"The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation, because in the degradation of women, the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source."
-Lucretia Mott
Before I got here going on four years ago, I'd never even heard of the Seneca Falls Convention, or Lucretia Mott, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. And I was a history major and amateur history buff.
The Seneca Falls Convention, which took place about an hour up the road from here at the top of Cayuga Lake, was the first great women's rights gathering in U.S. history. That summer of 1848 saw some of the great luminaries of the civil rights movement, including Frederick Douglass, urge each other toward all sorts of radical notions, like letting women vote or speak in church.
Peg and I visited there during our Covid idyll, on a gray frozen February afternoon I look back upon now with a great deal of fondness.
What got me thinking about all that was a piece Peg and I watched last night from this past Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher. I've always enjoyed Maher's thought provoking, take-no-prisoners use of humor to call out the hypocrisy of left and right, and this one was a doozy.
Here, you can watch it for yourself:
The monologue was named "Gender Apartheid", and chided college protesters for renting (rending?) their garments over Gaza, but turning their gaze from the dehumanization of half the population of those backward countries their leftie professors hold out as examples of virtue, mostly because they're not run by white men.
We systematically put up with that particular form of discrimination and aggression, give the transgressors a pass with a shrug and the vapid observation that "boys will be boys".
I wasn't always so sensitive on this topic. Although my mother was a tough colonel's daughter who put herself through college all the way to a doctorate, I had one other parent who was a little less open to the notion that women were people. Dad used to refer to Mom's college friends from her AAUW meetings as "hairy legged feminists", an accusation I was never able to confirm although I can say I never knew Mom to go unshaven. When I was in high school, early in high school, he gave me what passed for fatherly advice in our household. "Son, never forget: women is for [ ], and nothing else. If you start caring, you're only going to get hurt."
Thanks Dad. Not the sort of wisdom you want to impart as a teenage boy goes out into the world.
The fighter community wasn't exactly a hotbed of feminist activism. We had strippers in the squadron bar during social events. We strenuously argued that women had no place in our business, that they'd be a distraction and cause their male squadron mates to take stupid risks to avoid them getting captured and, well, you know. Looking back, it was a lot of nonsense, but I believed in it.
But even then cracks in my views on gender were starting to form. No he-man would spend his evenings listening to 10,000 Maniacs on Friday nights as I did then. The lyrics, often about reproductive issues and the horrible things women endured then, acted as a form of sedition.
Law school was really a turning point on this walk. Besides learning to think in a different way about human rights and discrimination, I found myself in a class that was composed roughly half of women, many of whom were smart and driven and there to do big things. It was a long, long way from the squadron bar.
I never experienced what I gather can be the ultimate feminist education for a man--raising a daughter--but I have a pair who are attached to two of they boys and are family. I'm learning.
Then there's P, who turned my world upside down in so many ways, this being one of them. The stories she tells of what she endured to get where she was going while putting herself through school as a single mother are beyond anything I could have imagined.
But is that really true? Am I really all that surprised? Or did I just turn a blind eye to all that, just like pretty much everyone else back then who wasn't on the receiving end of the abuse?
So here I am, sort of a twelve-stepper on the topic of women's rights, trying to make amends not so much for things I did, but more broadly for how I thought and how my indifference to all that allowed really good people to suffer in silence. I can't fix who I was back then, and the experience of those years colors how I approach things today. I can, however, commit to doing better.