Feminine Riles: Cartoons to Promote ThoughtThe Patriarchy has long tried to deny Woman a seat at the table Man pretends to call “history”: For millennia, she was told she was confined to the house, deprived of an education and of the right to work outside her home, except as a whore – governesses, maids, cooks, mistresses were, of course, all confined to the house. She was forbidden to participate in government, the economy, the military, the arts, the sciences, philosophy, or academia. Often, she could not own property, hold bank accounts, inherit estates or titles, or borrow money in her own name. Likewise, she could not publish her work under her own name, nor could she patent anything she created.
Her body and her children were the property of her father and then her husband. In Western countries, barely 100 years ago (your grandmother’s mother’s life-time), either of these males could throw her out on the street to starve, with naught but the clothes on her back, impoverished, with no income, and with no way to earn one.
He could legally deprive her of the right to see her children, or confine her to a mental institution, ordering her drugged or lobotomized into zombie-like submission.
For much of history, men could legally beat the women they “owned” – their mothers, sisters, girlfriends, wives, daughters, granddaughters, cousins, nieces, aunts … Indeed, the State and the Church encouraged them to do so to ensure that these female chattels did not get “uppity”. Men too often tortured, abused, and murdered the women in their lives with little expectation of any punishment.
In many parts of the world, all of the above are still common, accepted practice.
Any woman who bridled at the Patriarchy’s restrictions met with huge familial and social resistance. She could expect to be ostracised, threatened, imprisoned, beaten, or killed into her accepted place.
The Patriarchy tried very hard to prevent women from making history. And when so many of them did so, anyways, against overwhelming odds, their amazing contributions were deemed irrelevant. Those who discovered a way around the rules found that their activities, though often superior to that of their brothers, were reviled, ignored, buried, erased, denied, or attributed to a man.
But if recorded, those contributions were too often confined to a footnote, which over time tended to be glossed-over, minimized, and eventually dropped into the dust-bin.
Of course, women made history – read the hundreds of thousands of their amazing stories on Wikipedia – what they didn’t make is his-story.
A male ruler may be demented, syphilitic, paranoid, blood thirsty, perverted, stupid, mentally ill.
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He may destroy his country’s economy, gut its currency, stifle rights and freedoms, disappear his opponents, arbitrarily imprison, torture, maim, and kill those around him, invade his neighbours, and slaughter countless young men in pointless wars.
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The Patriarchy insists on this:
One dreads to think how much worse it would have been had a woman been in power.
A celibate priest giving advice on love, sex and marriage is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs.
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It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.
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There, Boswell, I fixed it!
James Boswell was a friend and biographer of Samuel Johnson, an English writer from the 18th century, who made “lasting contributions” to English literature according to Wikipedia.
In his biography of Johnson, Boswell recorded Johnson saying, ”Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It’s not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
How often have I had this sexist chestnut quoted at me:
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“A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
– Boswell: Life of Samuel Johnson
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Fascinating that this one NEVER gets quoted:
“Men know that women are an over-match for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.”
– Boswell: Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
Let’s see what little girls are made of!
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Let’s:
>Make girls a global priority.
>Pump billions of dollars into girls’ education, training, and sports.
>Commandeer arenas, TV time, and the top university spots for them.
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Let’s:
>Show them only positive images and role models.
>Encourage their independence and strength.
>Develop their minds and bodies with the same enthusiasm we have devoted to boys for millennia.
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Then we can see how males and females REALLY match-up.
Throughout history, men have handicapped women, depriving them of education, opportunity and employment, leaving them utterly dependent on males to support and feed them.
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Men have then looked, often resentfully, upon these same females as privileged parasites, living a life of pampered luxury, which they have to slave to provide.
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It’s sort of like amputating someone’s legs and then whining that you have been entrapped into supporting a cripple.
Women were kept illiterate.
(They still are: in developing countries, between five and ten times as many women will be illiterate as men, with the illiteracy rate for women sometimes exceeding 90%. Nearly 70% of the world’s adult illiterates are female.)
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If women did become literate, their writing was suppressed, destroyed, mocked, ignored, attributed to a man, or condemned as unreadable.
What is surprising is that women have written so much and so well.
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Men have no right to say where are your great women writers when they have for millennia been so busy keeping women out of the arts and then belittling their work or erasing the memory of their existence if they found an entrée.
I have a fierce hunger for what women might have created …
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… for the art denied, the words never written, the science never done, the discoveries never made.
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… for the wonderful creations, forever lost, which would have delighted us, amazed us, and moved us forward.
Think of what the world has lost … think of what all those women, minorities, and slaves might have accomplished had they been given a fair shot at education, opportunity, and options … the books not written, the cures not found, the inventions not created, the avenues not explored.
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They also lost their chance for a full life.
Is it fair that anyone, because of an accident of birth, should lose the chance for a full life?
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Is it right that those who stole this chance should then use their bully pulpit to decry the “inferior” or “negligible” accomplishments of their victims?
We will never know all that women did accomplish.
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For millennia, a woman could not claim credit for what she did – for her inventions, her art, her writing, her work.
She used a male pseudonym or let a male – husband, brother, father, son, friend – claim the credit.
Or, famously so, Anonymous was a woman.
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Even worse, we will never know what women didn’t accomplish because they were prohibited from trying or were too afraid or too repressed to try.
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Weep my Sisters, weep for the loss of your history, for the legacy stolen from you by your Brothers.
Men understand the concepts of advantage and disadvantage, of handicap and windfall …
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… the concepts of level playing field and inequality, of fair play and injustice …
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Except when it comes to how they treat women.