Women's Rites, part 3

If We Want a Woman in the White House...

Photo by Jessica Podraza on Unsplash

If we want a woman in the White House we need to start acting like we belong there. Compliment a woman on her appearance and most of us will preen a little and say, ‘thank you.’ Compliment a woman on her skills and the job she’s doing, she’ll probably cringe and deflect. I see it all the time and I want to say, “What are you doing? Stand up and take that shit like a woman!” How can we expect voters to take us seriously if we won’t take OURSELVES seriously?

And seriously, who else could we possibly blame if we lose this election? (see how well trained I am?)

I remember the day Trump won. Pushing my toddler in her stroller I walked into town and immediately became aware of the pall of shock and grief hanging in the air like the aftermath of a battle. Rena played on the floor while I sat with my writer’s group, holding their silence, still not “woke” enough myself to entirely understand their reaction. I felt like my daughter, a child in a room full of adults. That was the day I took up the sacred burden of feminism.

I spent the afternoon today overseeing Rena, now nine, making her own “Harris/Walz” sign for our yard. She sketched out the words and painted them on card stock, surrounded by stars filled with blue glitter glue:

Harris
Walz
Better For America

She’s so invested it scares me. What do I tell her if her new hero loses the election to a slimeball like The Donald? What do I tell her if our yard gets trashed because of the sign she made? How to reconcile the ugliness of sexism with the fairy-tale world she still lives in?

A few weeks ago we finally watched the Barbie movie. From the first appearance of Barbie on the screen, a towering figure on the beach with the Goddess’s upturned crescent moon hanging in the sky above her head, I knew I would love it. But I wasn’t prepared for how emotional it made me. When Barbie and Ken first take to the streets of the “real” world, and Barbie realizes that here she is less a person than an object, my throat filled with rage and empathetic humiliation. A part of me remembers that “first time,” although I can’t quite pin it down. Moving back to rural Ohio from the little liberal college town where we lived in Pennsylvania felt a bit like that. Swarthmore had opened my eyes; like the Biblical Adam and Eve, I suddenly felt exposed.

My head falls back against the couch. The words refuse to separate themselves from the swirling vortex of anger and frustration tightening my chest. The light in the old ceiling fan above my head flickers. A ladybug is battering herself against the glass orb separating her from the light she seeks. Again and again, around and around; it’s right there but she just can’t reach it.

In Barbie’s world, everyone was alike and complete and perfect. The Barbies existed to live, and the Kens existed to make life more perfect for Barbie. One taste of patriarchy in the “real world” however, and the Kens revolt and take over—briefly. It’s a not-so-subtle parody of the ultimate consequences of feminism as preached by patriarchal evangelicals everywhere. How many times did my mother tell me that a woman in power was dangerous because “women can’t handle power”? One little taste and we’ll go shit crazy, off our heads drunk with it and spoiling for any fight. I guess they assume that power activates the testosterone in us. It’s no wonder then that a woman president is viewed like a sign of the End Times, never mind that her opponent actually acts and talks like a dictator and she doesn’t.

Such a response is old news. Merlin Stone, author of When God Was A Woman, quotes the work of Lucy Komisar, formerly the vice-president of NOW (Nation Organization of Women) in the United States, who describes in The New Feminism how “women first became aware of their own problems of oppression when they tried to speak out in favor of the abolition of black slavery.” Stone quotes Komisar as stating:

When Sarah and Angelina Grimke toured New England to speak against slavery in 1836 the Council of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts issued a statement attacking them and pointing out that, “The power of woman is her dependency flowing from the consciousness of that weakness which God has given her for her protection…when she assumes the place and tone of man as a public reformer, she yields the power which God has given her for her protection and her character becomes unnatural.” ¹

My skin crawls as I read it, knowing what “protection” or “weakness” has really afforded us over all these years. I cannot help but hear the menace of a God-mandated threat in those words, “shut up, or else.” I’m sure the Grimke’s heard it too, and they were not the only ones. Stone writes:

It was the shock of this decision that eventually brought about the first women’s rights conference at Seneca Falls, New York. At that meeting, in 1848, a Women’s Declaration of Independence was drawn up, and once again women spoke out against the lowly position that the Church had assigned them. Into that Declaration, some fifteen centuries after the major obliteration of the worship of the Queen of Heaven and her priestesses, it was written: “He [man] allows her in Church, as well as State, but in a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the Ministry and with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church…He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscious and her god.”

I had never heard of a women’s declaration of independence, so I looked it up. Written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, this document, the Declaration of Sentiments, was the founding document of the Women’s Suffrage movement. Modeled after the Declaration of Independence and signed by 68 women and 32 men, this Declaration reads as follows: