Four for the Fourth 2022: Remember the Ladies

Reminder: here are links to my other Four For the Fourth blog articles, one about a plea for silent firecrackers, one about the need for fixing our nation to save our freedoms, and one about needing more metal music on the TV specials dammit!

It's hard to celebrate Independence Day this 2022 when half this nation's population are now - thanks to a sadistic Christianist Supreme Court - Second Class citizens.

As much as Frederick Douglass called out the hypocrisy of the 4th of July - the promise of liberty while Blacks were still in chains - we are now at the point in American history where the liberty and rights of women to choose their own health and well-being has vanished, turning women into slaves themselves to the states holding bondage over their uterus.

This is not a sound policy for the mostly White, mostly Male, mostly Rich conservative leadership that brought us to this tragic reality. These anti-abortion laws - seeking to confine women to their homes 'barefoot and pregnant', forced to bear babies against their will, and likely killing them when those pregnancies turn lethal - will only enrage the women and remind them of the horrors their grandmothers had to endure decades before.

When our Founding Fathers crafted first the Declaration of Independence and then the federal Constitution, they never even considered the rights of women at all. When Abigail Adams, wife to Founder John Adams and a fervent believer in equal rights, wrote a letter to John to "remember the ladies," her own husband scoffed at her. Via Lisa A Mazzie at the Marquette University Law Center Faculty blog back in 2013:

John Adams responded, “I cannot but laugh . . . .” To Mr. Adams, this was the first he’d heard of women’s possible discontent with the status quo.  “[Y]our letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest were grown discontented.”  For whatever “power” that Mr. Adams suggested that women had, it clearly wasn’t enough, for the new Declaration of Independence and Constitution failed to give any express (or even implied) rights to women.

Mrs. Adams responded to her husband, “I cannot say that I think you are very generous to the ladies; for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good-will to men, emancipating all nations, you insist on retaining an absolute power over wives...”

Mrs. Adams did not suffer hypocrites, even when it was her own husband.

Over the history of America, women's rights were undercut and ignored even as the rights of others were expanded. Full rights of citizenship like voting, for example, only belonged to property owners until the 1820s, when suffrage finally extended to all White men (and only Black freedmen in certain states). When the federal government needed to confirm voting rights for freed Blacks in the post-Civil War era, they passed the 15th Amendment but specifically excluded "sex/gender" from the equation. It took another 60 years of women constantly marching for suffrage before the 19th Amendment guaranteed at least that right.

And even then, full rights for women weren't a given. Every expectation in the workforce of less pay than men, getting denied opportunities in education or politics or business, forced into support roles in wartime, forced into gender roles as housewives and mothers, every dismissive treatment dumped on women throughout the 20th Century... If you were a girl, you had to work twice as hard and get told twice as often to "smile" through it all.

This was the mighty river of sexual discrimination women had to swim, every day of their lives, only barely reaching the calmer waters of the past 50 years when the civil rights movements of the 1960s opened up more opportunities. And they still had to... HAVE to cope against harassment and sexual assault to this very day.

I only learned this year a horrific fact, that until 1974 women couldn't sign up for their own credit cards: A man - either husband or father - had to co-sign with the bank on it. Women had no financial freedom at all until then. Some still don't.

And so with all this happening, as women face the darkness of 50 years ago returning to haunt them, do our American mothers and daughters and sisters and friends have any reason to celebrate Independence Day?

Because they're not independent today.

Goddamn us for taking that away from them.

We need to bring back the Equal Rights Amendment, get the states to go through approving it again, because it's not our women who need it, it's our nation that needs to break free of our fear and hypocrisy.

Anniversary: The Vote Mattered Then, It Matters Now

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed this:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Before this, elections and thus political representation could only be done by men. Even though women counted in the Census towards the congressional apportionment, even as women came to own property and run businesses, even with women showing centuries worth of spilling the same blood, sweat, and tears as men.

The right to vote had long been a struggle even before the Constitution was made, with the feminists of the Revolutionary era calling for equal rights of women to vote and hold office. Even as the abolitionists were arguing for Blacks to be free, a good number of them also didn't see a reason to let women vote. The entitlement of patriarchy was pretty strong.

But the struggle grew, not just here but across much of the planet where any elective body existed. The suffrage movement was a universal one, and by the 1900s the Progressive reformers that had gained control of the United States policy making got around to getting the right to vote for women set in stone.

The struggle to get women elected into office took a while longer, with few winning their way into Congress well into the 1970s. Every so often there would be a wave of women candidates expanding the representation in office, but that wave would ebb and the number would never get to near-equal the number of men (in a planetary demographic where the male-female gender split is roughly half-and-half, it's a bit shocking to see we're STILL below a quarter of the Senate AND House of Representatives by 2020). 

What matters about voting is the power the voters have in choosing people who will enact laws and reforms that benefit their needs. In issues that matter most to women - equal pay at work, better social aid for family care, legal protections against harassment and rape and exploitation, equal access to higher education and career opportunities, better health care and the freedom of health care choices - they are not seeing enough women in leadership roles working to resolve those issues (and few male elected officials caring enough to resolve them as well).

Getting women to vote mattered in 1920 and earlier, getting women to vote matters today because there remains so much work left to be done to ensure equality and justice for all regardless of gender or race or orientation or faith.

It matters today because our overall right to vote is under attack more so than it has been since the 1960s, not just for minorities but for every demographic that is not Rich White Male.

A hundred years ago women won their power to vote in elections. This year, everyone needs to express that power to vote to stop the corruption of a vote-suppressing Republican Party before we - not just women but men - lose that power.

Get the damn vote out, America. Women as well as men.