It's a Wonderful Death?: Seneca Falls, Bureaucracy, and Feminism

by Shaker EastSideKate, a feminist teacher/scholar/mother/partner/derbygirl from Upstate New York.

Seneca Falls has the odd distinction of being the only municipality in the world that is reasonably famous for not being the location where It's a Wonderful Life was filmed. I don't understand, either. The village is more famous (in some circles), as the one time home of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose residence served as the setting for the Seneca Falls Convention.

On March 16, voters in Seneca Falls approved dissolving the village. As is common in former colonies, New York State's system of government is arcane. Essentially, villages (such as Seneca Falls) are cute, baby municipalities, embedded within towns (think townships, ala the ever-popular Land Ordinance of 1785).

Soon, the government of the village of Seneca Falls (population 7000-ish) will dissolve, while the town of Seneca Falls (population 9000-ish) will pick up the slack.

These things happen. Brooklynites now get to elect Manhattanites to rule over them as mayor of New York. Indianapolis confuses and terrifies me. Systems of government aren't necessarily static and self-explanatory.

I admit I'm strangely sad to see Seneca Falls go, even if it is being replaced by a larger, pre-existing Seneca Falls. This isn't really about Seneca Falls, though. In New York, some citizens increasingly see dissolving villages as a means of fixing the problems with (or of) government.

I'm a sucker for symbolism. While it might be fun to hear Elizabeth Cady Stanton muse about recent events (the dissolution of Seneca Falls, the waning likelihood of wine in grocery stores, wev.), it also would be fabulous to hear Lucretia Mott handicap the 2010 World Series. These things aren't going to happen.

However, I find some Americans' thoughts on government vexing, and I'd like to frame populist anti-government movements as an issue that should concern feminists.

I'm still trying to figure out whether we, the people, ever came to a shared understanding of what government should (and shouldn't) do, nor who should (and shouldn't) pay for it. Sure, most of us pay taxes to multiple governments. Yet the system isn't particularly progressive.

Moreover, things seem pretty top-heavy. I personally pay a lot of income tax to the Federal government, with a smaller amount of income tax to state government, as well as sales taxes and fees going to various state and local entities. Were I to own land, I'd be directly responsible for local property taxes. Higher levels of government (say, at the federal and state level) typically redistribute some funding to lower government agencies. Of course, this funding frequently dissolves when times are tight, leaving each lower level of government to raise taxes and/or pass the pain on to increasingly local bodies.

To me, feminism is about nothing if not local bodies. What do local bodies need? We need water to let us live, schools and libraries to help us learn, and parks in which to play. Heat and sanitation are always welcome, too.

The people with the most money can always buy trucks full of water, private book collections, estates, trucks full of fuel, personal generators... whatever they need. It seems to me that this is pretty much always the case. But what about the rest of us? Should the government not help ensure, if not equality of living standards, equality of opportunity? This was as a problem for many, many, people in the 19th Century. It is still a problem for many of us today.

Little of this has to do with the structure of government. In my mind, any number of prototypical governments (including the lack thereof) is capable of doing just fine by all of us, provided that everyone involved shares the same priorities.

That's what strikes me as so frustrating about the current discourse about politics; while dissolving governments may increase negative liberty by releasing us from oppression (or taxes), on its own, doing away with some aspect of government does nothing to increase positive liberty. Selfish people acting with the backing of powerful governments don't necessarily produce different results from powerful selfish people acting in the absence of government.

Those without privilege do not fare well when the privileged fail, as is so often the case, to yield their advantage.

The Declaration of Sentiments was primarily concerned with the form of government, notably with respect to the disfranchisement of women. However (and not uncoincidentally), it also echoes to same themes as the Declaration of Independence and other documents Americans pretend to have read—the themes of freedom from oppression, and happiness. To me, happiness involves working water mains (wooden ones tend to break after a century or so, making people very unhappy), and functioning schools for all.

Creating hope and opportunity does not so much require reorganizing and dissolving governments, as much as it does reorganizing priorities to put local bodies and human needs first.