Hear ye, hear ye, mothers, sisters and daughters. Get off your asses and get angry.
I guess you thought you could sit back on the gains your mothers and grandmothers made and never have to lift a finger, but that is not true. The rights your mothers and their mothers fought so hard for, education, a voice in the political arena, the right to be anything, to go as far in life as your excellent mind will lead you, to have children when you chose, without which make the others difficult and sometimes impossible, are under attack; and you cannot let it stand.
What the hell are we doing glorifying women on TV who have twenty children? Or mothers who spend their lives home schooling and filling their daughters with religious nonsense? Every woman in this country should be demanding that this idiot should be taken off TV, not acting like she is some kind of earth mother. The last thing this planet needs with seven billion humans and counting is women cranking out babies like they are factories.
Twenty kids and counting? Stop already. Stop it.
This is why I hate those stupid beauty pageant shows that start when the kids are babies, making them miserable and setting them up from the start with the wrong focus in their tender malleable little minds. The mothers are screaming, the kids are crying, but the mother says, “She wants to do it.” And they will ask the kid, who has been crying the whole time but has just been given a pile of crap as a present for going through all this hell, and they will say, “I want to do it.” Wake up call, “You are the parent.” You are the one supposed to be making the right choices. Not your four year old who does not have the capacity to make such decisions.
My sister sits and watches this crap with her four year old granddaughter almost daily. That little girl has a great mind. I talk to her all the time. I hate to think she might ignore the best part of her growing up because of this kind of junk. I can’t help but wonder how many possible great women we have ruined with this brain damaging nonsense.
My generation fought for the right to be respected for our minds and have control over our bodies, and now it is all going down the toilet because women have grown complacent. They want to be sweet again and not rock the boat. Well, keep that up and soon your boat will sink, and you with it. You will find yourself having children you don’t want, being stuck with some man who doesn’t deserve you, and no way to get out.
I can’t believe women are having to fight for their right for birth control and abortion. This is the problem when you put religious men, idiots, in positions of power. We have gone from the first woman Jeannette Rankin (Republican, MT) in the senate in 1917 to 17 women in the Senate. Almost one hundred years. There should be fifty. Thank you Elizabeth Warren for standing tall. Thank you Elizabeth Warren for being a good example for our daughters and sisters. If women would get their priorities straight we would not be in this position.
My best friend, Leslie, in the seventies, became the first woman firefighter in AZ. We both met in college. She had two children, I one. My husband was an abuser, she had just split from hers. We both realized there was no way to be free from them and support our children without a college education. Leslie became a nurse, but applied to be a firefighter a few years later. They asked her why she wanted to be a fireman. She said “Because, i want to get paid like a man.” It was not easy for her to pass the requirements, they gave her no breaks. the other firemen harassed her the whole time she worked for the department. But she also made a life long friend who came to respect her deeply.
Leslie also was a midwife, an OR nurse, an operating nurse, and an OB nurse and worked on an ambulance crew. When she died her mother ran her high school graduation picture in the paper, which looked nothing like her, and hadn’t almost since it was taken. Leslie grew her hair to the small of her back and wore it in a braid and wore her glasses instead of contacts. She could not hide her beauty no matter what she did, but she was not catering to it. It did not stop her powerful mind and soul from shining through. Her mother wanted to remember the beauty queen she had been and not the beautiful person she had become.
Thank god, Leslie had the strength of her generation to overcome her mother’s destructive influence, although it hurt her all her life that her mother could not, and would not, recognize her accomplishments.
When Leslie died, the Fire Dept gave her a special memorial in remembrance of her accomplishments. I told her children I wanted to give an eulogy, as her life long friend, they allowed me, I was directing this to her mother who made a sham of the memorial by not honoring who Leslie was. I gave a long chronicle of Leslies life and her life of fighting for and saving and giving life and making gains for women. I said that, “Leslie was a rose, she was beautiful and had thorns. You do not get to be the first woman anything by making everyone around you happy.” When I was done her daughter came up and said, “That was my mother.”
Yes we burned our bras, quit shaving and made people angry. Because we wanted our right to be respected for our minds and not ogled for our bodies. We wanted to take the focus off our looks and put it on our minds and our rights.
My oldest daughter is an astrophysicist. She went straight to college and did a double major, physics and astronomy, in four years. She learned her lesson from watching me. She was in a class of a hundred women for physics. She was the only one who made it through the whole four years. Your daughters are watching you. Women are now graduating from college in larger numbers than men, but still have not gained corresponding numbers in the career field. The fight has not ended, and will never end, until women achieve the positions that they deserve and have earned. And as long as men try to push women down by trying to control our bodies.
The Pendulum Swings: Female Students Make Dramatic Gains Since 1970s
A generation ago, it was expected that most middle-class boys would go on to college after high school and land high-paying, white-collar jobs after that. Women were presumed to be headed for a life of homemaking or low-paid administrative or service labor.
But then things changed. More and more women began to go to college. By the 1980s, the majority of new freshman each year were females, and since then the gender gap has only grown. Between 1970 and 2000, the overall number of women enrolled in post-secondary institutions grew by 136%, while their numbers in professional school grew by a whopping 853%.
This growth, combined with the relative stagnation in the rates of enrollment for men, has led to imbalances in college gender ratios across the nation. In 2004, 9.9 million women were attending the nation's accredited post-secondary schools, compared to only 7.4 million men.
Poor men. Can’t keep up with the women in college so you will try to stop us with your laws restricting our contraceptive freedom. If you can’t stop our minds, you will try to keep us pregnant.
There must be some women out there like Warren who can try to replace these idiots in Congress (and I’m not talking about Jan Brewer puppets). We need to have a good loud voice and give them an argument in front of everyone that will be heard, not behind closed doors that won’t be televised. We will not continue to live our lives without the right to control when we have children.
The fight to live your life and reach you potential will never end. We cannot rest on our laurels. We must continue to speak loud and proud to this nonsense at every place these idiots give their speeches, whether in congress or our hometowns.
Tell Congress stop trying to block women's access to birth controland abortion. Your voices are louder than you think. Use them. And give them another piece of your mind while you are at it.
3:22 PM PT: Ty for the community spotlight. Yesterday was my mother's, 76th, and my oldest daughter's, 40th, birthdays. I have been thinking about all the women in my life. People have been telling me to stop being angry the last two days, and it pissed me off. When I say my daughter learned from me, I should have said, she learned from my mistakes.