Texan who was tricked by Used Husband into moving to Milwaukee. Fomenting feminist revolution based on potty parity, pockets, and psleeves. Bad bacon eater. Also, cats. Also, REVOLUTION.
I’m taking a few weeks off to mourn.
But we will not stop fighting.
It took almost a century for our right to have a voice in our own government to be recognized.
Sometimes the fight is long.
Yesterday, I let myself get trapped into a long, unproductive conversation with a voter.
Lordhavemercy what on earth made me think I could change the mind of a 30something white Christian man who is convinced he is being persecuted and that abortion is the “biggest human rights violation of our time?”
I won’t go into the abortion stuff, except to say he wants to know why the baby should be punished instead of the father in the case where a ten year old girl becomes pregnant as a result of rape. (All pregnancies of girls under 16 are the result of rape.)
I tried to explain to him that the body of a ten year old girl is really not ready for pregnancy but he brushed that off.
I didn’t even bother with “why should the life of the ten year old girl be less important than the life of the fetus” because although I am a fool who can get trapped in conversation, I am not that much of a fool.
But his absolute assurance that he should be running things and his annoyance that he is not – where on earth did that shit come from?
He said he was raised in the hood by “social justice warriors.” (The annoyed tone in quotation marks was his.) That his parents are “woke” and that his mother will be voting for Kamala.
What we really need in this country, he said, is for God and the gospel to be part of government. That feminism had ruined things for everyone. (Except for women, I noted. Feminism has not ruined things for women.)
I pointed out that all feminism did was force men to up their games so that we would want them instead of needing them, but I guess the opinion of a woman does not count. He did, however, appear to be startled at the idea that a woman should be able to have a choice about whether or not she stays with a man, but then, this is a man who appears to think that only men should be choosing anything.
I didn’t ask him what about people who aren’t Christian because by that point in the conversation, I had realized there was no changing his mind or even getting him to reconsider his opinions and I was trying to get away.
Note to self: It’s really not necessary to be super polite to people who are pissing you off. Although I think there is always, with women, the fear that if we directly contradict a man that we might set him off so we have to be very careful.
He told me that as a straight white Christian man, he is seen as The Oppressor and that the only path to redemption was “anti-racism,” which was when he launched into his “the Dems and Kamala are communists have you read what Marx has to say about this?”
I finally got some courage and interrupted him – Lord do these men count on women maintaining the social norms of not interrupting – and said I had to go.
W.T.F?
Where do these men come from? Clearly, it wasn’t in his raising. It’s sounds like his parents did the best they could.
But this was one seething white man who feels as if something has been taken from him that should have been his.
Even though I have encountered this attitude before, it still surprises me. A VP at my old job – very smart, very educated – UW Madison, not exactly a breeding ground for White Nationalists – had joked to me about how he had a hard time finding a job when he graduated from college in the early ’80s.
“I was a straight white guy,” he said. “What chance did I have?”
As a straight white woman, I got asked questions like “What do your parents think about your having a career?” Men grabbed my ass when I was a cocktail waitress. Male co-workers my father’s age massaged my neck and then got all butthurt when I didn’t want to go to dinner with them.
The right answer was, of course, “Every chance in the world. This world has been built in your image.”
Vote as soon as you can. Once you show as having voted in the Democratic databases, nobody should call you or knock on your door, which means volunteers can focus more time on people who are still undecided.
(I know but they do exist and they can be swayed!)
And volunteer. Make phone calls or text or knock doors. Knocking doors is actually not that bad! Yes, a woman literally slammed the door in my face the other day and you know what?
I just shrugged and moved on to the next house, where I had a lovely conversation with someone who does support Kamala and all the women (in my neighborhood, it turns out all the Dem candidates are women). He had just moved to the new place this year and didn’t realize that his voting location had changed, so I was able to give him that information (it’s all in the little app you put on your phone – MiniVAN has the voter name and where their polling place is and any notes from previous conversations) and tell him when early voting started. Our early voting starts on Tuesday and Tuesday is his day off, so he promised to vote on Tuesday.
The house above? For some reason, it was also on my MiniVAN list, but the only name was a woman’s name.
Because I am a chicken, I didn’t knock on the door, but I noticed there were some packages on the front porch. One was addressed to a male name; the other was addressed to the woman on my list.
So I put one of my little sticky notes – I keep a batch in my purse and you should do the same – on the package addressed to the woman.
Volunteer! Click this link now and sign up!
On Ask A Manager last weekend, Bitte Meddler* (Hi Bitte!) asked about campaigning.
Other readers jumped in to comment that they do not want anyone to call them, to text them, to send them postcards, to knock on their door.
I am so fed up with the amount of texts, postcards, and letters I have gotten from volunteers from both political parties. I live in a no soliciting community and I even woke up one afternoon (night shifter/day sleeper) to find that someone had apparently come up to my apartment on the top floor of my building to knock on the door and leave a note asking me to call them to discuss a political candidate. They’re damned lucky they didn’t wake me up.
(For the record, political campaigning does not count as soliciting.)
I wish I could report unsolicited texts and emails to someone. And those people get fined. I consider them a spam, even if they come from the party I am going to vote for.
(Also for the record – those phone numbers come from lists that the campaign has bought. At some point, you gave your phone number to someone and agreed to Terms and Conditions. Don’t get mad at the political party – get mad at the data sellers.)
Granted, these are only a couple of comments, but to someone who has never volunteered before, I can see how they would make you think twice.
I am here to tell you that campaigning IS FINE.
Yes, there are always some rude people, but if you are texting with them, you can have some fun. Below are some texts from when I was campaigning for Mandela Barnes. I did them from home, from my computer, in a program – and number – from the campaign. The recipients did not see my phone number.
Some people just want to argue and to be nasty. All they have to do is say “STOP” and they will be unsubscribed.
But those who were rude and didn’t say stop?
Sometimes I – um – corrected their grammar.
Which made them really mad. 🙂
Most of the people who actually responded were polite, though. Sometimes they had questions about specific issues, which I answered using the campaign’s policy page and FAQs. And a few even wanted to donate money but didn’t want to do it online, so needed a PO Box.
Texting is FINE.
You know what else is fine?
Doing doors.
Doing doors is FINE.
That is, getting a list of houses from your local Democrats, getting the campaign materials, and knocking on those doors to talk to people about the candidates.
I will admit that even after having done this for over a decade, I always dread that first knock. I hate it. I am so scared that I will encounter someone mean or rude.
But it just doesn’t happen.
Even the few times a Republican somehow have shown up on my list, they are polite and just tell me that they vote Republican. Nobody has slammed a door in my face or spit on me or yelled at me.
Usually, nobody even answers the door.
When they do, half the time, they tell me that yeah they are voting Blue and thanks and goodbye.
Sometimes, it is people who say they are undecided or don’t agree and they want to vent and I listen to them. And then I ask if they want the materials for my candidates and they say yes.
And then occasionally, I have a great conversation with someone like this delightful woman.
With people like this woman, I just enjoy talking to them. I also ask about their voting plan. In this case, she is planning to vote absentee for the first time since John Kennedy was running (“I went into labor on election night,” she said), so I reminded her about the new rules about witness signatures in Wisconsin and suggested she return her ballot as soon as possible because of complications with the mail in Wisconsin. (Thank you DeJoy for deliberately destroying the US Postal Service.)
What I am saying:
Yes, there are people who don’t want anyone to talk to them.
But there are more people who do want someone to talk or to text or to call or to send a postcard. It is always worth it. Always.
I see stories on @Amy.Siskind‘s facebook page (she has been organizing door-knocking trips to Pennsylvania) about people agreeing to vote for Kamala after someone knocks on their door.
I see stories from my local candidates about people who weren’t going to vote but have changed their minds after engaging with someone who showed they care.
You can be that person.
Yes, you.
Go to Mobilize.us to find volunteer opportunities in your area.
You can do this! WE can do this!
PS I am publishing this on Thursday instead of Saturday to give you time to plan something for this weekend.
More than ten years ago, when Mr T’s father told Mr T to “get [me] in line,” Mr T laughed, which is the only appropriate response to such a stupid, sexist, misogynistic, patriarchal suggestion.
I had honestly – this is how ill-informed I was – thought that the days of men thinking they were the boss of us were behind us.
I was wrong.
In the middle of the 19th century, it was not uncommon for men to have women committed for, among other things, “defying all domestic control.”
Hysteria – you know, having a uterus – was another reason.
Ann E. Lowry has written a book, The Blue Trunk, about a female ancestor of hers who was committed to an asylum in Wisconsin. In an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio, Lowry talks about why women were committed.
People who had mental health problems in the early 1900s, if their families had money, often went to private institutions. But this was a public institution, so the people who lived there became wards of the state and often spent their entire lives there.
One of the things that was prominent in those days, especially for women, was the diagnosis of hysteria. There were many symptoms for hysteria, including things like anxiety and the desire to have sex or desire to not have sex — a lot of things that many of us could be diagnosed with today. Hysteria didn’t drop off the DSM until 1980.
Source: WPR
In the late 1920s, a woman was put in an Illinois asylum after she was found wandering, catatonic after being beaten and raped. She didn’t know her name or who she was.
She was kept in an asylum until 1978, when she died alone and unidentified.
The asylum called her Mary Doefour because she was the fourth Jane Doe to be institutionalized. The fourth woman who was institutionalized in the area whose name was unknown to herself and to the people who institutionalized. The fourth one.
Lord have mercy how many women did this happen to?
This Mary knew enough to know she was someone and just needed help remembering who she was.
But the more she protested, the more the people in power pushed back.
As she became more and more insistent, she was force-fed pills and other concoctions to keep her calm. When that wasn’t enough, she was stripped naked, tied up to a gurney, wheeled into a theater, and given electroconvulsive therapy: painful and powerful shocks to her brain administered via electrodes. Sometimes the shocks were so powerful they knocked her out. When that happened, the wires were ripped from her scalp, and she was dumped on a large tub filled with freezing water, the protocol to revive patients at the Bartonville State Hospital.
The once articulate and inquisitive Mary Doefour slowly but surely began to slide down the slippery slope of stupor. Her body was kept alive, but the aggressive treatment didn’t fail to turn her into an orderly, docile vegetable at a hospital for the criminally insane. Her only crime? Being a victim.
I saw this post by a 30something white man. I guess he thinks he should be the boss of women?
He doesn’t understand why women aren’t flocking to him – he says he is good looking and has two jobs.
One job is at a fast-food restaurant, the other is driving an Uber.
He thinks women shouldn’t work outside of the home.
But he also thinks that women who care about a man’s income are golddiggers.
(That would make men like him – who want a wife to stay at home, bear his children, cook his food, and clean his home – Labor Diggers.)
He is, not surprisingly, a trump supporter.
They want to control us.
We cannot let this happen.
Vote. And make sure all your like-minded friends vote.
(And volunteer? Here’s a texting event – you don’t have to leave your house and you don’t have to talk to anyone. It’s all about getting moms who are infrequent voters to the polls.)
Also Bernie Moreno, who is running against Sherrod Brown in Ohio.
Speaking on Friday at a town hall in Warren County, Ohio, Mr. Moreno characterized many suburban women as “single-issue voters” on abortion rights, suggesting that older women should not care about abortion because they were too old to have children.
“It’s a little crazy, by the way — especially for women that are like past 50,” Mr. Moreno said, drawing laughter from the crowd. “I’m thinking to myself: I don’t think that’s an issue for you.”
Nikki Haley wrote on twitter, “Are you trying to lose the election? Asking for a friend.”
Commenters asked Haley if she understands that menopause is real and that women over 50 rarely get pregnant.
On a post criticizing men who date much younger women, a man commented that the older women were just jealous – that we were hags who couldn’t attract men anymore.
I replied that we were not jealous – we want to protect younger women.
We know what men like him are like.
We know why they don’t want women their own age.
We know it’s because these men know that women our age won’t put up with their BS.
We care about what happens to younger women.
Extrapolating from Moreno’s comments, I guess we are supposed to care only about issues that affect us directly.
Why send foreign aid? They’re not even Americans.
Why fund the fire department? My house hasn’t burned down.
Why care about voting rights? I’m a white blue-eyed blonde. Nobody tries to stop me from voting.
Why care about lead pipes? I don’t have children drinking water in my house.
Why care about schools? I don’t have kids in school.
Why care about police brutality? Cops usually don’t mess with middle-aged white women.
As I write this, trying to identify issues that MAGA voters would care about, I can’t think of any.
Except for the cells that make up the fetal tissue in abortions in the US, 85% of which are performed before the ninth week, they don’t care about anyone else, especially people who don’t look like them.
We older women – we menopausal useless women – care about what happens to younger women.
And that’s enough to get us out to vote.
I was heartbroken to read that Amber Nicole Thurman had died because a Georgia hospital refused to give her the medical treatment she needed.
She needed a D&C to get rid of tissue that had not been expelled with mifepristone.
Georgia has outlawed abortion.
By the time they finally did the D&C, it was too late.
She.
Died.
She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.
But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.
Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.
It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.
An otherwise healthy 28 year old woman died.
Unnecessarily.
She left a little boy motherless.
No.
The state of Georgia – DONALD TRUMP – left that little boy without a mother.
Look closely at Meg Lionel Murphy’s painting above.
Do you see the part where a baby is being born?
When you see it, ask yourself where else you have seen this event portrayed in Western art.
Almost never, right?
Childbirth – and its attendant dangers – is all but ignored.
Pregnancy is glorified because it’s the thing men can’t do but they need because they want heirs and someone to carry on their name and all sorts of BS that make me roll my eyes.
We have forgotten that pairs of graves like this – which took me only minutes to find as I walked in the old section of a cemetery – used to be common.
(And in the three minutes after finding these graves, I found four other graves of 1800s women who had died before they reached the age of 35. I can’t be sure if they died of pregnancy or birth complications, but I would guess it’s likely.)
All those stories of our great-grandfathers and multiple wives?
It’s because women died while giving birth.
(And then they would lose children to diseases that are now easily preventable if parents are not idiots and vaccinate their children, which is a different story but it isn’t really, is it?)
Some man online said that older women are just jealous of younger women who are involved with men our age.
I said nope, that’s not it at all. It’s that we want to protect young women from predators.
That’s our mission right now: We have to protect young women and girls. We have to protect them from predators and we have to protect them from bad laws that keep them from getting the medical care that they need.
We all know someone who has had an abortion or a miscarriage and has needed a D&C.
Even if you think you don’t know anyone, you do! One in four women is expected to have an abortion in their lifetime. And about 10-20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, which sometimes needs a D&C as well.
Believe me, you know someone.
Even if you are not in a swing state and can’t knock on doors (I KNOW! I HATE IT TOO! But I hate the alternative more.), you can do something.
You can phone bank. They train you and give you the phone numbers and a script.
You can text bank.
And you don’t necessarily run the risk of talking to people who are hostile. A lot of it is just reminding people to vote. When I texted for Mandela Barnes, I encountered people who had questions about issues – questions I could answer (because I had an entire list of FAQs). I also found people who wanted to donate money but wanted to send a check to a physical address and needed that address.
My point is that you don’t need to be scared of calling or texting people.
In addition to those things, you can also leave notes in the ladies’ room. There are women married to R men who don’t want their husbands to know how they vote. We need this election to be a landslide for Kamala. Help these women – many of whom have voted R in the past but who are furious about abortion – know that the can vote the way they want. I keep a pack of sticky notes in my purse now and leave one in each stall in any public restroom I use.
I just learned that it’s been in my lifetime that women got the right to join the marching band at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Yeah – they just made a big deal about celebrating the 50-year anniversary of women being allowed in the band.
I have been learning how awful things were for women in the past – like not being able to get a bank loan in their name – but it never even occurred to me that there would be something so stupid, so mean, so petty as to not let women in a band.
My mom, who played clarinet in her high-school marching band in a town so small it didn’t even have a stoplight and who went to UW-Eau Claire before 1974, would not have been able to play in the Madison band. She could have joined the Eau Claire band, but didn’t because you had to go to all the games. (Which leads to the question – why were women allowed in the Eau Claire band and not the Madison one?)
(About the loans: When I wrote about that on facebook, a FB friend told me that she had been able to get a business loan before the law changed and she was just fine thank you very much and if women just pull themselves up by their bootstraps life will be fine.
As I have resolved not to argue with idiots online, I didn’t reply that there was no law against giving a loan to a woman, but there was also no law requiring anyone to do so and refusing to lend money to a woman had no repercussions.)
So anyway here I was all angry about the Badger Band and women not being allowed to join until 1974 – when I read Abbie Conant‘s comments on one of Katherine Needleman’s great pieces.
Conant wrote,
In the mid 1990s, the Mozarteum was interested in hiring me as the trombone professor. That would normally be an absolutely dream job for anyone, and especially an American in Salzburg with its musical history and fairly-tale cityscape at the base of the alps. I refused. The Vienna Phil still categorically forbade membership to women and I was beginning to become very outspoken about women’s rights.
Turns out the Vienna Philharmonic didn’t even let women audition until 1997.
NINETEEN NINETY SEVEN!
That’s only 27 years ago.
That’s nothing.
I have t-shirts older than that.
It takes forever for us to get rights.
And no time at all to lose them.
I leave you with Shemekia Copeland’s new song, Blame it on Eve, with these brilliant lyrics:
But these days, a woman can feel alone
When even her body she doesn’t own
Wanna know how it feels to have the blues?
Just try losing your right to choose
A few months ago, I was lucky enough to see Sister Helen Prejean, the anti-death penalty activist who wrote “Dead Man Walking,” speak.
Her main message was that
and Christians and other people of good will should not support it and indeed, should fight it LOOKING AT YOU SO-CALLED CHRISTIANS WHO SUPPORT THE ORANGE GUY.
Even if someone is guilty, I don’t think the state should have the power to decide if someone lives or dies, but if your reason for being against the death penalty is because we can’t be sure someone is guilty, that’s fine with me, too. We shouldn’t have the death penalty, period.
Here are some of my notes from her talk. I’m leaving out the quotation marks, but assume unless otherwise stated this is what Sr Helen said, either in direct quotation or in spirit.
The Geneva Convention says you can’t tie a man’s hands behind him and then take him out and shoot him. It’s the defenselessness.
They’re designing a game – Death Row Lottery. On the first roll of the dice, where you get a one or a two, the question is “Are you rich?”
In Texas, when they executed Ivan Cantu (who was possibly innocent), it’s a cruciform. They have to stretch their arms out. (Sr Helen stretched her arms out to illustrate. She looked like Jesus on the cross.) She told Ivan, “Your death will not be in vain.”
One out of eight people sentenced to death are later exonerated.
Why do we focus on pain and punishment and exile? Separating people from their families? How do we restore people and bring them back to life?
It’s always people who are poor.
Prosecutors who go for the death penalty are in ex-slave states: Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana.
Iowa was the first state to eliminate the death penalty. And now Wisconsin. Y’all are a life state! Not saying that cheese is all there is to life, but – you got cheese at the airport! (Me: We do!)
The biggest prison in the US is Angola (Louisiana). Inmates earn 2.5 cents (Me: YES CENTS) an hour picking cotton. Angola is on the site of three former plantations.
Slavery morphed into convict leasing.
What do we do when we finally get knowledge?
Do we walk away?
Or do we act?
Jesus was always on the side of the vulnerable. Always.
Texan in Exile 