Hi there, New York Times. I see that yesterday you tweeted, or whatever it’s called now, this:
Abortion rights groups have been on an unexpected winning streak with ballot measures that have prevailed in six out of six states since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. But the measure in Ohio is their toughest fight yet.
Well, let me tell you a thing or two about those of us whom you didn’t expect. I don’t purport to speak for everyone on the winning side of this issue, but I will speak about experiences I and people I personally know have endured in our very long fight to have bodily autonomy and equality under the law.
When my grandmother was 21 in 1916, it was a presidential election year. She wanted to vote, but she didn’t. Why not? Because under the US Constitution, she didn’t have the right to vote simply because she was a woman. She didn’t get that right until 1920 when she was 25, and she voted in every election after that until she died, but the feeling of having been infantilized based on her gender was something she never forgot.
When my mom was 40 in 1974, she was fresh off a divorce and had to buy a house to finish raising me and my sisters in. She found one that she could afford. She went to apply for a loan, but was told not to bother. At the time it was legal for banks to deny loans to women simply because they were women. She had to ask her father to cosign the loan, which he thankfully did, but the feeling of having been infantilized based on her gender was something she never forgot.
When I was 17 in 1980, I started at Georgia Tech. Only 10% of the students in my class of mechanical engineering majors were women. Over the course of my studies there, I was told by more than one professor that women did not belong in engineering. They simply weren’t intellectually or temperamentally suited. Feeling myself to be more than suited both intellectually and temperamentally, I carried on despite their words, but the feeling of having been infantilized based on my gender was something I’ve never forgotten.
Now, I came of age in what I now think of as the Golden Era of Women’s Rights. The 19th amendment giving women the right to vote had been ratified in 1920. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act had been signed into law in October of 1974. Further, the Equal Opportunity Act had passed in 1972, the very same year that birth control became legally available to all women regardless of marital status due to the ruling in Eisenstadt v. Baird. And with the Roe vs Wade decision in 1973, women finally achieved the right to decide when and under what circumstances they would bear children.
My parents had told me growing up that I could be anything I wanted to be, and finally the legal landscape in the United States had removed enough barriers to women that their words rang true. Sure, I’ve had to deal with the lingering vestiges of patriarchal misogyny, still do in fact, things ranging from being paid less than the men doing the same job to being called a prick tease for saying no and a slut for saying yes. There’s still plenty of work to be done, but the foundational work of basic rights had largely been settled…
until Dobbs vs Jackson.
On June 24, 2022, a day which will live in infamy, the United States Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, stripped women of the right to bodily autonomy. They said that women have no right to decide when and under what circumstances they would have children. They said that whenever and wherever a fertilized egg exists in a womb, the state has the right to force the person in whom that womb resides, no matter what, to bring that fertilized egg into fruition.
And the New York Times is surprised that that has electoral consequences. They weren’t expecting that.
And there you have it, folks, the best example of why teaching the full and accurate history of this country is essential. If the folks who wrote that Tweet, or whatever it’s called now, at the New York Times really knew the history of what it took for grown up women to be able to make grownup decisions for themselves, they really wouldn’t be surprised that we mobilized when the Supreme Court took that power away from us.
Oh, and hey NYT. If you think last night was surprising, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
