Wow, this old feminist feels absolutely enshrined. Now if I could just get my niece to get it. LOL! My sister who passed away on 9-30-2011 had mentioned to me that her daughter and her friends would go “women’s lib?” They didn’t get it, and I guess I thought maybe they didn’t need to. But about four years ago, my niece then 24, had put an article on her MySpace that really turned my head around. She is one of those conspiracy theorists who see outrageous plots in just about everything and worries about the “New World Order.” Anyway her article was about one of the Rockefellers telling an interviewer that he bankrolled the feminist movement with the whole idea in mind of breaking up American families to further his New World Order cause. In the article, he claimed to have financed Ms Magazine and said that Gloria Steinem was a spy for his organization.

Wow! After all my sister and I did to bring equality to my niece and her generation, this is what they thought about all that??? It caused me to write a very long essay and send it to her. I have no idea what she made of it. My niece was born toward the end of 1981, and she also loved shows like Designing Women. And she had no idea of who Gloria Steinem was until that article she posted and my rebuttal to it. She is still a conspiracy theorist and the “only one” who really knows what’s going on, so I doubt she got much out of it.

So, Alise, your post was a wonderful gift to me and you made my day.

I have to admit that I can’t get my mind around what’s going on now politically — this war against women is so Out There and Obvious but it’s like we’ve been drugged somehow and there isn’t enough outrage.

I know that it is a threat to women, even a war on women. And I don’t understand (naively) why in the world
a) they would want to do this to women and
b) why women are seemingly putting up with it.
and c) what to do about it.

I know one thing, we MUST vote. We only get one vote, but we need to use our collective power to vote. That’s one war that was fought valiantly for us even before the old feminists did what they did and we must ennoble ourselves and VOTE!

Most of the issues above, while relating to women are really larger human rights issues. It is the imposition of religious dogma on the general population. As a white male without religion I too feel that people should be treated equally. The double standard we have for men and women should be crushed. Given our population issues we really need to encourage a responsible attitude to sexuality. We need to rise above unthinking obedience to ancient texts and reason for ourselves. My point I guess is that I would march with you. This isn’t an issue which affects only women – the fallout of this fuzzy religious thinking is bad news for everyone.

I was hoping to see a much larger response to Alise’s article. I’ve always said that you can tell the degree of civilization of a group of people just by how women are viewed and treated. I never got why it is always the women that need to be controlled. But since we have wombs, and population could not continue without us, maybe that’s why.

My husband once asked me about the veils in eastern countries. He said jokingly, “Are their women so ugly that they have to hide their faces?” I explained to him that women are seen as the temptress, that even a glimpse of wrist is considered so dangerous to a man’s ability to control his impulses that she must be fully covered. And when a woman is raped, it is because she tempted the poor innocent man and is often executed.

Not long ago, I was watching my favorite true crime channel and they aired an “honor killing” segment. This guy killed his sister because she was raped and that shamed the family, hurt them so much that he had to kill her for the good of the family. He got three years for that. When asked if he felt his punishment was just, he waid absolutely not, he did nothing wrong. He compared a woman to a glass or a dish and said when it’s broken, it’s useless, same for a woman.

I believe that there’s more behind the “War on Women” than meets the eye, and it all goes along with other things I see happening. If poor women don’t have easy access to birth control, they will have more children. Going to war with Iran seems to be popular among the GOP. The corporations that moved their factories overseas because they didn’t want to pay a living wage to Americans now want to come back to the states because they see their profit margins slipping, but they have gotten spoiled paying slave wages and they do not want to pay more over here. Otherwise moving back to save shipping costs wouldn’t even make sense profit wise. At the same time, there is a push to abolish unions, and some are even suggesting abolishing minimum wage. So, if more poor children are born, there will be more young people to fight their wars and to work in their factories for pennies. Mark my words, it’s not just a “war on women” but a war on poor people and they want more to use and exploit.

This is what I really wanted to say:

So Why the Women?

I grew up in church and Sunday School, Baptist to be exact, and to me it always seemed like more of a “women’s’ thing. The pastor was a man of course, and so were the deacons, but women filled the pews, women came to the extra services, and women were always working on charity fund raisers, making quilts to be auctioned off or having bake sales. My grandmothers and mother were always very involved, my dad did not attend, and most dads and grandfathers attended on Sunday only and even sporadically at that.

When I married, my husband and his family were not religious, so church was never a part of our life together. When I reached my early 20’s, I began calling myself an atheist and later amended it to agnostic because I didn’t want to seem so egotistical as to say that I knew God didn’t exist. At the same time, I became a feminist. Feminism was probably a natural for me, as my father was abusive and my uncle who helped my mom after she divorced my father thought he owned us and he was abusive. All around me I saw women trying to hold it together while working around men who made life rough on them.

When I reached my early 30’s, I began to realize that I was just fooling myself, that I really did acknowledge God’s existence and that in times of trouble or fear, I called out to him/her/it without even realizing I was doing so. So I began to pray in private, and out of curiosity, I picked up the Bible and began to read for myself for the very first time in my life. I found from my own exploration that often verses that people had used to hurt or control me were taken out of context and had nothing to do with the point that scripture was making. So I became a “closet Christian” and didn’t tell anyone, not even my husband.

Cancer brought me back to church. I had the aggressive/invasive kind and was going through experimental chemotherapy and wanted to feel God’s love and fellowship with other Christians. I told my husband I wanted to start attending church. He agreed and we chose a Baptist because both of us had attended church, Sunday and/or vacation Bible school in that denomination growing up.

We didn’t realize it, but we were actually attending a Bill Gothard influenced church, and many now believe that those who are under that influence are actually in a cult of sorts. They were very strict on the women there, and no matter what else they were preaching about, “wives submit” was always stressed and reiterated throughout the sermon. They didn’t believe that women should work, but acknowledged that sometimes it couldn’t be helped. They didn’t want women wearing pants or cutting their hair. They preached against birth control and advised couples to “Let God Plan the Family.” Even abstinence was not advisable, as they often quoted scripture about not denying each other. They preferred children to go to their school, but home schooling was also acceptable. They believed in creation only and that the earth was only six thousand years old. They did tell men to love their wives, but the rules were mostly for women. Once I realized that it was a Gothard based church and that Gothardism was basically a cult we got the hell out of there.

But at the time, I still couldn’t help but wonder why the women? For whatever reason, women always seemed to be more spiritual, and usually more responsible. They held things together while men deserted families or beat the wife and kids. There was always the “boys will be boys” attitude when I was growing up and that church just seemed to reinforce that.

Then I began hearing about the War on Women in Afghanistan. This was at least a couple of years before 9/11. The Taliban patrolled the streets to make sure that no woman was out un-escorted by a male relative and that she was covered properly. If a woman had white socks on instead of black, she could be beaten or even killed. All houses with females inside had their windows blackened. The Taliban often raided homes where they suspected female children were being home schooled and if they found such activity taking place, they raped the women and girls and then killed them for being whores. I even read of one such occasion where they shot the men and male children and threw their bodies in a ditch, but the female’s plight was worse, as they threw them in alive and buried them. I saw a woman being executed on TV for wearing makeup.

For this reason, I have always felt angry whenever I saw a woman wearing a veil. I am working to change my prejudice on that as I now know that many women, even in this country, and some of them are women who have converted to Islam, want to wear the veil. I assume it is for the same reason that women fill our churches, no matter what it costs them, because the spirituality they seek is worth it to them.

But again, I wonder what’s going on today with the GOP’s War on Women. They seem to be trying to set us back 50 years. It’s like the strides we made never happened. And I think the answer must be that it’s because we have wombs. We bring life into the world. Yes, men fertilize the eggs, but women carry the child in their wombs for nine months, and for the most part nurture the child for the greatest part of their non-adult lives. Women have breasts, and while tantalizing to men, they can sustain life as well. Without women bearing children, the population would cease to exist, unless it they perfected a way to grow fetuses in a test tube and incubate them without the help of a woman’s womb and have them turn out okay with no horrible flaws to be unleashed on the world. So, men want to control the sex that produces and sustains life because their own existence and the preservation of the species is all wrapped up in the fertility of women. And I believe they have found even more ulterior motives in this century.

I ascertain that there is more going on than meets the eye with the so-called War on Women. I see it as a war on poor people. The corporations moved their industries overseas because they did not want to pay a living wage to American workers. Now, they want to bring some of the factories back to the states. Why? Because the cost of shipping is causing them to notice a slightly lower profit margin. At the same time, the One Percent is trying to abolish unions and many are suggesting also eliminating minimum wage. Now we are hearing the faint echo of yet another war. The GOP candidates want to start something up in Iran. With all this in mind, I think that by making birth control not readily available for poor women, they are investing in their future vision of lots of poor youth to fight their wars and work for pennies in their factories. The control of women’s wombs to enrich their own future is what this is all about. Now if the good women of the church could only get wise to this, we could possibly see some real power. But with the brainwashing of Faux News, the high jacking of the Christian religion, the prosperity doctrine that filled the mainstream Christian churches in the 1980’s along with Ayn Rand’s philosophy becoming an icon for a Christian based life, not only is selfishness acceptable, but considered a godly and righteous way to be. The so-called Christian Right support the GOP and believe that it is the American way. They embrace the “trickle down” theory because they worship the rich and tell themselves that they too can be rich if they keep the current rich One Percent in Power. So even though it appears to be all about the women, it’s really all a part of the Class War. I want to believe that women will be wiser this time around, that they will be able to sort the wheat from the chaff, no matter how religious they are, but it remains to be seen. I implore everyone to pray to whatever power they believe in, or think good thoughts, light candles and chant, any and all you do to invoke the power to let the good side win this one.

Thank you.