Susan B, Louisa May, Monica L, and Me


by Carol Fondiller

Women’s History Month. What a silly concept, really. As if women’s history is separate from men’s history, and we had no part at all in the story of human beings.


Men and women are different, our concavities and our convexities are different, but they fit, and nicely. In all the long human history, beginning (according to the written record) when women were treated as property to be traded off, worked and bred to death until now, when thanks to the PILL we can be as goofy and promiscuous as any man getting up in chill dawn quietly putting on our clothes, and stealthily sliding out the pad, just like you, big guy!

Sometimes I hear women who should know better denigrating the women’s movement. These women are commentators, lawyers, writers, etc. Not that the women’s movement hasn’t had its fits of insanity, but the bulk, the heft of the movement has been the story of courageous women who through necessity or choice have taken nontraditional roles or attitudes and questioned authority.

Susan B. Anthony, with almost monkish devotion, preached women’s suffrage and got arrested many times for attempting to vote. Others followed in her footsteps chaining themselves to government buildings, getting arrested, throwing themselves in front of carriages to protest the jailing and force feeding of women who were imprisoned in their efforts to get universal suffrage.

Susan B. was ridiculed because she wore her black dress and red shawl to speak to sometimes hostile audiences. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, Mother Jones, Rosa Parks, Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, oh My Goddess, so many of them…Louisa May Alcott and her subtly subversive stories about independent courageous women triumphing over adversity and blooming and sharing their triumphs.

In 1920, women were granted the right to vote. Granted the right to vote! Like it was handed to them on a silver platter. See first page in re: the efforts that were made on our behalf so we could stay home and not vote.

Thirty years ago this year, the Supreme Court ruled that women’s decisions about their bodies were their own business, and no one else’s, and all the king’s men could come in, but the government stay out.
Ain’t nobody’s uterus but my own.

I remember the days before Roe v Wade. There were no maternity leaves for secretaries, waitresses, barmaids, etc., even if you were a secretary in a Catholic Diocese. Advancement for women was nil because “women were just working until they got married.”

And if you were a single parent, as in being a World War II widow, you were denied employment because “Suppose the kids got sick and you had to stay home?” Many women lied and said they had no children. The man who sat next to you and did the same job could get health insurance for his family, and get a promotion because he had a family.

Women who became pregnant, in other words, got off the workforce and had the baby, or resorted to unsanitary sometimes debilitating or lethal back alley abortions.

Now the good ol’ days of pre-Roe v Wade that the not so Reverend Jerry Falwell, Ashcroft, the Ms. Carpenters and Coulters yearn for, might be coming back.

Each year it seems the bites at the concept of privacy and freedom of choice have gone from timid nibblings to rending, savaging the whole idea of women’s right to choose.

In the 1980s I wrote something to the effect that not only was the right to the alternative of a safe clear abortion in danger, the idea of prevention was also on hold. And certainly sex education in schools was also being called into question.

I’m sorry to say that not much has changed. It’s gotten worse.

“Traditional Family Values” are being touted, as in have five kids, one a year, stay at home, home school ‘em, go bonkers and kill the children. I over-simplify and I don’t mean to minimize the horror of that situation. But in reality, the traditional family as we know and revere it, didn’t really come into being until the 19th century and the rise of the middle classes.

The working classes worked their kids, and if they were lucky maybe the kids got a bit of reading and writing. But mostly they were apprenticed out to learn a trade, and the girls stayed home, or went into service or sweatshops.

The upper classes had nannies, wet nurses, and boarding schools that their children were sent to to learn how to rule the world for the boys, and schools to learn how to be ladies and wives for the girls. So much for quality care with the folks.

It seems only the middle classes kept their children close to home until marriages could be arranged and occupations picked. Unmarried women were a problem. They drudged at home or were sentenced to the genteel poverty of librarians or teachers. But now the party in power – with the connivance of the conciliatory and caving under party (who me? a Liberal?) – allowing the no Big Government for health care, affirmative action, decent housing, environmental protection, etc., but lots of oversight on one’s thoughts and what one does with one’s body is on its Rogue Elephant rampaging of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, so that in the end it would be difficult to tell the difference between the Shiites and the “Free World.”

Freedom means having a choice. The more freedom one has, the chances are that he or she at some time or other will make some choices that will have negative consequences.

I hope that in the future, if there is one, that he and/or she will have enough education and courage to turn the situation around to prevent catastrophe.

For instance, Monica L., who was old enough to drive, drink, and vote was also old enough to make her own choice.

She chose to thong President Bill and polish off his El Presidente.

She only did what hundreds of women did for centuries to get power. She wanted a job in the White House, despite a stunning lack of ability or dedication, not in the Peace Corps, even if she spelled it differently. She made her choice and thanks to these modern times is literally making purses out of a sow’s rear.

Today I see young women making choices of becoming doctors, able to become firefighters, police officers, letter carriers, writers, news readers, etc.

I remember when women couldn’t become chefs because it was too stressful for the fragile darlings, and the pans too heavy, although they had to lift fifty pounds of flour and deal with drunks if they were waitresses, and if they prepared meals in a restaurant, they were cooks, not chefs and ergo, paid less.

I remember when women poets were called poetesses, a charming but dismissive term that diminished the seriousness of their poetry. Women couldn’t really be poets I was told in all seriousness by a beat poet; they could only be muses to be worshiped. And clean up the poet’s pad and comb the puke out of his beard, I thought ten years later.

Women do have a history and it is with men.

Hopefully in the near future if there is one Goddess willing, women’s history, Black history, Latino history, etc., will be integrated and told and written about as one big wonderful colorful sad funny tale of the human odyssey to find life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

So Mote It Be.

Posted: Sat - March 1, 2003 at 07:09 PM          

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