July 26, 2009 |
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Women’s rights are
human rights?
Stephen Henry Lewis,
United Nations’ envoy for HIV AIDS in Africa, 2006, said:
“[Women’s rights have] never been made real, and so long as men control the levers and bastions of power… it never will be real. The demeaning diminution of women is everywhere evident… where freedom from sexual violence, the right to sexual autonomy, to sexual and reproductive health, social and economic independence, and even the whiff of gender equality are barely approximated. It’s a ghastly, deadly business, this untrammeled oppression of women in so many countries on the planet.”
1 Meme: a unit of information in a mind whose existence influences events such that more copies of itself get created in other minds. ~ Refer Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme, Richard Brodie, author
2 Galvanized: to react as if stimulated by an electric shock.
“In the early days of woman-suffrage agitation, I saw that the greatest obstacle we had to overcome was the bible. It was hurled at us on every side.”
~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton, An Interview with the Chicago Record, June 29, 1897. For more on Stanton, read Women Without Superstition.
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Bottom of the Heap
When Is Too Much Enough?
Religions are the biggest and oldest enemies of females. With very few exceptions, females were and are considered closer to a supposed evil entity than to a supposed good entity. This age-old meme is a viral infection of the cultural mind and continues to mutate and replicate in modern times in spite of so-called intelligent thinking.1
The disease of gender discrimination is rampant in almost every societal system and institution supported by the populaces they were created to serve. The clergy rules hand-in-hand with governances, each protecting the other from invasion by feminine ideology.
As a result, civil rights for women are still mired in the sticky, black tar pits of the Middle Ages. From time to time, a token of “rights” for women surfaces, but is often invalidated by the next ruling of the liturgical or judicial systems overwhelmingly dominated by males. When is too much enough?
Prioritization of Civil Rights
On July 19-20, in 1848, the very first women’s rights convention in the world met in Seneca Falls, N.Y.
Feminist and freethinker Elizabeth Cady Stanton, with four friends, instigated and convened the Seneca Falls Convention. Stanton was the first woman to call for “woman suffrage,” as part of the “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments” adopted at the convention. Stanton, initially warned that the suffrage plank was almost too shocking to utter and would alienate supporters, prevailed. The suffrage plank won endorsement and galvanized U.S. women for the next 72 years.2 ~ Refer Freethought of the Day.
While Stanton and other women continued the battle for female rights, America was being torn apart by The Civil War (1861-1865). North vs. South, Union vs. Confederate, conservative vs. liberal, brother vs. brother, whites vs. blacks, and freedom vs. slavery. None were immune from the effects of the four-year upheaval which cost the lives of 203,000 killed in action, 620,000 died of disease, and more than 400,000 wounded.
In 1863, President Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, which freed most slaves in the South but failed to address the issue of slavery in the North. In 1865, as the war drew to a close, the Thirteenth Amendment to The United States Constitution was ratified, declaring,
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,…shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” ~ Refer The United States Constitution.
But the question of voting rights for the freed slaves was overlooked in the aftermath of destruction and waited, none too patiently, to be resolved.
After the American Civil War, Stanton’s commitment to female suffrage caused a schism in the women’s rights movement when she, along with Susan B. Anthony, declined to support passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to The United States Constitution. She opposed giving added legal protection and voting rights to African American men while continuing to deny women, black and white, the same rights. ~ Refer Wikipedia.
Good memes and bad memes are often closely related and too often doled out as good to the guys and bad to the gals. Nevertheless, just five years later in 1870, Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment which stated,
“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged…on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.” ~ Refer The United States Constitution.
Wars Take Precedence
The struggle for women’s voting rights lasted through much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although some states permitted women to vote and to hold office, national suffrage rights were still in limbo.
World War I, as most wars do, took precedence over the needs, desires, and rights of women. But at last, seventy-two years after the Seneca Falls Convention and eighteen years after the death of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Congress finally saw fit to grant full favor to the ladies. The Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women’s right to vote, was finally passed in 1920:
Amendment XIX
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. ~ Refer The United States Constitution.
I find it somewhat humorous that the writer(s) of the Nineteenth Amendment didn’t specifically say “females,” but rather “on account of sex.” By utilizing the non-gender specific term “sex,” perhaps the males were covering their asses in the event females ever gained control of the government, and therein guaranteed their own previously assumed voting rights.
These two historical afterthoughts (15th and 19th Amendments) to perhaps the most famous document in the world serve as daily reminders that females were at the bottom of the minorities’ heap, and still would be, had it not been for courageous women such as Stanton and Anthony. There should be at least one in every country, state, city, and village; but given the current state of the world’s women, would they be enough to change the memes to which females are accustomed to submitting?
Enough Already
How big is a heap? A great number or large quantity. The female minority “heap” is huge—approximately 3,500,000,000 (three billion, five hundred million) females are alive today. However, most of them are barely clinging to an existence (as opposed to living fully and equally with the male counterpart) within the stanchions of masculine controls known as governments, religions, and other deadly exclusions. His-story has shown us that the guys are not going to set females free. Again I ask, when is too much enough?
It is unfortunate, to say the least, that women, in spite of opposite-gender degradations, are still more loyal to men than they are to other women. It seems tradition and conditioning, but mostly, necessity, has made it almost impossible for females to escape the shackles of male domination.
In a world of revolutionary forces and ideas, it would seem the time has come for females as a group to resist patriarchal masters too long in charge of the feminine reality. Pass this on to your female friends and family. Let us be the cheerleaders and defenders for one another, no matter who, what, where, when or why. Let us drown this archaic and debilitating meme in the tar pits from whence it came, never to let it surface again.
I’ve had enough of watching women and girls die just for being a gender other than male. I’ve had enough of the back of the bus. I’ve had enough of the man’s way not working for our entire global citizenry. I’ve had enough of the bottom of the heap.
“Take your rightful place, and all others will follow.” ~ Unknown
#0060 Albeit Rantler |
