If only women would do something noteworthy

I was shocked yesterday when I read something about a public school being renamed for a woman (a woman I had never heard of and now I cannot find the original story).

I wasn’t shocked that the school was being renamed.

I was not shocked when I realized that none of the schools in my town are named after women. Or that none of the schools where I went to high school were named after women.

I was shocked that I had never even noticed.

When I talk about this is the water we swim in, this is what I mean.

This sort of systemic sexism is so pervasive and so ordinary that we – that I, at least – don’t even notice.

I didn’t even notice.

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I would not be shocked if I ever brought up the issue to anyone else to get the response, “Our elementary schools are named for presidents and there has never been a woman president so what are we supposed to do?”

(If only there were something we could do.)

The junior high schools are named after poets.

Male poets.

There have been female poets. I am sure of it.

(The high schools are named after the city, so that’s not an issue.)

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I was also shocked that I was shocked about the alleged proposal to rename an airport in Tennessee after Dolly Parton. Apparently, this would be the first instance in the United States of an airport being named after a woman.

I had never even noticed that there are no airports named after a woman.

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In San Antonio, where I went to high school, there is now a Sotomayor High School. That’s progress.

And I guess it’s also progress that Robert E. Lee High School has been renamed to Lee High School, although that is not very much progress.

(I did see that the school board had noted that using “Lee” as an acronym would reduce some of the costs of the name change, which, to their credit, was initiated by students in 2018.)

The previous team name was The Rebels, with the associated image below. Now it’s The Volunteers and the image is of a service dog.

Some people – in the alumni facebook group – are still angry that the name was changed. (Some of them are also remembering, apparently fondly, the teacher who used to beat them with a paddle.)(I have a pretty good idea of how these people vote.)

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I need to stop being shocked that I am shocked and start looking at everything. Everything.

Stop asking for permission

My sweet 17-year-old friend Paloma and another girl stopped by my front yard and asked about my flowers. As I went on and on and on about the value of native plants and of pollinators and the dangers of invasive species, the other girl, Paloma’s friend Trinity, lifted her right hand.

I stopped talking, looked at her, and raised my eyebrows.

She said nothing.

I returned to the fascinating topic of native plants and prairie restoration.

Her hand remained lifted.

I finally asked, “Are you – raising your hand?”

She looked at her hand in surprise. “Yes,” she answered. “I have this habit.”

“Go ahead,” I told her.

She pointed to the “No Kings, No ICE” sign in my front window.

“Are you – are you against trump?” she asked.

Paloma burst into laughter.

I laughed.

“My entire mission in life right now is to make sure no Republican, including trump, is ever elected again,” I said.

She exhaled. “Good. We can be friends.”

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I was delighted to meet such a discerning girl.

And I was even more delighted to learn that she and Paloma have learned a lot of about politics and current events at school.

(I was not taught about current events, even though when I took high school history, I was living in the Panama Canal Zone – the United States was in the process of handing control of the Zone back to the Panamanians and we had bomb threats and strikes all the time. Also when I was taking my high school history class, the archbishop was assassinated in Costa Rica, the Maryknoll nuns were murdered in El Salvador, and Jim Jones murdered his followers in Guyana.

We did not talk about any of that in school. Not in my history class, not in my Spanish class, not anywhere.)

I was not delighted that girls are still asking for permission to speak – that girls are still asking for space.

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Ten years ago, I had a wonderful co-worker, Sage. In her mid-30s, she taught me so much. She didn’t wear makeup. To work! She didn’t even wear makeup to work! Her husband was the stay at home parent, but the school never called him first, even though he was listed as the primary contact. She would seethe when they called her first and I realized she was correct.

And she refused to raise her hand in meetings.

The women’s group from my office – there were only a handful of us – were in a meeting with a (it almost goes unsaid but a male) VP from the home office.

I raised my hand to ask a question.

I didn’t even think about it.

That’s how you ask permission, right? Permission to speak? When you’re in a group? When a man is running things?

But when Sage wanted to say something, she just said it.

After the meeting, I asked her about it.

“I don’t raise my hand,” she said flatly. “We’re not children.”

He had more money. She had more determination.

I knocked on almost 1,800 doors.

I wore holes in my shoes.

She won by 291 votes out of about 10,000.

It was worth it.

The Internalized Misogyny of Some Women

Remember Susan and Chad? The people who are running in a primary against each other?

I have talked to a lot of voters about them.

Some of the people voting for Chad give me their reasons. A few reasons I can understand, even though I don’t agree with them. Reasons like “I want someone from this neighborhood” or “I’m a lawyer and I like that he’s a lawyer.”

Reasons the other volunteers and I have heard that are just batshit insane?

“He has more leadership ability,” from an 80 year old woman.

No. He doesn’t. He has literally done nothing for the community that involves working with a group and convincing people in that group to do whatever. He has done nothing professionally that involves working with a group and convincing people to do something. Although his educational background is impressive, his work background is sparse and appears to have been solo work. His volunteer background, as far as I can tell, is picking up trash for a photo op and summer volunteer things in high school that his parents would have paid for because no 15 year old has the money to fly to the Dominican Republic or wherever.

He does not have more leadership ability.

He has a penis, which many people confuse with leadership ability.

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He has more community involvement, another woman said.

No. He has picked up trash for a photo op.

Susan was the president of her college alumni board. She is a member of one of her town’s commissions. (I have served on two town commissions and it’s a pain in the neck but it’s important.) She volunteers with her church’s and her professional organization’s leadership groups. She talked to a friend of mine yesterday – a friend who works for a nonprofit helping victims of human trafficking – and it turns out Susan served on a board with the founder of my friend’s nonprofit.

Mr T was canvassing for our current representative, who has had the office for four terms. He met a college student who remembers when Current Rep was her second-grade soccer coach.

That, my friends, is deep community involvement.

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An older woman got annoyed when a volunteer leaned into the “We want more women in office” aspect.

“What rights don’t women have that men have?” she asked.

Oh honey.

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A neighbor said, “He has chutzpah.”

I agreed – until I realized she meant it as a compliment.

Nobody would say a woman has chutzpah as a compliment.

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Another neighbor likes his ambition. To be fair, she would also probably like it if a female candidate were ambitious, but this neighbor is probably not typical in being an equal-opportunity ambition admirer. Women are not usually praised for their ambition.

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He went to Harvard!

Some people just swoon about that part. He went to Harvard!

And? I don’t even know where my legislators went to college and I don’t care. What I care about is what they have accomplished since then.

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An 86 year old woman asked my friend what my friend thought about a woman maybe becoming governor of Wisconsin. My friend loves the idea.

The 86 year old woman snorted and said, “A woman for governor? That’s crazy.”

My friend snapped, “Get with it, Mabel. Women are always smarter than men.”

They don’t even want us to be ourselves in art

I was excited to see Debra Fabian’s gorgeous statue of Betsy Thunder of the Ho-Chunk Nation. Betsy was born near Black River Falls, Wisconsin, in the 1850s and was widely known throughout the region as a skilled and knowledgeable medicine woman, providing care to both Ho-Chunk and white patients.

(I didn’t even know about Betsy Thunder – I was excited when I saw the photo, even before I read about the subject.)

Why was I so excited?

Do you remember this?

I don’t remember it. It was from 1989 and I was not paying attention. But when I saw it a few years ago, I thought WHEW AT LEAST THAT CRAP IS OVER WITH.

I was wrong.

That crap is not over with.

Even today in the Year of Our Lord 2026, statues of real women – as opposed to statues of figures of women representing something else, like the Statue of Liberty, are rare.

There are around 300 statues honoring real women in the U.S. compared to around 5,000 statues honoring real men in the U.S. Only 6% of American monuments feature real women as their subjects.

UW – LaCrosse

And statues of women who are not nude are also rare.

A statue of Mary Wollstonecraft was installed in London a few years ago.

A statue of a nude Mary Wollstonecraft.

The artist, a woman, explained her thinking. (And appalled all of us, I suspect.)

Hambling, for her part, tells the Evening Standard’s Robert Dex that the nude figure is not meant to depict Wollstonecraft, but women of all eras.

“She’s [an] everywoman and clothes would have restricted her,” the artist says. “Statues in historic costume look like they belong to history because of their clothes.”

Regarding the slim, muscular body of the woman depicted in the statue, Hambling says, “As far as I know, she’s more or less the shape we’d all like to be.”

Smithsonian magazine

Right. That’s why statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt and every other man in the world are nude and aspirational.

Because the only thing we women can aspire to is the shape the Beauty Industrial Complex things we should have.

We can’t aspire to accomplish amazing things, like define feminism or heal people or help women get the right to vote. We can aspire to thinness.

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But again that was a few years ago and surely things have changed oh wait here’s what Debra Fabian had to say about her piece:

There was pressure on me to make Betsy a sexualized version of herself with cleavage, tight clothing and a smile. I pushed against this and am glad I did.

The struggle is real for white men who inherit

Want to know how to make the sexist racist maga men so sputtering angry that they won’t have time to go to their jobs at ICE or wherever they trample over people’s rights?

Suggest that a white man has power simply because he inherited or married money.

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Bill Archer died. He was a Congressman from Texas who seemed to think that the purpose of government was not for us to pool our money to provide the services that enhance our community (that the private sector cannot or will not provide) but to make rich people richer.

Bill Archer, a Texas Republican who in three decades in the House of Representatives became a savvy veteran of budget fights and one of the most passionate and powerful anti-tax crusaders in Washington

New York Times

He wasn’t rich, he said.

He was frugal.

Mr. Archer told The New York Times in 1995 that he did not consider himself rich. “No, not really, I don’t,” he said. “I think of myself as someone who has been frugal and saved and tried to provide for his own security and someone who bore the responsibility of putting five kids through college.”

Ibid

My friends. My father never made more than $30K a year. My parents gave me about $500 a semester for college – all that they could afford – and I used that money for books. I buy my jeans at Goodwill and we have two cars – one is 26 years old and the other is a new ten years old. Mr T does most of the repairs.

We are frugal.

Archer may have been frugal, but he was also born to money.

Did he mention that? Did he mention that he worked at the family business? And not just worked there, but started out as the president of the company?

His father prospered in the livestock feed business….Mr. Archer was the president of Uncle Johnny Mills, the family feed business in Houston, from 1953 to 1961.

Ibid

I can’t find a lot of information about Uncle Johnny Mills, but I did stumble across this gem about Archer’s father:

“The Right to Achieve,” according to google, was “the keynote speech delivered by William R. Archer (President of Uncle Johnny Mills) at the Houston Community Conference held on November 22, 1948. The conference focused on regional economic growth and the preservation of free enterprise.”

I think we can all safely assume that Bill Archer was a nepo baby born to a man who was convinced – in 1940s, post-war Texas, that “free enterprise,” AKA “Black people, Hispanics, and women have no power” was the key to everything and that his own hard work and determination were why he succeeded.

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When I posted about Archer in my college alumni group, writing that Archer had a connection to our college and BTW, that he had followed the traditional path to wealth and power for men, which is to inherit money or to sleep their way to the top, you would have thought I was stomping kittens to death.

The reliable maga idiots howled with outrage that how dare I speak ill of the dead and that working hard is another path to wealth and power.

Of course their underlying, unspoken assumption is that all of their success as white men in this world is strictly due to their own efforts and if other people aren’t as successful as they are, it’s their own fault.

I got tired of the drama very quickly and deleted my post. I then wrote that I had deleted my post, not because I thought the man in question deserved respect – that he did not deserve it because his policies were harmful and destructive, but because I didn’t want the admins to have to deal with incivil responses.

They piled onto that post. I didn’t read the comments – I ignored them, but a friend in the group told me that the magas were still pissed off and commenting.

Lord Have Mercy. Little snowflakes really don’t like hearing that maybe they are not so fabulous after all.

(Not really – this phrase so often misunderstood)

I am volunteering – knocking on doors, mostly – for a local candidate, Susan. She announced a year ago, when my current state representative, Alice, announced that she would be running for the state senate, leaving a vacancy in the state house of representatives.

Alice has done an amazing job, proposing and getting passed, despite being in the Democratic minority, legislation that directly benefits women. Legislation of the type that men have had decades to propose and pass but did not.

Susan has not held office before, but has been and is currently a community volunteer, accomplishing things that again, benefit women and children. She has helped other local candidates in their races, knocking on doors and doing the tedious, boring, hard things that are necessary to get people elected to city council and school board.

In February, this new guy – Chad – entered the race.

Chad has not been involved in local politics.

He has not served as a community volunteer.

He has not helped other people on their campaigns.

He just decided that he needed to run for office. I’m not sure what problems are making him angry enough that he feels compelled to solve them. Alice ran initially because she was furious about the human trafficking she would see when she was photographing wedding receptions at hotels. Susan owns a small business and is a mom and is frustrated at the lack of government support for working parents.

Chad, in an interview when he was in high school or college – a few years ago – said that he wanted a career in politics.

Alice and Susan already have careers. Politics was never their goal.

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There was a forum for Susan and Chad.

Chad said people should vote for him because lawyers are under-represented in state government.

I’m gonna let you sit with that for a moment.

Lawyers. Are. Underrepresented.

YOU KNOW WHO ELSE IS UNDERREPRESENTED, CHAD?

YOU KNOW WHO ELSE?

FFS.

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I hate knocking on doors and I especially hate having to do so in the summer when I have so many other things I want to do, but I will not let Chad win.

MEN tell me things

It seems that every time I am out working in the garden in my front yard, someone wants to talk to me. It’s nice that my neighbors know me and want to chat, but a few of them are real Talkers if you know what I mean (I mean older men who live alone) and sometimes, I would like to pull weeds or whatever after we have greeted each other. That is, I am not necessarily interested in a 15-minute conversation.

It also seems that when I am canvassing for my candidates, I find the lonely men who are desperate for a listening ear. That is a tricky situation, as I need to keep the focus on my candidate without alienating the voter. How do I steer a conversation

• FROM the Packers or quitting smoking and drinking or a misspent youth that all changed when his son was born
• TO my candidate?

I have not figured out how to do so easily or quickly, so I end up listening to long stories and thinking about how I need to pee and how I still have 20 doors to knock before I finish and go home.

On the one hand, I do feel bad for these lonely men. They are stuck in this system, too, where they do not feel like they can talk about intimate issues – having to move because of health issues, trying to stop drinking to be a better father – with their male friends.

On the other hand, I am not a therapist. I am not even a close friend. In many of these cases, I would say that I am a cordial stranger.

And on the other other hand, these are rarely conversations.

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(Sometimes they are conversations. The college freshman who lives up the street stopped yesterday when I was out and he was delightful. We talked about books and native plants and it was an exchange where both of us talked and both of us listened.)

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Usually, they are monologues.

Usually, they are sustained monologues.

They are monologues coming from places of pain and fear and isolation and loneliness, but – they are monologues.

And there is only so much I can hear.

So last night,

• after an afternoon of neighbors talking to me while I worked in the yard (or rather, while I stopped what I was doing because I could not listen and pull weeds at the same time because I have to look things up to make sure they are weeds),

• after listening to voters go way off topic – I am delighted to talk about politics while I am doing political stuff – while I was canvassing,

• I was done. I had listened all I could listen in one day.

So when I was in line for an author event at the library, when the older man in line behind me started talking to – I don’t know who – when he just started asking questions to the air, I shut my ears.

I was on my phone, reading the paper.

I was not making eye contact with anyone.

I was not seeking conversation.

And yet.

I heard the man speak. “Why is this taking so long?”

I ignored him. I knew he wasn’t talking to me, because I wasn’t even looking at him and we had not acknowledged each other’s presence in any way. All he could see was the back of my head.

He asked again.

I finally said, without looking up from my phone, without turning around to look at him, “I don’t know.”

(I actually did know – they check attendee names against the reservation list and ask for your zip code and even though there are two people doing the work, it still takes some time, but I didn’t feel like I needed to explain anything to a stranger.)

The woman in front of me said something, too, and he answered her immediately.

“I used to come here every Saturday morning when I was a kid,” he said.

She said something back which I didn’t catch because I was reading the news.

He said something to her.

I looked up and asked, “Are you two together? I don’t want to be blocking your conversation, so I am happy to move back.”

“No!” he said. “Why would you think that?”

“OK,” I said, and returned to my phone.

He started talking again.

She answered his questions, even though I got the sense that she, also, was not that interested. But she was maybe 15 years older than I am, so perhaps a little more steeped in deferring to men? I don’t know.

They continued to talk.

I could tell he was lonely. I thought, “He’s doing the things you’re supposed to do when you are lonely – to try to engage with people.”

But – and this is just occurring to me right now – he wasn’t quite getting it right.

He was talking about himself and expecting someone to listen.

What he could have said was something like, “Wow I wonder why this is taking so long? But it will be worth it. I love (major author). What’s your favorite book of hers?”

But even then – don’t you wait until you have made eye contact with someone to start a conversation? Aren’t there rules for starting conversations in line? Who just talks to the back of the head of the person in front of him?

I am conflicted because I still feel guilty for ignoring him, but then I am annoyed that all I wanted to do was read the story about how they are burying the Minab report and I should have been allowed to exist in quiet peace in line.

What do you think? Should I have engaged with him? What are the rules on this?

Freedom

My friend E said this to me and it’s a beautiful poem.

The first thing I do when I get home from school

Is take off my bra

I throw it across the room

Sometimes it lands on the dining room table

I leave it there

Which is why The Patriarchy does not want us to have them

Mr T and I were on a trip. As usual, we were sharing one suitcase. I took my shower (ha that makes it sound like I shower daily, which is not true except when I am staying in someone else’s house – I love the freedom of not having to go to a job) and got dressed, grabbing the jeans that lay across the top of the suitcase.

When we were downtown, I put my hand in my pocket – and my hand was not stopped three inches in.

I pushed further – and my hand still had space to move.

Further.

Until my hand was BURIED in my pocket.

I ran another test.

I put my phone.

In my front pocket.

And

It

Fit.

That’s when I knew something weird was happening.

And indeed, I had accidentally put on Mr T’s pants.

For those few moments, I knew what it was like to have power.

And I liked it.

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Mr T, alas, would not let me keep those jeans.

But I am not without skills, so I simply transplanted a pocket from a pair of his old jeans that I used for parts to a pair of my jeans.

And it worked.

However, it was a pain in the neck and I am lazy and don’t want to do all that work and indeed I should not have to.

So I wrote to Levi’s to ask them to GIVE US POCKETS.

I had to transplant a pocket from my husband’s jeans to mine because men’s jeans have pockets deep enough to hold a phone and women’s jeans have pockets deep enough to hold a quarter. What the hell? Why can’t you give us the same pockets you give men?

Texan in Exile who is tired of worrying about losing her phone in the ladies’ room at the ballpark where she is not allowed to carry a purse

They wrote back.

Apparently, I alerted them to an issue that THEY HAD NO IDEA EXISTED.

Thank you so much for taking the time to share this with us. We completely understand why it feels disappointing. Pockets are a real, everyday need, and it’s upsetting when something so simple becomes a limitation.
 
Your feedback is really important to us, and we want you to know that we take it seriously. We truly appreciate you expressing your concerns so openly, and we will make sure your comments are shared with our team. Hearing directly from customers helps us understand where we need to improve, and your message highlights an issue that deserves attention.
 
If there’s anything more you’d like to share or anything we can do to make your experience better, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
 
If you need anything else, just reply to this email or chat with us. Texan —we’re always happy to help!
 
Samantha from Levi’s

So you may all thank me – Levi’s is ON IT. They JUST DIDN’T KNOW BEFORE.