Section II – 90 minutes total for Section II
Directions: The following four (4) sources present multiple perspectives on the same issue or topic. Read
the sources carefully, focusing on both the thematic connections among them and the different perspectives
each represents. Then write a logically organized, well-reasoned, and well-written argument that presents
your own perspective on the thematic link you identified. You must incorporate at least two (2) of the
sources provided. You may also use the other provided sources or draw upon your own knowledge. In your
response, refer to the provided sources as Source A, Source B, Source C, or Source D, or by the authors’
names.
Source A - Women’s Suffrage Speech – Susan B. Anthony 1873
In the 1800s, women in the United States had few legal rights and did not have the right to vote. This speech was given
by Susan B. Anthony after her arrest for casting an illegal vote in the presidential election of 1872. She was tried and
then fined $100 but refused to pay.
Friends and fellow citizens: I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted
at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to
prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen's
rights, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any
state to deny.
The preamble of the Federal Constitution says:
"We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic
tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty
to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people,
who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the
half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people - women as well as men. And it is a
downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the
use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government - the ballot.
For any state to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the
people, is to pass a bill of attainder, or, an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of
the land. By it the blessings of liberty are forever withheld from women and their female posterity.
To them this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. To them this
government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex; the
most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe; an oligarchy of wealth, where the rich
govern the poor. An oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or even an oligarchy of
race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes father,
brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters, of every household
- which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord, and rebellion into every
home of the nation.
Webster, Worcester, and Bouvier all define a citizen to be a person in the United States, entitled to vote and
hold office.
The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents
will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no state has a right
to make any law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities. Hence, every
discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several states is today null and void,
precisely as is every one against Negroes.
Source B - “Phenomenal Woman” by Maya Angelou
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them,
They say they still can’t see.
I say,
It’s in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing,
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It’s in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair, the palm of my hand,
The need for my care.
’Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
Maya Angelou, “Phenomenal Woman” from And Still I Rise. Copyright © 1978 by Maya Angelou. Used by
permission of Random House, Inc. Source: The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (Random House
Inc., 1994)
Source C - 'Equal rights' for women: wrong then, wrong now
By Phyllis Schlafly, the author of 20 books is the president of Eagle Forum, a national pro-family volunteer
organization. eagleforum.org.
April 8, 2007
Nearly 25 years after the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, feminists and their political supporters, who
now control Congress, are back at it. Last month, the constitutional measure, now dubbed the Women's
Equality Amendment, was reintroduced in the Senate and House, and its prospects, according to one
advocate, "are better now than they have been in a very, very long time."
But ERA Retro is doomed.
The amendment, which was born around the time that women were given the right to vote, was first
introduced in Congress in 1923. For nearly 50 years, all subsequent Congresses had the good judgment to
leave it buried in committee.
In 1971, the women's liberation movement burst on the scene and became the darling of the media. Its leaders
demanded a gender-neutral society in which men and women would be treated exactly the same, no matter
how reasonable it might be to respect differences between them. The amendment, which states that "equality
of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,"
was the chosen vehicle to achieve this goal.
A radical feminist organization called the National Organization for Women stormed the halls of Congress
and forced a vote on the Equal Rights Amendment. Only 24 members in the House, and eight in the Senate,
voted against it. On March 22, 1972, Congress sent the amendment to the states, which had seven years to
ratify it.
The Equal Rights Amendment had a righteous name and incredible momentum. Who would oppose equal
rights for women and men? Support was bipartisan, with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and thenAlabama Gov. George Wallace among its endorsers. Three presidents — Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and
Jimmy Carter — signed on. Within the first year, 30 of the 38 states needed for ratification passed it, many
without holding a hearing on the legislation. The Equal Rights Amendment was actively supported by most of
the pushy women's organizations, a consortium of 33 women's magazines, numerous Hollywood celebrities
and virtually all the media.
The opposition was totally outmanned. We had no Rush Limbaughs, no Fox News, no "no-spin zone" to
challenge the need for the amendment. We had no Internet, no e-mail, no fax machines to help rally an
opposition.
But the Equal Rights Amendment was rejected. We kicked off our Stop ERA campaign, launched in February
1972, with an article I wrote: "What's Wrong with Equal Rights for Women?" Over the next 10 years, nearly
100 issues of my Phyllis Schlafly Report were devoted to exposing the bad effects of the amendment.
While claiming to benefit women, the ERA would actually have taken away some of women's rights. We
based our arguments on the writings of pro-ERA law professors, among them current Supreme Court Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The amendment would require women to be drafted into military combat any time men
were conscripted, abolish the presumption that the husband should support his wife and take away Social
Security benefits for wives and widows. It would also give federal courts and the federal government
enormous new powers to reinterpret every law that makes a distinction based on gender, such as those related
to marriage, divorce and alimony.
Throughout the 1970s, we presented legislators with our arguments. I testified at 41 state hearings.
Meanwhile, the pro-amendment crowd could not show how the ERA would confer any benefit on women, not
even in employment, because employment laws were already gender-neutral.
In 1977, ERA advocates realized that they were approaching the seven-year time limit three states short of the
38 needed for ratification, so they persuaded Congress to give them $5 million to stage a conference, called
International Women's Year, in Houston. The conference featured virtually every known feminist leader and
received massive media coverage. But it backfired. When conference delegates voted for taxpayer funding of
abortions and the entire gay rights agenda, Americans discovered the ERA's hidden agenda.
A couple of months later, a reporter asked the governor of Missouri if he was for the ERA. "Do you mean the
old ERA or the new ERA?" he replied. "I was for equal pay for equal work, but after those women went down
to Houston and got tangled up with the abortionists and the lesbians, I can tell you ERA will never pass in the
Show-Me State."
With the expiration clock ticking — March 22, 1979 — and ratification uncertain, feminists appealed to
Carter and Congress for a time extension and won. The ratification deadline was extended to June 30, 1982.
The American people were so turned off by the extension that no additional state ever passed the ERA. In
Idaho vs. Freeman, a federal court ruled that the time extension was unconstitutional and that states could
constitutionally withdraw their previous support. Five did.
The Supreme Court subsequently ruled that the lawsuit was "moot" because the ERA had not been ratified by
either the original deadline or the extension.
ERA supporters repeatedly tried to revive the amendment, reintroducing it in Congress in 1983. But the
House rejected it. They then tried to persuade individual states to pass the ERA as state constitutional
amendments. They got nowhere.
The current plan to revive the amendment is so outrageously dishonest — for instance, backers say both
previous time limits can be ignored, that prior court rulings are irrelevant and that the previous state
ratifications are still valid — that it's a wonder anybody could argue it with a straight face. No matter its new
name, the same text that has been voted down, again and again, will again be rejected by the American
people.
Copyright © 2015, Los Angeles Times
Source D - Opinion: Continuing the Centennial Work of Women and Citizen Diplomacy in Korea
by Christine Ahn (New York)
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Inter Press Service
Christine Ahn is the International Coordinator of Women Cross DMZ, a campaign of 30 international women
walking for peace and reunification of Korea in May 2015.
NEW YORK, Apr 28 (IPS) - A century ago, the suffragist Jane Addams boarded a ship with other American
women peace activists to participate in a Congress of Women in The Hague.
Over 1,300 women from 12 countries, "cutting across national enmities," met to call for an end to World War
I. That Congress became the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which is now
gathering in The Hague under the theme Women Stop War.
Just as Addams women met women across national lines to try and stop WWI 100 years ago, from May 19 to
25, a delegation of 30 women from 15 countries around the world will meet and walk with Korean women,
north and south, to call for an end to the Korean War.
As WWII came to a close, Korea, which had been colonized by Japan for 35 years, faced a new tragedy. After
Japan's surrender in 1945, the United States proposed (and the Soviets accepted) temporarily dividing Korea
along the 38th parallel in an effort to prevent Soviet troops, who were fighting the Japanese in the north, from
occupying the whole country.
Japanese troops north of the line would surrender to the Soviets; those to the south would surrender to U.S.
authorities. It was meant to be a temporary division, but Washington and Moscow failed to establish a single
Korean government, thereby creating two separate states in 1948: the Republic of Korea in the south and the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the north.3
This division precipitated the Korean War (1950-53), often referred to in the United States as "the forgotten
war", when each side sought to reunite the country by force. Despite enormous destruction and loss of
life, neither side prevailed.
In July 1953, fighting was halted when North Korea (representing the Korean People's Army and the Chinese
People's Volunteers) and the United States (representing the United Nations Command) signed the Korean
War Armistice Agreement at Panmunjom, near the 38th parallel.
This temporary cease-fire stipulated the need for a political settlement among all parties to the war (Article
4 Paragraph 60). It established the Demilitarized Zone, two-and-a-half miles wide and still heavily mined, as
the new border between the two sides. It urged the governments to convene a political conference within three
months, in order to reach a formal peace settlement.
Over 62 years later, no peace treaty has been agreed, with the continuing fear that fighting could resume at
any time. In fact, in 2012, during another military crisis with North Korea, former U.S. Defense Secretary
Leon Panetta acknowledged that Washington was, "within an inch of war almost every day."
In 1994, as President Clinton weighed a pre-emptive military first strike against North Korea's nuclear
reactors, the U.S. Department of Defense estimated that an outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula would
result in 1.5 million casualties within the first 24 hours and 6 million casualties within the first week.
This assessment predates North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons, which would be unimaginable in
terms of destruction and devastation. We have no choice but to engage; the cost of not engaging is just too
high.
The only way to prevent the outbreak of a catastrophic confrontation, as a 2011 paper from the U.S. Army
War College counsels, is to "reach agreement on ending the armistice from the Korean War"—in essence, a
peace agreement—and "give a formal security guarantee to North Korea tied to nonproliferation of weapons
of mass destruction."
Recent history has shown that when standing leaders are at a dangerous impasse, the role of civil society can
indeed make a difference in averting war and lessening tensions. In 1994 as President Clinton contemplated
military action, without the initial blessing of the White House, former President Jimmy Carter flew to
Pyongyang armed with a CNN camera crew to negotiate the terms of the Agreed Framework with former
North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.
And in 2008, the New York Philharmonic performed in Pyongyang, which significantly contributed towards
warming relations between the United States and DPRK.
Christianne Armanpour, who traveled with CNN to cover philharmonic, wrote that U.S. Secretary of Defense
William Perry, a former negotiator with North Korea, explained to her that this was a magic moment, with
different peoples speaking the same language of music.
Armanpour said Perry believed that the event could positively influence the governments reaching a nuclear
agreement, "but that mutual distrust and fear can only be overcome by people-to-people diplomacy."
That is what we are hoping to achieve with the 2015 International Women's Walk for Peace and Reunification
of Korea, citizen-to-citizen diplomacy led by women. We are also walking on the 15th anniversary of the
passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325, which calls for the full and equal participation of women
in conflict prevention and resolution, and in peacebuilding.
Women from Cambodia, Guatemala, Liberia and Northern Ireland all provided crucial voices for peace as
they mobilized across national, ethnic and religious divides and used family and community networks to
mitigate violence and heal divisions among their communities.
Similarly, our delegation will walk for peace in Korea and to cross the De-Militarized Zone separating
millions of families, reminding the world on the tragic 70th anniversary of Korea's division by foreign powers
that the Korean people are from an ancient culture united by the same food, language, culture, customs, and
history.
We are walking on May 24, International Women's Day for Disarmament and Peace, because we believe that
there must be an end to the Korean War that has plagued the Korean peninsula with intense militarization.
Instead of spending billions on preparing for war, governments could instead pour these critically needed
funds for schools, childcare, health, caring for the elderly.
The first step is reconciliation through engagement and dialogue. That is why we are walking. To break the
impasse among the warring nations—North Korea, South Korea, and the United States—to come to the
peacemaking table to finally end the Korean War.
As Addams boarded the ship to The Hague, she and other women peace activists were mocked for seeking
alternative ways than war to resolve international disputes.
Addams dismissed criticism that they were naïve and wild-eyed idealists: "We do not think we can settle the
war. We do not think that by raising our hands we can make the armies cease slaughter. We do think it is
valuable to state a new point of view. We do think it is fitting that women should meet and take counsel to see
what may be done."
It is only fitting that our women's peace walk in Korea takes place on this centennial anniversary year of the
first international act of defiance of war women ever undertook. I am honoured to be among another
generation of women gathering at The Hague to carry on the tradition of women peacemakers engaged in
citizen diplomacy to end war.
Edited by Kitty Stapp
© Inter Press Service (2015) — All Rights Reserved