though slavery technically ended, the system created during Reconstruction created a system where freedpeople could be in situations similar to slavery. Vagrancy laws were largely enforced on African-Americans and a few whites, which meant that all African-Americans needed to hold jobs that kept them occupied every day and did not allow them to be in public. "Nearly everywhere, failure to appear to be working on a binding contract was defined as vagrancy, and vagrancy was severely punished." If they were arrested for vagrancy, they could be whipped, imprisoned, or placed in forced labor contracts without pay. Black women dealt with trying to fill the gender roles set for women, which meant women needing to stay in the home, while having to work because of the vagrancy laws and the need for money.

Chapter 3 outlines taxation and representation of women within the United States. Abby Smith and her sister refused to pay their taxes because women did not have any representation in government. Their mother brought them up to be abolitionists and they interacted with both black and white abolitionists. "For the Smith women as for so many other white women, claiming rights for slaves flowed easily into claiming rights for themselves." When arguing for their right to vote, they used the rhetoric from the Revolution and how revolutionaries fought against taxation without representation. Women's rights activists found it difficult to find define the relationship between individual rights and the state when it came to taxes. Women paid taxes, but were not granted full voting rights. "Many suffragists proposed that if they could not accomplish full voting rights in a single step, they should be offered 'municipal suffrage,' enabling them to make more limited, but still very practical choices where they lived and paid taxes." The Smiths argued that without representation, taxing women was illegal and Abby stated that the tax money would be spent on men's needs. Women continued to fight for their right to vote through the discussions of taxation and representation, and this eventually led to the the Nineteenth Amendment.

Chapter 4 discusses Gwendolyn Hoyt's trial, the right for women to be on juries, and the legacy of Hoyt's case within gender discrimination. Hoyt was charged with murder after she killed her husband by hitting him in the head with a baseball bat. During her trial, there was an all-male jury. People believed that women should not be on juries for several reasons. They believed that women could be embarrassed by the evidence presented during trials. Men also argued that women could not take care of the home if they had to perform jury duty. Some argued that "the state might have an interest in enforcing women's 'performance of their domestic chores'; if the obligation of jury service would interfere with that performance, or contribute to its being performed sloppily, or in a 'lax' manner, then the state might reasonably refuse to make jury service obligatory." This reinforced the idea that women's obligations to their family was more important than their obligation to perform a public service. The argument was that women were not excluded, but exempted, which made women not serving on juries legal. Because of this case, women fought against gender discrimination through laws and court cases. Pauli Murray proposed that the ACLU or the justice department prepare a brief to say that discrimination against women violated the 14th Amendment and she used Title VII to argue for this. Ruth Bader Ginsburg continued Murray's fight, starting with Reed v. Reed. Ginsburg partnered with the ACLU and led the Women's Rights Project. Since then, women have been allowed to serve on juries and the Supreme Court has recognized cases that involve gender discrimination.

Chapter 5 discusses women's role in the military. During World War II, women were able to enlist in WAAC to help with the war effort. Helen Feeney was a wife of a veteran who applied for many jobs that required a civil service exam to be taken for consideration for the job. She often had the highest scores, but was placed lower on the consideration list, with veterans who had lower scores placed above her. Feeney took the exam for the Assistant Secretary position at the Massachusetts Board of Dental Examiners. She "received the second-highest score, but was ranked sixth on the hiring list, behind five male veterans, four of whom had received lower grades than she." This would create a nationwide discussion about what the government owes its veterans. The book also outlines how women received benefits compared to men for serving in the military. For women who served in the military efforts, they were not compensated or had any entitlement, unlike men, because they held positions that were not combative. The right to compensation for women serving in the military was discussed in the court case Frontiero v. Richardson. The role that women should hold in the military has long been a discussion and what type of role they should have. "Given institutional form in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and in Women Strike for Peace, pacifism remained a strong part of the feminist social critique through the Vietnam era." The use of pacifism separated women from the violence that came with war, aligning women with peace and men with aggression. Women have been able to hold "combat support" and noncombat" roles in the military, but there has been a struggle to allow women, along with LGBT+ people, into "combat" positions in the military. It creates the question about women having an obligation to bear arms like men have and women's relationship with violence and aggression compared to men.

Reed v. Reed:

Reed v. Reed was the first major Supreme Court case that addressed that discrimination based on gender was unconstitutional because it denies equal protection. The director for the ACLU, Mel Wulf, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote Sally Reed's brief. They recognized Pauli Murray and Dorothea Kenyon as co-authors of the brief, giving them credit even though they did not help on it because Ginsburg wanted to acknowledge the debt she owed them for their feminist arguments that had created a basis for her arguments.

Hundreds of laws were changed after the Reed v. Reed ruling. "Congress went through all of the provisions of the U.S. Code and changed almost all that classified overtly on the basis of gender. So Congress and the Court were in sync." This court case created the opportunity to analyze laws that dealt with sex-based classifications.

Phillips v. Martin Marietta reached the Supreme Court as the first case about Title VII gender discrimination in 1971, the same year Reed v. Reed was decided.

Reed created a basis to analyze sex-based discrimination, “so when we see people concluding in policy or in law that there needs to be a line between the treatment of men and the treatment of women because men are a certain way or women like certain things, or don’t like certain things, that’s the thing that raises the constitutional red flag under equal protection.”

Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld

This case gave widowed men the opportunities to collect Social Security for their dependent children, which was only allowed for widowed mothers to collect before this court case. Like men, women could now have their Social Security benefit their families if they passed away.

(The Wiki page states that the court rules unanimously for Wiesenfeld, but this is false. I would change this to say: Eight of the nine justices voted in favor of Wiesenfeld and the other judge abstained from voting.)