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.
This weekend, find a way to help Kamala and all your local Democrats win
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.
It’s OK for you to campaign, no matter how much people say that they are tired of hearing about the candidates
By Leda Black (thank you reader saf for the link!)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Shouldn’t we be grateful for the crumbs that have been given to us?
I cannot believe there are not comments on the posts about the anniversary from women who are livid about this – that it didn’t happen until 1974. Source
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:
(Just in case you didn’t know the answer, no, he would not)
“As Thomas Merton, one of the great mystics of the Catholic Church, said, ‘The end of the world will be legal.’ That kind of thinking that ‘If it’s a law it must be right.’ But the death penalty is just using law to torture and kill human beings.” (source)
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
THE DEATH PENALTY IS EVIL
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.
It’s easier for the Patriarchy if we smile. A lot of us are done with that.
Mr T and I saw Morissette in concert last week and she was fabulous. Yes I know the song is about an ex-lover but there is a larger rage behind it.
How angry are women now?
How angry are our mothers and our foremothers?
How angry were they when we were kids?
Did you see you mom’s generation express that anger?
I didn’t.
I didn’t see women my mom’s age get mad.
I didn’t see them rail about injustice or how women were treated.
Yes, I saw anger at ordinary things but I did not see older women expressing anger at the system.
I didn’t know that expressing anger was an option.
Even worse, I really didn’t know that the system was wrong.
How angry was I the first time I heard Alanis sing that song?
I wasn’t angry but I was puzzled about sexual harassment at work. Why would my boss ask me what I had done to get a married man my dad’s age (OLD) to kiss me? Why would a customer laugh when I told him not to grab my butt?
I wasn’t angry but I was frustrated about why I couldn’t get promoted. What was I doing wrong?
I wasn’t angry about women not being able to get credit cards in their own name until the late 70s because I didn’t even know about it.
I wasn’t angry about the lack of abortion rights because we still had them.
I wasn’t angry that before Roe, white girls and women had their babies ripped from their arms while “‘naturally’ sexually promiscuous and ‘naturally’ maternal” Black girls and women were expected to keep their babies because I didn’t know. (Source)
I wasn’t angry but I was confused when a male hiring manager asked me how my parents felt about my having a career. Did he ask that question of everyone, I wondered. And why did he even want to know? Was living at home with your parents after you graduated from college even an option?
I wasn’t angry when the woman was assaulted running through Central Park at night. Who runs alone at night?
Wait. What *woman* runs alone at night?
I wasn’t angry that of course *I* would never go running by myself after dark. That I would always park under the streetlight if I went to the store at night. That I would never meet a blind date or a guy from a dating site except at a public place.
I wasn’t angry because I hadn’t thought about any of this.
It was just how the world worked. Nothing to be done except change my behavior and try not to cause men to treat me in ways I didn’t want to be treated.
I didn’t think I was angry but I did know that I had never heard a song like that before.
It wasn’t until my then-boyfriend asked me why the song was so popular that I realized that it was the first time I had heard a song about women’s rage. He didn’t like that she was so furious.
Reader, I broke up with him.
My mom was her class valedictorian. She went to college on a full scholarship but dropped out after her freshman year to get married.
My mom is brilliant. She is super smart and organized and she gets shit done.
Her skills were used to support my dad’s dreams.
I don’t even know what my mom’s dreams were.
Now that I know things, I am angry.
I watched and experienced more years of sexual harassment that male bosses dismissed.
More years of watching men who had not accomplished as much as I had getting the promotions I did not get.
More years of asking my boss what I had to do to get promoted but never getting an answer.
More years of watching the men hired to replace me be paid 34% more than I was paid. (And then they didn’t accomplish anything.)
More years of watching women criticized for things men are praised for. Of men being direct; women talk too much. Men are smart; women use Big Words Nobody Can Understand.
Of hearing a friend tell me that when she told her priest about her first husband beating her, the priest’s attitude was Well yes but you’re married and divorce is not an option.
Of my friend Heather snapping at me that the woman should have been able to run through Central Park at night.
Of women being attacked with sexist terms instead on substance.
Of seeing how we have f*ing chewable viagra but still don’t have a clue about how to cure endometriosis.
Of seeing the disparities in white and Black maternal mortality rates.
Now I am angry about everything.
Does my mother’s generation even know they’re angry?
They must have a substrate of simmering rage about opportunities missed and life in general that they never thought they could express and probably, even if asked today, could not articulate.
My friend Judith’s mother is jealous of her and does show anger to Judith.
Not because Judith has done anything wrong but because Judith has had and has taken advantage of the opportunities that she has had and that her mother, growing up in post-war Germany, never had.
Judith’s mom is angry with the wrong target.
It’s not Judith’s fault that the system stinks. Judith did not create the patriarchy or sexism or misogyny.
Judith’s mom needs to direct her fury to the system.
We all do.
We need to use our rage to smash the patriarchy and change these systems so our daughters and granddaughters never have to be angry about these issues again.
When women have power, they use it to protect women and girls (except for Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is disgusting for signing that child labor bill into law)
In the world: 1 in 5 girls do not go to school, 1 in 3 girls are forcibly married, 2 million girls become mothers before 15 years old. So don’t tell us feminism is an old fight. (Le Salon des dames)
My cousin – a trumper – asked if the only reason I support Kamala is because she’s a woman.
He has lived in the same small (two stoplights) town his entire life.
Ten years ago, we were talking about gay marriage. He was against it. (To be fair, I used to be against it until I really thought about it. People can change and grow.)
I asked him what about his gay friends – shouldn’t they be able to marry?
“I don’t have any gay friends,” he answered.
I laughed and said “Oh yes you do.”
Sometimes, people can’t think of anything beyond their own experience.
Sometimes, those people are straight white men who are not necessarily interested in anything beyond their own experience and what benefits them.
My friend Lenore and I toured Villa Louis, a historical site in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. One of the residents of the house was Jane Fisher Rolette Dousman. In 1818, she married Joseph Rolette.
She was 14.
He was 37.
She was his second wife.
Joseph’s first wife, Marguerite Dubois, whom he married when he was 26, was also 14 when he married her.
Marguerite died in 1817 at age 24, leaving two children.
And yes, 1817 – the year of Marguerite’s death – is only one tiny year before he married Jane.
In case you were wondering, women did not yet have the vote when these child marriages happened.
A few years ago, Mr T was running for public office.
Another Democrat entered the primary to challenge him.
When we found out her platform was human trafficking and maternal mortality, we were confused.
Were these even issues in our middle-class neighborhood?
Holy smoke yes they were and are.
The challenger, whom Mr T supported wholeheartedly after he withdrew from the primary (“How do I run against someone I agree with?” he asked), is a woman. A mother. A photographer.
And she had noticed – when she was photographing weddings – grown men taking very young women up to their hotel rooms.
She heard from her friends about maternal mortality, including the disparities in maternal mortality rates between white women and Black women.
And she knew that women’s health conditions do not get the same level of research and even respect (doctors tend to provide painkillers for men and therapy for women) that men’s health conditions do.
She knew these things from her own lived experience.
Mr T is a wonderful, caring, compassionate man, but it had never occurred to him that these were issues that needed attention. Because they did not touch his world.
That’s not to say that men are incapable of making laws and policy that help women and children. Governor Tim Walz is the guy who got free lunch for Minnesota schoolchildren. And who put free menstrual supplies in public schools.
But – would he have done these things if he hadn’t seen the need with his own eyes when he was a teacher?
Maybe.
He does have a wife and daughter, too, but man it sure helps to live these experiences. (The former student who introduced Walz at the DNC explained that Walz was his junior high track coach because he – Walz – looked for extra jobs so he could pay for lunch for his students who couldn’t afford it.)
And I know Mr T, had he been elected and had I asked, would have supported legislation and policy to improve women’s health.
But here’s the thing – until Mr T’s challenger brought up maternal mortality as a campaign issue, it never even occurred to me that women’s health – outside of abortion and abortion was safe, right? – could even be a political issue. That it could be a problem we could solve via legislation.
The Wisconsin abortion law was passed in 1849.
That was before women could vote.
As in – women would not have voted for that crap.
Women did what they could before the government recognized our right to be part of choosing our government.
Part of the women’s suffrage movement in England was about age of consent and prostitution and other child welfare issues. Women wanted the vote so they could effect change on these issues, but they didn’t let not being able to vote stop them.
In the later 1860s a series of Contagious Diseases Acts attempted to control sexually transmitted diseases in the armed services by eliminating prostitution in garrison towns and ports. The Acts were the result of campaigns by various groups concerned with public health.
However, a strong protest movement grew up – the Ladies’ National Association led by the social reformer Josephine Butler – which argued that it was the men who frequented prostitutes who needed to be punished. The Acts were eventually suspended in 1883, and repealed in 1886.
Young girls in London
For several decades the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children had been concerned by the sexual exploitation of young girls in London. A press campaign on the subject in 1885 had persuaded Parliament to pass the Criminal Law Amendment Act.
As well as raising the female age of consent from 13 to 16, the Act set down a series of other regulations for the protection of young women from vice. The new legislation proved a great success, with a huge increase in the number cases being reported to the police and brought before the courts.
In the US, women advocated for families as well. The Temperance Movement was not a bunch of women crabby that their husbands went out for a beer after work.
It was women who watched their children cry with hunger because not only were their husbands drinking their entire paychecks, the husbands never even got the paychecks. The taverns and employers worked together so employers would garnish employee wages to pay their bar tabs. That money never even hit the men’s pockets and never made it into their homes. The wives never even saw the money.
Julie Suk’s “After Misogyny: How the law fails women and what to do about it.”
It wasn’t until women had the vote and had some representation in office that it finally became illegal to deny women their own credit cards and loans.
That was in 1974, y’all.
And it was a woman who introduced the bill.
Although the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963 requiring men and women to be paid equally when doing the same work (HAHAHAHA!), it wasn’t until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) was passed in 1974 that women were able to get their own credit cards in their own name. The ECOA was originally introduced in 1973 by Representative Bella Abzug (D-NY) and was signed into law by President Gerald Ford on October 28, 1974.
I love Kamala’s vision for our country. I want a new voting rights act signed. I want families to be able to afford to raise children. I do not want Project 2025 (that alone is enough for me to not want the other guy).
I want Kamala to win for many reasons.
Her being a woman is not the only reason I support her.
I first published this piece in 2020 but it also applies now, too. VOTE!!! (And write postcards – they work.)
Will you shut up, man?
Remember when the king of Spain told Hugo Chavez to shut up? Good times. Dictators and bullies should always be confronted.
I don’t even know where to start.
I am done, done, done with these jerks who try to talk over us and who accuse us (women in general, not me, because I am not successful) of having professional success only because we slept with the right person.
A young man at the place I volunteer told me a few weeks ago that Kamala had clearly slept her way to the top.
I replied, “Disagree with her on policy and her record – that’s fine. But that’s bullshit that she slept her way to her success. Honestly, if it were that easy for women to sleep our way to power, don’t you think we would all be doing it?”
Another volunteer, who is another Woman of a Certain Age, chimed in. “I know I would have,” she said. “If I could be rich just by sleeping with someone? I would do it.”
A member of the Wisconsin Republican party, which has time on their hands because it’s not like the Wisconsin legislature has met in the past six months or anything, tweeted this:
“If there are any questions on how to sleep your way to the top, Kamala will have an advantage,” Best wrote. His post included a meme that said, “She will be an inspiration to young girls by showing that if you sleep with the right powerfully connected men then you too can play second fiddle to a man with dementia. It’s basically a Cinderella story.”
Cinderella did not sleep her way to the top. She made an awesome dress with the help of some cute rodents. I don’t think she and the prince even kiss.
Let’s say Kamala (I know I should say “Harris” but Kamala is such a great name) did sleep her way to the top. I want to learn from her. Show me how to sleep with the right powerfully connected men so that I, too, can win court cases and be elected with (consults wikipedia) 3,000,689 votes.
Of course, I am assuming that everyone she slept with voted for her.
But what if she also slept with people who didn’t vote for her?
Because there were 1,416,203 votes cast for her opponent.
What if she slept with all the voters but not all of them voted for her?
How much time would it take to sleep with (3,000,689+1,416,203) = 4,416,892 people?
Leaving out the logistics of travel, etc, let’s assume 30 minutes per encounter.
That’s 2,208,446 hours, which is 92,018 days, which is 252 years.
252 years of sleeping with people to get their votes.
(That doesn’t even include the jurors on all of her trials.)
But my math might be wrong. My assumption of 30 minutes per encounter might be wrong. Please feel free to correct me.
Still, she would have been busy.
Which is why she doesn’t have time to let anyone talk over her.
Which is why hearing the VP trying to shut her up and hearing her response to him inspired joy in the heart of every single woman who has ever been in a meeting with men and wanted to shout, “WOULD YOU PLEASE JUST SHUT UP I AM TALKING IT’S MY TURN.”
We are so tired of being talked over. We are so tired of men interrupting us and not hearing us and saying what we just said and getting credit for it even though we are the ones who said it. We are so tired of being condescended to and being explained to.
We are tired.
And we loved it when Kamala told Pence “I’m speaking.”
Even though he knew she was speaking.
He knew and he spoke over her anyhow.
But she did not take his crap. She told him to shut up shut up shut up.
She did it more nicely than that, but that’s what she meant.
And even with that, she had to be careful.
Because heaven forbid she speak too loudly. Or too womanly. Or too meanly.
Because no matter what she does, she is going to be judged.
By jerks, I might add, but it must get tiring to be criticized all the time for doing normal things like frowning and talking and raising your voice because we all know that sometimes the only way to get men to listen is to scream and they don’t like it and ask why you don’t just ask in a normal tone of voice which is when you tell them that you did but they ignored you.
It fell to Harris to remind the vice president, “I’m speaking” — something he already knew but chose to ignore. If Harris had raised her voice in those moments, she would have been labeled shrill. If she had frowned, she would have been labeled a scold. If she had raised a hand, she would have been called angry or even unhinged.
Which is a whole other thing – having to scream to be heard and then being chastised for not speaking softly. Which you did do. You did speak softly. You knelt at a football game.
Texan in Exile 