Reading Rambo

On January 20th, 2018, Chicago will host a second Women’s March. Those who attended the first remember the astounding numbers, miraculously warm weather, and surge of energy across the nation as America’s women stood up and said “we are here and we are angry.” 

So we did it. Our elected leader who bragged about sexual assault and who has made countless denigrating remarks about women is still in charge. Why are we marching again? 

 There is a tendency in any movement for things to lag. People become complacent, they accept their new reality, and think they can make no change. It makes sense that after the draining year that 2017 turned out to be — a year where one could constantly feel buffeted on all sides by waves of racism, misogyny, cruelty, and disregard for the planet — after that exhausting year, why should people come out in January weather to stand in the streets once again and say “We are still here and we are still angry”? 

 The answer is because without that voice, and withou…

"An equal number of men never would hold together under what these girls are enduring."

You know what gets all the attention? The Triangle Factory fire. Which is understandable, because it was a massive public tragedy that improved New York's fire codes and led to greater safety for factory workers, as well as sympathy for the union.

BUT BEFORE THAT. There was the Uprising of the 20,000. Which was damn great and almost unprecedented.




In the late 1800s and early 1900s, workers had begun to speak up more and more for their rights. These were mostly male workers, from the Knights of Labor to the AFL (American Federation of Labor), the latter headed by the inimitable Samuel Gompers:



Women were traditionally not a large part of the unions, if allowed in at all. They were seen as part-time workers who could be disregarded as their investment in their jobs would only last until they got married.

This assumption was a mistake.




Shirtwaists' popularity had blown up in the early 190…

I'm reading more about 18th century women's history (yes, American, it's always American unless it's English), and just being GENERALLY enraged most of the time. Some women in the colonies had the right to vote? In New JERSEY? Until it was taken away in 1807. So not even just in the colonies! Into statehood time! 

That's just bananapants and the sort of thing where I'm like, if I did not know this thing, most people will not know it. That could sound condescending, but what it means is obvs that this is most of what I read about. And no one in my books had really thrown that fact around before. Until I was reading Gail Collins's American Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines, which is really great so far and has some A+ anecdotes, like how Margaret Brent basically saved Baltimore.



Honestly, HAD I BUT WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME, I would just spend all my days learning about every single woman who ever lived in history. But life is finite, etc, …

I brought Sex Object with me to London, because why wouldn't you want to read a feminist memoir that refuses to be optimistic when you're on a week-long trip?

Jessica Valenti is obviously a Name in popular feminism. As the founder of feministing.com and a frequent go-to lady for quotes about how things in the culture affect the ladies, it makes sense for her to be writing books. And she's a good writer! And yes, there is a but, but that only but is that this book is a major downer. Which I RESPECT.

Valenti points out that "even subversive sarcasm" in response to comments from men being assholes "adds a cool-girl nonchalance, an updated, sharper version of the expectation that women be forever pleasant, even as we're eating shit" and that the "inability to be vulnerable--the unwillingness to be victims, even if we are--doesn't protect us, it just covers up the wreckage."

This has made me think.

Because we are conditioned to act like none of…

SO, women getting the vote in 1920 was a long process involving a lot of work that had been in motion since the early 1800s, but let's ignore the entire 19th century and jump forward to the early 20th when things began to move REAL FAST until the monumental achievement of the 19th amendment, i.e. some recognition that women are people. Which shouldn't be monumental, but HERE WE ARE.



A big part of the movement picking up so much speed in the 1910s was the influence of the radical English suffragettes on the American women's movement. American suffragists never quite reached the live-free-or-die mentality of the English suffragettes, but they became much more "take to the streets" than they had been since the time the women of the temperance movement went to pray in front of saloons.


English women had basically been told to "hang on for a sec while we do this other thing" by the British government for DECADES, and anyone who's been put on hold right aft…

Lucretia Mott, guys. Damn. I've always just kind of thought of her as one of those older suffragists who probably wrote some things for ladies and then Elizabeth Cady Stanton went charging forward with it.

WELL THAT'S WHAT ELIZABETH CADY STANTON WANTED YOU TO THINK.

One of the main reasons we don't hear much about Mott is that Stanton and Susan B. Anthony literally wrote the book on the history of women's suffrage. Also Mott had other fish to fry. Abolition fish.




Abolitionists had been organizing since 1775 and they were not only determined to stop slavery, but were becoming radicalized in their efforts as the battle for America's future seemed to grow more and more pressing. 

Lucretia Mott was a Nantucket-born Quaker (did you know Nantucket used to be a Quaker island?) who then moved to Philadelphia with her husband James Mott and KICKED ALL THE PRO-SLAVERY PEOPLE'S ASSES.

Through, like. Earnest discussion, peaceful boycotts and politeness.

Mott:



Mott has been seen a…

Dead Feminists basically springs from the idea of "What if we made a book about feminists throughout history and made it REALLY really pretty?"

Chandler O'Leary and Jessica Spring, one an artist and one a printer & typographer, have assembled 24 essays and beautiful prints of historic feminists, or "historic heroines in living color." It's a damn gorgeous book.


They include biographical sketches, prints for each woman, and a breakdown of what historical elements inspired the print. GET EXCITED, ART NERDS. And oh, history nerds, there're quotes and photographs and - knitting nerds, listen up, Elizabeth Zimmerman is in here. 
I know you guys are out there.
Whenever I flip through it, I think about how much I probably would've loved it as a kid. There are so many pictures, and as a 3rd grader who was real real into a padded white book detailing the histories of every president of the United States - but which I only really cared about because it had s…

The other day, I decided to lay out all the women's history books I had in my room (minus my Emma Goldman books, which have their own shelf section).



My path to women's history wasn't extremely wendy, but I somehow wasn't expecting to be on it. When I was five, my family went to England. I learned about Henry VIII and his wives and got really into them (and drew some EXCELLENT five-year-old-child pictures of them in my journal, but that's for another time). 

Then I feel like things kind of stagnated except for random things, like PBS aired a Catherine the Great biopic in the '90s and I asked my mom for a biography of her. I was kind of too busy memorizing dog breeds and planning my soon-to-be-thriving full-time dachshund breeding business to care about women's history.



"Women are interesting because they overcame more" was the explanation I gave to myself in high school while I angstily worried in my journal that the reason I listened to women singer…

The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner is a 1986 study into the possible origins of our current societal structure. I'm reviewing it in sections, because each chapter has a lot of ideas worth discussing. Part I can be found here, and part II can be found here.

If you will remember, this book focuses on ancient civilizations and the earliest records we have of patriarchal formations. Most of these chapters talk about the Code of Hammurabi, and Babylonian, Assyrian, and Hebrew law. In these we can see the gradual subjugation of women as it became codified and then part of our collective consciousness. This post is solely focusing on chapter 5, as it got way too long while I was writing it.

Chapter 5: The Wife and the Concubine

[A] man's class status is determined by his economic relations and a woman's by her sexual relations...It is a principle which had remained valid for thousands of years. A civilization's laws don't show us how its citizens actually behaved, b…

I wasn't going to see Suffragette. When it was first announced, I was leap-in-the-air excited, and then as time passed and disappointing reports kept trickling in, that enthusiasm waned and waned until my only motivation for going was a friend asking + a dull desire to learn more about the British women's suffrage movement.

I'm extremely glad I saw it.

My expectations were The Lowest because most of the articles I've seen about Suffragette either commented on the whitewashing involved, or on the hideous PR debacle surrounding the Pankhurst quote "I'd rather be a rebel than a slave" t-shirts the cast was photographed wearing. (Does Pankhurst say this quote in the movie? Yes, but it's in context, and therefore not horrifying)

I have to do more reading to verify how accurate this portrayal of the situation was, but Suffragette gives an on-the-ground view of what the actions and consequences were for the everyday women involved in the suffrage movement in En…