It’s women’s history month and the news is full of stories about a war on women. What else is new? Women around the world have been struggling for equal rights ever since Eve got blamed for “original” sin.

American history begins with “Molly Pitcher” risking her life on the battlefield in the Revolution, while Abigail Adams urges her husband, John Adams, to not leave women out of the Declaration of Independence and the new government, because “all men would be tyrants if they could.” And, “we will not be bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

In 1848, a women’s rights convention was held in Seneca Falls N.Y., where they improved on Jefferson’s language to say, “all men and women are created equal.”

But, it was almost eighty years before women got the right to vote by passage of the 19th Amendment. Even in the lifetime of many of us, that equality was a long ways off.

A popular song of the 1950’s went, “It’s a woman’s world, when she’s in love.” And in those days, women needed not only her man’s love, but his permission for almost everything from writing a check to going to work. It wasn’t just custom, it was the law in many states.

In Texas, a married woman’s property was all in her husband’s name. And up north in Michigan, a woman could be a waitress, but not a bartender. Girls were welcome to be cheerleaders, but had few sports in which to participate until the 1970s when Congress and President Nixon adopted Title IX, requiring equitable treatment in sports and the workplace. It still took the courage of women, like Lilly Ledbetter, to sue to implement fair pay and promotions they had earned.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the double standard that has always worked against women. Men were expected to “sew a few wild oats,” which included not only premarital or extra marital sex, but children they fathered and didn’t raise or support.

Women, then as now, were called ugly names when they did the same, though the advent of modern contraceptives in the 1960’s helped free women to behave like men.

In the 1970s, both Democrats and Republicans supported the Equal Rights Amendment, but with the Reagan era, the Republican Party dropped its support.

Currently, some leading Republican politicians are trying to turn back the clock even farther by restricting women’s access to birth control. It’s not clear whether they are motivated by genuine religious convictions or just a desire to go back to an era where they had more power over women.

Either way, women are likely to vote in larger numbers this fall, to defend their rights, so unless Republicans can change the subject or change their positions, they may feel the fury of women scorned.

Meanwhile, let’s remember and salute some of the women heroes of our history. Two in particular played a huge role in ending the curse of slavery.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” made people everywhere more aware of how terrible conditions were in the South, and Harriet Tubman was second to none in her success in physically leading people out of that area to free states in the North.

Our literature has been greatly enhanced by the writings of Emily Dickenson, Ida Tarbell, Maya Angelou, and many others.

Women’s rights were especially advanced by Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem. In politics, the first woman cabinet member, Frances Perkins, was also the “mother” of Social Security and much of the New Deal, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, who helped found the U.N.

Other political firsts were Margaret Chase Smith, first woman Senator, Geraldine Ferraro, first major party V.P. candidate, Sandra Day O’Connor, Supreme Court, Hillary Clinton, first woman to be a “serious” candidate for President, and Nancy Pelosi, first woman Speaker of the House.

I almost left out Sacagawea, Sally Hemings, Rosa Parks—and Ginger Rogers, who, it is said, did everything Fred Astaire did, but in high heels and backwards.

We owe them a lot. And to the men reading this, remember, we won’t have equal rights until women do.

 

Jack Burgess is a Portsmouth native and a retired teacher of American and Global Studies, living in Chillicothe.