American Women - Pay Attention

The War on Women may seem more like the War for Women if one just stands back and listens to the rhetoric.  Sure, it’s about votes, but there is something else going on as well and American women need to pay close attention.

There is history, but it’s a history which isn’t very old.  The 19^th Amendment to the Constitution which gave women the right to vote wasn’t passed until August of 1920, a mere 91 years ago.  Think of it, there are still plenty of people alive today whose mothers lived at a time when they simply watched their husbands, fathers, and brothers march off to the polls to decide the future for them and their families.  That Constitutional milestone was hardly the successful culmination of the fight for equal rights. Rather, it was more like the first door being unlocked.  Since then women have continued to face locked doors, whether it be in employment, health care, social mobility, finance, and even property rights to name a few, and men have reluctantly given up the keys.  The end is not yet in sight; in fact it may actually be slipping away. This is a reality which can be hard for women to see beyond the attention they must give to their lives on any given day.

The origins of patriarchal societies covering the planet are irrelevant.  The relevancy is what has perpetuated this inequality between men and women throughout recorded history and up to this present day.  It is the use of faith based doctrine and theocratic governance which has provided men the justification to retain legal power over women.  It is no accident of history that the United States was one of the first countries to accept women’s suffrage in 1920, and in fact provided a model for countries around the world.  The crack in the hold men had over women in the US, leading to Women’s Suffrage, began with the creation of the Nation itself, which drew a strong distinction between the rule of law and religious doctrine.  Yet still after 236 years the glass, although covered in cracks, is still not broken.

This clear movement to resist the equality of women is evident in the rise of Theoconservatives championed by the Republican Party. They would have you believe the debate is simply about abortion.  It is not. Abortion is a tragic occurrence by essentially everyone’s standards and no one can fault a person’s emotional response to it, but if there is a God and he didn’t want women to make the decision as to the use of their bodies he would have designed them to lay eggs like chickens - then men could decided what went into the hatchery and what didn’t.  

No, it is not simply about abortion.  It is about the continuation of a faith based definition of what a woman is, how she should act, and is manifest in the powerful, extreme conservative wing of the Republican Party. It’s not just in rhetoric you hear about God deciding who gets pregnant from a rape or designing women’s bodies to differentiate good sperm from evil sperm.  That’s just the tip of the testosterone iceberg.  It is the movement to an Old Testament, faith based creation of law which is threatening the gains women have made over the past 100 years. It should be no surprise that almost all the Conservative rhetoric you hear regarding women comes from men, that Congressional hearings lead by Republicans are testimonies primarily of men, and that a woman who seeks to argue her case for women can acceptably be labeled a slut.  Those are all echoes of 1919.

These are the same people, Romney, Ryan, and the male Republican leadership, who attack Islamic nations that use a faith based rationale to subjugate women.  Although they may rightly describe Islamic fundamentalist attitudes toward women as Neanderthal, American women need to wake up to the fact that even though this Theoconservatism carries a smaller club, it still lives in the same cave as their Middle Eastern brethren.