Headlines

Women teachers in Iraq killed in bloody suicide-bombing.  Amish schoolgirls lined against the wall.  Birthing woman paralyzed by accidental overdose times ten. Three sisters shot to death with their parents, killed by their own brother.

Is this is not war against women, what is?

No one notices a spate of attacks against women, perhaps because this violence is nothing new.  It's quite the norm.  Victims are women so often that women have come to be viewed as victims.  Rape, incest, and murder of women is ingrained into most every culture in the world.  Women are often told they should consider themselves lucky; after all, our foremothers did not vote and did not have the legal right to leave an abusive husband.

We should not consider ourselves lucky.

We should considers ourselves human.

We should demand those rights that belong to every human, and to every citizen.  We should demand that those rights be encoded into law.  Something along the lines of "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex." 

Oh wait -- that's the Equal Rights Amendment, that hated piece of legislation that supposedly will cause Western civilization to crumble beneath the judgment of God.  How could I forget that our present culture cannot exist without the subclass of womanity to prop up mediocre and uneducated men?

A coaster on my nightstand, given to me by my husband, says "Men of quality are not threatened by women of equality."  How wonderful it would be if great men everywhere would rise up to recognize the greatness of women around them.  How good it would be -- for men and women -- if men insisted that women be paid equally for equal work.  It would save many a man's job, if he didn't have to worry about losing it to a lesser-paid but equally skilled woman.  How wise and how noble it would be for men to recognize the value of their sisters and their wives, the way my Derek does, and to recognize that the differences between us can be a source of strength rather than disdain.

But supposing that the majority of men never recognize this, what must women do?  Shall women be victims because victims are women?  Let us move and act and speak in a manner worthy of those women who were beaten and imprisoned for the defiant act of casting an unwelcome vote.  There are more of us than them!  More church-goers, more voters, more citizens.  We cannot keep waiting for the men to hand us equality on a platter.  We have to insist on equality by refusing to settle for less -- in education, in marriage, in the workplace, in the legislature and the White House.

J.

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