Property in Rights: How Hope Overpowers Hypocrisy in James Madison's Paper on Property.

James Madison is hailed as the “Father of the Constitution” because of his crucial contribution to the Constitution, and zealous advocacy for the Bill of Rights. He was a staunch advocate of the enlightened ideals of the time, or more precisely, unenlightened, hypocritical ideals of the time. The Bill of Rights was intended to protect from the government that which human beings hold sacred, their liberty. One of the liberties protected is property. But to Madison, property is more than a house, a backyard, or what’s inside one’s bedside drawer. Property is all encompassing, and in James Madison’s paper on Property, he espouses that property “embraces everything to which a man may attach a value and have a right” (Madison 1792). Madison urges that if the United States is to “deserve the full praise due to wise and just governments, they will equally respect the rights of property, and the property in rights” (Madison 1792). While at face value, Madison’s paper seems like a love letter to humanity, true knowledge of the United State’s perpetual oppression of Native Americans, minority groups, and women– anyone who was not a white, male, landowner– forces this love letter to lose its meaning. However, at the same time, it is evident that its underlying ideology is true. Should the United States universally respect the rights of property, and the property in rights, it will deserve praise for being a wise and just government.

While Madison describes the right of property as an abstraction that blankets every right one ought to have, he mentions specific property rights as well. Madison illuminates one has property in “the safety and liberty of his person” (Madison 1792). One has “a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them” (Madison 1792). Additionally, there is “an equal property [right] in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them” (Madison 1792). He proposes that “conscience is the most sacred of all property” and “no positive law invade[s] a man's conscience which is more sacred than his castle” (Madison 1792). Madison’s specific instances give meaning to the right to property. It is more than a castle, it extends to what might be intangible, but is still definable. Madison argues that “government is instituted to protect property of every sort” and the government’s ultimate purpose is to “impartially secure to every man, whatever is his own” (Madison 1792). Looking at history, it is clear that Madison’s government was not impartial, and did not uphold property rights for everyone’s castles, bodily safety, free use of faculties, or conscience. At the time he wrote this, slavery stripped black people of every right imaginable. They had no safety or liberty for their bodies, no free use of their faculties to practice professions dictated by their religious opinions. Instead, they were forced to build the infrastructure of the United States economy without any credit. The very backbone of this government was partial; it desecrated the rights of some so that the white man could eat and enjoy the fruits of their labor, and contemplate how good it tasted. A wise and just government was an empty promise.

While Madison’s piece on property reeks of insincerity when looked at within the context of its time, there is an unquestionable truth to it, and when one reads closely, hope can override its hypocrisy. Madison asserts that “the praise of affording a just securing to property, should be sparingly bestowed on a government which, however scrupulously guarding the possessions of individuals, does not protect them in the enjoyment and communication of their opinions” (Madison 1792). Praise is something that must be bestowed sparingly, with discretion and discernment. Thus, it is our job to praise the government when we see it has guarded the right to property, and likewise, to criticize it when it has not. According to Madison, the United States could not have been praised for guarding the sacred property rights of humanity during his time. It wasn’t until 1865 that black people were freed from slavery. It wasn’t until 1920 that women were allowed to vote. From 1831- 1850, Native Americans were forcibly removed and discarded from the land they inhabited for centuries in such a way that warrants being called a genocide. The government he knew was rampant with injustice, invisibility, and violence. The government today is also not a stranger to these same injustices. Through decades of struggle and upheaval, the United States has come closer to protecting the sacred property rights that Madison outlined, but still it is clear that the government cannot be fully praised as just and wise. Racism, sexism, and othering has morphed throughout history in ways that are more covert and subversive, giving birth to almost undetectable inequalities. Their elimination cannot happen overnight. This sounds like a grim, uphill battle; however, the pursuit of creating praiseworthy government is not a hopeless endeavor. While the torments of inequality cast a shadow on the United States adoration of freedom, autonomy, and dignity, those intangible rights are still present and fighting. Their everlasting existence proves they are worth protecting, so that perhaps one day, when they are revered by all, and upheld for all, the United States can be wise and just as Madison argues.

Is a Tampon a Treat?

When you read the word “country club” what do you think of? Surely, images of golf clubs, picturesque green lawns, wait staff, and buttoned up shirts swirl through your mind. Do you think of tampons? According to Republican representative Richard Prickett from Maine, offering free tampons and pads to women’s correctional facilities would make jails like country clubs. This notion, that access to feminine hygiene products is luxurious, has caused health crises for menstruators across the globe, especially incarcerated women. This is unacceptable. Just as the federal government must ensure incarcerated women have food and water, they must ensure women have access to pads and tampons as well.

Numerous studies from across the globe have proven unsafe and unhygienic menstrual hygiene practices pose dangerous health risks including reproductive tract infections, infertility, and even death. Coupled with the fact that the United States has one of the highest rates of female incarceration in the world, it is an urgent concern that women within the carceral system are guaranteed menstrual equity.

While the push towards menstrual equity has gained legitimate traction over the past few years, state legislators have done little to address reproductive health care in the prison system. Because of this, women in prison are often given an insufficient supply of safe and usable menstrual products. One story particularly highlights this failure to protect women’s health. In 2015, Kimberly Haven had to get an emergency hysterectomy after she was released from a Maryland prison. While incarcerated, Haven was denied access to the pads and tampons she needed. In an effort to survive, Haven made her own out of toilet paper, and her makeshift menstrual hygiene products caused her to contract toxic shock syndrome, ultimately requiring the hysterectomy that saved her life. This is an especially egregious case, but it highlights the underlying issue that women in the carceral setting are being denied access to supplies that are essential to their physical health.

Women across the United States report that while incarcerated, they only receive an allotted number of pads or tampons regardless if that allotment sufficiently meets their needs. A report on Menstrual equity by the ACLU shared many shocking and disturbing violations of menstrual equity for U.S. women in the carceral setting. The report cites “in one Michigan jail, women detainees were regularly denied access to desperately needed menstrual products.Some women there only received such products after begging for them, while others never received them at all. They were therefore forced to use toilet paper to manage menstrual bleeding or else bleed into their prison jumpsuits. Because laundry day occurred once a week, they were forced to rewear bloody clothes for up to a full week.” In the same prison, the staff forced 30 women to compete with one another to share a pack of 12 pads. In another violating example in Indiana, “ a woman was provided no products for 36 hours and then was provided only four — three pads and one tampon — for the next two and a half days. She bled through her jumpsuit onto the floor where she was forced to sleep. She was humiliated and subjected to a severely unhygienic environment.”

These women were within the care of the state, and general conditions of prisons aside, the 8th amendment guarantees protections from cruel and unusual punishments. Included in this protection, is the requirement that people in prison are afforded the minimum standard of living. For people who menstruate, having access to menstrual products is the minimum standard of living.

A Critique of Freud's Civilization and its Discontents

In Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents Freud discusses the innate aggression of human beings. Freud asserts that civilization occurs from opposing forces that are always in conflict with one another, and ultimately causes an overall sense of discontent. However, when laying out the opposing forces, he details the forces as only occurring to men. Women make up half of civilization, and from Freud’s analysis, do not have the same aggressive capacity, they do not have the same opposing forces within them that bring up discontent and create civilization. Freud details women as beings who care solely for their children, and marks men as beings who are looking to find sexual gratification from women. In doing so, Freud fails to include people who do not prescribe to heterosexuality and heteronormativity. Additionally, Freud ignores the female experience in his analysis. The way that Freud details aggression is mostly in reference to straight men. Freud’s psychoanalysis of human beings is thus limited to one sect of human beings, is outdated, adhering to principles such as heteronormativity as constants, and cannot be attributed to all. Because people who do not prescribe to heteronormativity and women are not shown to have the same aggressive drive as heterosexual men, the opposing forces do not exist strongly anymore, and there is no constant threat to civilization.

Freud emphasizes that society’s construction begins with primordial human beings. Civilization begins with the Id, with unconscious instinct. Parents and authority figures overpower the Id’s insatiable desires and creates the super ego. The superego eventually manifests into what creates the ability for people to exist together in communal life. Freud goes on further, “the communal life of human beings had, therefore, a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love, which made the man unwilling to be deprived of his sexual object — the woman — and made the woman unwilling to be deprived of the part of herself which had been separated off from her — her child. Eros and Ananke [Love and Necessity] have become the parents of human civilization too” (Freud 24). While this is true to a certain extent, it is an archaic view. People do not continue to exist in civilizations because of love and necessity anymore, people have met and exceeded maslow’s hierarchy of needs with survival and sex at the bottom.

Civilization and its Discontents’s argument is contingent on the aggressive nature of human beings. Freud argues that “men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him” (Freud 31). This depiction of man however does not factor women into the equation. Women are less inclined to be as aggressive as men. Additionally, it cannot even be said that all men have this extreme aggression. Freud believes that “the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man” (Freud 43) . This is not true, aggression has gone away. It may be original, in a primitive sense, but the aggression and frustration subsides in modernity. Some men are not aggressive and violent. Some women are aggressive. Some men do not wish to have a “sexual object” and some women do not wish to protect their children. There is no universal aggression that dictates the constant discontent Freud evokes. Some people are perfectly content within civilization. Additionally, the innate aggression of human beings has gone away in a lot of respects, and therefore leads to less discontent. Freud discusses in depth the need for distractions to placate our innate aggression, but are they truly distractions? Hobbies, passions, activities, and relationships are real. Being a part of civilization is to be entrenched in these. Freud argues that “man’s discovery that sexual (genital) love afforded him the strongest experiences of satisfaction, and [...] suggested to him that he should continue to seek the satisfaction of happiness in his life along the path of sexual relations and that he should make genital erotism the central point of his life” (Freud 25). This is simply not the case anymore. People find fulfillment through what they do in their day to day life.

Society has advanced beyond its primitive stage of aggression and violence. Society is comprised and ruled by more people than heterosexual men. People do not placate themselves with distractions, they find real activities, interests, and people that make life worth living. The vast majority of people do not feel an overwhelming sense of aggression that overpowers their lives and makes them discontent. Freud does not encapsulate the reality of communal human existence in Civilization and its Discontents, he does not discuss women in depth, he does not explore people who are not heterosexual, or people who do not align themselves within heteronormativity. In not expanding his analysis, he does not show that civilization is in a constant threat of disintegration.