Published on Tuesday, June 26, 2001 in Newsday

Bush Puts Biggest Women's Issue Ever On the Table

by Marie Cocco

LISTEN to your mother.

Did she complain last winter about heating bills making it tough to get through the month? Has she cut back on getting her hair cut? Has she stopped slipping a dollar or two into the birthday cards for the grandkids? Listen to Mom. And then maybe you will listen more carefully to the Bush administration's commission to privatize Social Security.

The president has put on the table the biggest women's issue of all. It touches more women than abortion or contraception. It matters as much as equal pay for equal work. It is as important-more so-to women who stay at home to care for children than to those who shuttle off to work each day.

The government's biggest program for women isn't low-interest loans for female entrepreneurs or research into breast cancer. It's Social Security.

Turning it into a system relying on individual bank accounts for benefits has far more consequence for women than for men.

"Her account, just based on the facts, folks, is going to be smaller than his," said Deb Briceland-Betts, director of the Older Women's League, which opposes privatization.

Because women earn less than men-even when they work full-time-they will have less to put into a private account. Because women take years off to care for children, they will have fewer years to build up a balance. Because women are more likely to work part-time, they will have less to deposit in the first place.

The current system tries, in some ways, to make up for all this. And private accounts? Who can say? Nobody from the Bush administration has even tried to explain.

Right now, survivors of a wage-earner who dies before retirement get a lifetime, inflation-adjusted benefit every month for themselves and any children under 18. Women who never worked outside the home, and those who have taken years off work to care for children or other relatives, get a lifetime, inflation-adjusted retirement benefit based on a husband's earnings. Women or men who are divorced after 10 years of marriage can claim Social Security spousal benefits-even if their former spouse remarries.

And even with this protection, elderly women are still more likely than elderly men to be poor. We live longer. And we have less to live on. Once a woman reaches 75, the likelihood she will live in poverty is about double that of a man.

"Most women end up widowed, even if they don't start retirement that way," said Virginia Reno, vice president for research at the National Academy for Social Insurance.

By the time a woman is in her 70s, let alone her 80s, life has a way of sending her into economic straits. Widowhood brings an automatic drop in monthly Social Security benefits. A private pension that may have gone only to a husband ends. The value of any remaining pension that is not inflation-adjusted-and few are-has eroded seriously. The bank account already has dwindled.

"Whoever outlives the other has coped with the cost of a final illness, which depletes assets," said Reno.

You have not heard any of this from the Bush White House. What you have heard is how Social Security is going broke (not quite true) and even, according to Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, that it has "no assets" (though as a Social Security trustee, O'Neill just signed a report on the fund's Treasury bond holdings and continued growth in its surplus).

You have heard that the only way to "rescue" this faltering system is to take money out of it-that is, to allow workers to divert some of their payroll taxes into private accounts. You have heard these accounts will grow, year after year after year, as markets magically transform them into "wealth." You have heard so very much about accumulation. And nothing at all about the payout.

Will it be a lump sum or an annuity doled out over time? Will husbands be required to share accounts with wives? In a divorce, will this account formerly known as a lifetime Social Security benefit be just another asset to be fought over and may the best lawyer win? Can one spouse bequeath the account to someone other than a surviving spouse -say, a favorite nephew or the local animal shelter? Will women be shielded from inflation into their 80s and 90s? Listen for the answers. Then run them by Mom. Chances are she won't think this is such a great deal.

Copyright © Newsday, Inc. ----------------------------------------------------------------------

June 26, 2001

Some Last Words

By GAIL COLLINS

This is my last Op-Ed column for The New York Times, and although I was strongly tempted to spend it reviewing the accomplishments of the New York State Legislature, I'm going to resist. Instead, I want to put in a plug for seizing the moment.

We spend a great deal of time worrying about the damage a single wrongheaded individual can do on a whim. But it's nice to remember how many important watersheds in our history came when unheralded heroines responded to sudden impulses of a higher sort.

On July 16, 1854, Elizabeth Jennings, a 24-year-old black schoolteacher, was rushing to play the organ for a religious service in Manhattan when the trolley conductor demanded that she wait for a car that was designated for colored people. Jennings responded that he was "a good for nothing impudent fellow for insulting decent persons while on their way to church." She stayed in her seat, hanging onto the window sash, until they dragged her away. She sued, and won the first legal decision affirming that all New Yorkers had an equal right to public transportation. A hundred years before Rosa Parks, Jennings knew what to do when somebody told her to go to the back of the bus.

The case helped make a name for her lawyer, Chester A. Arthur, who later as president would be sorely in need of heroic anecdotes. But Jennings was almost entirely forgotten. She became one of thousands of Americans who changed history by following their best instincts, never insisting that immortality be part of the package.

My favorite low-profile but strong- minded woman was dragged out of a cellar by the British at the start of the Revolutionary War. The rebel forces were on the run, and the war might have ended almost as soon as it had begun. But the British were distracted by a fire that burned down most of Lower Manhattan and gave the Americans time to get away. What we remember about the moment now is mainly Nathan Hale regretting he had but one life to lose for his country. But Hale, who was picked up as a spy, didn't set the fire. In London, Edmund Burke told Parliament that the deed had been done by a woman, who was found hiding in the ruins, her face bearing "every mark of rage, despair, resolution and the most exalted heroism."

The woman, he added, "knowing that she would be condemned to die," boldly admitted what she'd been up to. Burke seems to be the only one who told this story. But if the woman existed, she saw her moment and jumped right in. She had her eye on something larger than herself, so perhaps she wouldn't have been put out that Hale won immortality with a terrific exit line while her name vanished.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn't fade away over time. But I like to think about her before she was famous, struggling to make sense of her life. She started her marriage in Boston, surrounded by a community of like- minded friends, living in a charming house and assisted by two hard- working servants. She couldn't understand why anybody hated housework. She gave the man who delivered the firewood a tip to pile the logs with the smooth ends outward.

Then her husband got a job in Seneca Falls, a distinctly unromantic mill town in upstate New York. The neighbors weren't congenial, her husband was away a lot and the kids kept getting sick. The house was isolated, and Stanton began to have trouble working up any enthusiasm for cleaning it. "Now I understood, as I never had before, how women could sit down and rest in the middle of general disorder," she wrote.

As a 19th-century matron, she always had the option of taking to her bed with the vapors. But Stanton gathered up her accumulated grievances and dumped them in the lap of Lucretia Mott, who was summering in Waterloo, N.Y., and probably bored out of her considerable mind as well. They worked up a newspaper announcement inviting people to a women's rights convention five days later. Just like that, the women's movement was born.

My farewell wish is that everybody have a summer as eventful as Stanton's and Mott's, preferably in a setting more cheerful than Seneca Falls circa 1848. And that we all listen to our better instincts and take the occasional leap on their behalf. It is, of course, advisable not to burn down cities in the process.

Gail Collins becomes editorial page editor of The Times in August.

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

-- Anonymous, June 26, 2001