u/Famous-Sympathy7011

Historians deny women credit for their accomplishments by assigning their accomplishments to men or better-known women. Bertha Lutz and her allies secured sex-equality language in the United Nations Charter. Textbook authors credited Eleanor Roosevelt, who never attended the conference. Scholars repeated the error for seventy years and excluded the delegates who secured equality.

Gerda Lerner fled Austria after the Nazi takeover and later founded the first doctoral program in women’s history. She argued that women repeatedly reclaim rights their mothers secured because historians erased earlier victories. Without those records, each generation enters the same struggle without historical knowledge.

Bertha Lutz’s career shows what such omissions conceal for future generations. For four decades at Rio de Janeiro’s Museu Nacional, she classified frogs, described species, and published taxonomic research. She later helped secure women’s equality within the United Nations Charter.

Trump administration officials continued the erasure of women’s achievements during America’s 250th anniversary. Women’s history exhibits were removed from national parks and Smithsonian museums while Freedom 250 sold access to the event. Lerner warned decades earlier that erasing women’s achievements forces future generations to fight again for equality.

A redacted woman reappears the moment someone reads her story.

Two researchers reopened the 1945 conference files in 2016, leading United Nations officials to revise the official account. Those records returned attention to San Francisco, where delegates from fifty nations drafted the United Nations Charter in April 1945. Women comprised roughly 1.5 percent of the delegates, and only four signed: Bertha Lutz, Minerva Bernardino, Wu Yi-fang, and Virginia Gildersleeve.

Lutz regarded signatures as insufficient without explicit language guaranteeing women’s equality. She pressed delegates to identify women as equal participants. Gildersleeve called the proposal “vulgar,” while British delegates claimed their presence already demonstrated equality. In her conference report, Lutz rejected both claims and described the American and British women as strongly conservative.

“If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” — Shirley Chisholm

Bernardino challenged the American objections and supported the amendments from the opening session. Jessie Street of Australia and Wu Yi-fang joined Lutz and Bernardino within days. The four women secured “equal rights of men and women” in the preamble. Delegates also approved Article 8, granting women equal access to every United Nations position. Their work helped create the Commission on the Status of Women the following year.

For seventy years, textbook authors credited Eleanor Roosevelt, although conference records named Lutz, Bernardino, Street, and Wu. In 2016, SOAS researchers Fatima Sator and Elise Dietrichson read the files and established that Lutz drafted and fought for the Charter’s sex-equality language. UN Women then changed web pages and staff training to correctly name the women who secured those provisions.

The persistence predated the conference by decades. Lutz was born in São Paulo in 1894 to a British mother and a Brazilian father. She graduated from the Sorbonne in 1918, finished law school in Rio in 1933, and between those degrees earned a Museu Nacional post through competitive examination. That appointment made her one of the first women in Brazilian federal service.

Suffrage became her next campaign when she founded the Brazilian Federation for Feminine Progress. Brazilian women gained the vote in 1932, and voters soon sent Lutz to Congress. Getúlio Vargas restored his dictatorship in 1937, suspended parliament, and ended her legislative career. She returned to science and described new amphibian species, and colleagues later named several frog species in her honor.

One prediction survives in the Lutz memoir. Anglo-Saxon women were surrendering leadership of the international movement, she wrote, and Latin American women would conduct the next stage. Her forecast proved accurate before the conference ended, when a Brazilian and a Dominican wrote equality into international law over American objections.

Eighty-one years later, Trump administration officials deport thousands of Latin Americans while removing women’s history from federal museums. The government erasing that history owes the Charter’s equality clause to two Latin American women. Public institutions preserve the record only when voters approve the funding.

“Women’s history is the primary tool for women’s emancipation.” — Gerda Lerner

One woman moved three allies and defeated a resistant majority, and political scientists have since measured the size such a minority requires. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan analyzed 323 resistance campaigns against authoritarian rule between 1900 and 2006. Campaigns that mobilized 3.5 percent of a population in sustained participation never failed. In the United States, that threshold equals about twelve million people, and voters can exceed twelve million on November 3, 2026.

How to Survive ICE and Defend the Vote: A resistance manual from the lives of five fearless women draws practical lessons from Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Sophie Scholl, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, and Fannie Lou Hamer. These women resisted authoritarian power through documentation, publication, organization, and persistence. Learn your rights before November, then read and share.

The booklet joins other free guides on Buy Me a Coffee. Please donate to help expand the work and keep these tools available to everyone. buymeacoffee.com/glassempires

Sources

1. SOAS University of London, “Recognising the women who shaped the UN Charter” — https://www.soas.ac.uk/research/recognising-women-who-shaped-un-charter
2. Bertha Lutz, San Francisco Conference Report (1945) — https://www.scribd.com/document/454571103/San-Francisco-Conference-Report-Bertha-Lutz
3. Gilder Lehrman Institute, “The United Nations Charter of 1945 and Women’s Rights” — https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/united-nations-charter-1945-and-womens-rights
4. Inter Press Service, “How Latin American Women Fought for Women’s Rights in the UN Charter” — https://www.ipsnews.net/2016/09/how-latin-american-women-fought-for-womens-rights-in-the-un-charter/
5. Lady Science, “Feminism, Fascism, and Frogs: The Case of Bertha Lutz at the United Nations” — https://www.ladyscience.com/feminism-fascism-frogs/no32
6. Verfassungsblog, “Bertha Maria Júlia Lutz” — https://verfassungsblog.de/bertha-maria-julia-lutz/
7. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy (Oxford University Press, 1993) — https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-creation-of-feminist-consciousness-9780195090604
8. Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2011) — https://cup.columbia.edu/book/why-civil-resistance-works/9780231156820

Originally published at https://wendy664.substack.com on July 23, 2026.

Republican leadership is orchestrating an economic collapse. They are willfully dismantling the safeguards that contained 1929 and 2008, ripping them out on a fixed schedule.

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime. — commonly attributed to Honoré de Balzac

Republicans are rushing to cut what remains of the safety net and deregulating the banks at once.

This downturn will hit harder than 2008 because the safety net is vanishing. In 2007, Medicaid and food aid caught millions of laid-off workers, and Republicans are cutting both now. The debt dwarfs the 1929 level too, when federal borrowing equaled 16.3 percent of the economy against today’s 100 percent. A crash mints winners. The wealthy bank their gains through tax cuts, dividends, and executive pay, then sit on cash while the crash forces families to dump homes and stocks at a loss. The same investors buy the wreckage cheap, as they did after 2008, when bulk purchases of foreclosed homes built the corporate landlord industry.

This past week, on June 18, 2026, the comment period closed on three federal proposals to ease bank-capital rules and cut the surcharge on the largest banks, freeing the Federal Reserve, the OCC, and the FDIC to finalize them. Those agencies already cut supervision staff 30 percent and moved to publish the stress-test models banks use to pass.

Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July 2025 on the same schedule. It cuts Medicaid 887 billion dollars and 10 million people by 2034 through 80-hour work rules and provider-tax limits. SNAP loses 2.4 million people a month, the Thrifty Food Plan freezes, and benefits drop 14 dollars by 2034. Medicare faces 490 billion dollars in cuts through 2034, a sequester Republicans refused to waive. Social Security depletes in 2032, forcing a 22 percent cut.

The bank rules written after 2008 are next. Trump is repealing the protections built when subprime loans, unregulated derivatives, and 30-to-1 leverage escaped regulators. Net worth fell from 69 to 55 trillion dollars, and unemployment doubled to 10 percent. Dodd-Frank answered in 2010 with capital requirements, the CFPB, and derivatives clearing.

Alan Greenspan died on June 22, 2026, at 100, days before the comment window closed. Greenspan chaired the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006 and spent those years championing deregulation and bank self-regulation. The 2011 Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission blamed his deregulatory push and his refusal to curb subprime securities for stripping the safeguards that could have stopped the 2008 collapse.

Greenspan admitted the error to Congress in October 2008, conceding that banks had failed to protect themselves. Trump is now rebuilding the conditions Greenspan’s own record condemned.

Trump is undoing each safeguard. Bessent ran the CFPB for days, then Vought took over on February 7, 2025, froze enforcement, and moved to cut off the Bureau’s money. A federal judge blocked him on December 30, 2025, ordering funding to continue while the litigation proceeds.

On November 25, 2025, federal agencies eased capital rules, effective April 1, 2026, cutting tier 1 requirements for the largest banks. Bessent named the goal: “responsibly deregulating the financial sector to accelerate what I call the re-privatization of the economy.” The rollback erases fifteen years of safeguards across consumer protection, bank capital, anti-money-laundering reporting, and private-credit oversight.

Project 2025 wrote the plan down. Page 705 of Heritage’s Mandate for Leadership merges the FDIC into one banking regulator and swaps federal oversight for “competition and market discipline.” A 2017 Heritage report went further, urging Congress to cut deposit coverage to 40,000 dollars and end it. Russell Vought, who now runs the CFPB, helped write the blueprint.

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The richest 10 percent gain 2.7 percent more income by 2034; the poorest lose 3.1 percent to the Medicaid and SNAP cuts. The law cuts taxes 4.5 trillion dollars, most for the top. The rollback hands billions to the eight largest banks, spent on dividends and executive pay, not loans. The banks keep the gains; the families losing coverage pay.

The 1929 crash began with unchecked speculation. Investors bought on margin, posting 10 percent of the price. Regulators ignored the securities markets, and deposits lacked federal insurance. The market fell in October 1929, and the margin loans came due.

Thousands of banks failed, and the Depression followed. Congress built federal deposit insurance in 1933 and the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934 to answer the failures that destroyed a generation of savings.

The debt is the difference. In 1929, federal debt equaled 16.3 percent of the economy, leaving room to respond. By March 2026, that figure hit 100.2 percent of GDP and passed 39 trillion dollars by June. That total exceeds the nation’s yearly output, and Trump’s borrowing erased the capacity that funded the 1929 recovery.

Picture the United States in 2028 if Trump prevails in court. He has dissolved the CFPB or starved it of funds, and banks set their own capital floors. Anti-money-laundering reporting covers a fraction of current activity, and private lenders extend trillions outside federal supervision. Regulators lack the authority to halt a run.

A crash does the political work votes cannot. Naomi Klein named the pattern in 2007: governments exploit the chaos after a disaster to impose privatization, deregulation, and cuts that voters reject in calmer times. The shock paralyzes opposition, and officials lock the changes into law before the public recovers. A financial crash works the same way. The wreckage buries the paper trail, the panic justifies a bailout, and the firms that lobbied for deregulation collect the rescue. The wealthy buy the wreckage at a discount and emerge owning more of the country.

A century of safeguards, built after the crashes of 1929 and 2008, is being dismantled by a decades-long Republican project that Trump is now accelerating to the end. They swore to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. They are engineering the next collapse.

Republican leadership knows the imminent damage. The Congressional Budget Office scored the risk before the vote: 10 million lose coverage, the poorest tenth lose income, the trust funds run dry. Leadership read the projections, then passed the law. For your own money, find an advisor who earns a flat fee and avoids commissions.

The love of money is the root of all evil. — 1 Timothy 6:10

The work continues.

Wendy

buymeacoffee.com/glassempires

Sources

1. CNBC, June 3, 2026, reporting Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget analysis (about $500 a month average cut; higher in 29 states): https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/03/social-security-benefit-cuts-trust-fund-shortfall.html
2. Federal Reserve, Agencies Request Comment on Proposals to Modernize the Regulatory Capital Framework, March 19, 2026 (June 18, 2026 comment deadline): https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/bcreg20260319a.htm
3. Congressional Budget Office, P.L. 119–21 Medicaid Estimate (about $886.8 billion reduction; roughly 10 million lose coverage by 2034): https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-10/PL-119-21-Medicaid%20_0.pdf
4. Congressional Research Service, SNAP Provisions in P.L. 119–21 (2.4 million fewer participants in an average month; average benefit down $14 by 2034): https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48552
5. Arkansas Center for Health Improvement, Pay-As-You-Go Act and Medicare (about $490 billion in Medicare cuts, 2027–2034): https://achi.net/newsroom/pay-as-you-go-act-budget-law-to-impact-future-of-medicare-funding/
6. Social Security Administration, 2026 Trustees Report, June 9, 2026 (2032 depletion; 22 percent cut): https://www.ssa.gov/news/en/press/releases/2026-06-09.html
7. Federal Reserve History, The Great Recession (2008 net worth and unemployment): https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-recession-of-200709
8. NPR, Judge Orders Trump Administration to Continue to Seek Funding for the CFPB, December 30, 2025: https://www.npr.org/2025/12/30/nx-s1-5661581/cfpb-funding-order
9. FDIC, Agencies Issue Final Rule to Modify Certain Regulatory Capital Standards, November 25, 2025: https://www.fdic.gov/news/press-releases/2025/agencies-issue-final-rule-modify-certain-regulatory-capital-standards
10. U.S. Treasury, Secretary Bessent Remarks at the Economic Club of New York, March 6, 2025: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0045
11. Congressional Budget Office, Distributional Effects of P.L. 119–21 (top 10 percent gain about 2.7 percent, bottom 10 percent lose about 3.1 percent by 2034; about $4.5 trillion in tax cuts): https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61387
12. USGovernmentSpending.com (OMB Historical Tables), 1929 debt at 16.3% of GDP: https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_debt_chart
13. Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Debt Reaches 100% of GDP: https://www.crfb.org/press-releases/debt-reaches-100-gdp
14. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, 2007 (governments exploit crises to impose privatization, deregulation, and spending cuts): https://naomiklein.org/the-shock-doctrine/
15. NBC News, Alan Greenspan, economist and longtime head of the Federal Reserve, dies at 100, June 22, 2026 (Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission faulted his deregulation; October 2008 testimony acknowledging error): https://www.nbcnews.com/news/obituaries/alan-greenspan-economist-longtime-head-federal-reserve-dies-100-rcna42286

Originally published at https://wendy664.substack.com.