Were the Little House on the Prairie books anti-feminist? What a question!
President Biden warns us repeatedly
that the November election is the most significant in American history. We will
choose between democracy and fascism. Recently I’ve noticed another threat—to women.
It’s not just abortion or our rights over our own bodies; it’s our place in
society, in the world in which we live. The presumptive Republican candidate
for the governorship of Norh Carolina, a man named Mark Robinson who is
endorsed by trump, has said he’d like to go back to a time when women didn’t
have the vote. A politician (I think it was Montana, and I apologize I didn’t
get his name) said that America ought to be ruled by men of God—strong, white
men. In Texas and in my home county of Tarrant, incumbent women lost a
significant number of offices, everything from state representative to tax
collector and the state school board. Nationally, there’s the quixotic campaign
of Nikki Haley, now ended, or the well-publicized shootout in California
between Katie Porter and Adam Schiff. Porter s now being criticized for being a
sore leader, akin to trump, but I think she was doing what she does best:
exposing politics and corruption. Could her being a woman have added to her
current dilemma? After years of fighting the glass ceiling, women are once
again gradually being edged out of power, influence, etc.
Senator Katie Britt’s response
to the State of the Union has been mocked, critiqued, disputed all over the
internet, and I won’t repeat the comments here, though some are hysterically
funny, especially the cold open of SNL. But beneath all the laughter, there’s
serious concern. Right-wing extremists give every indication of wanting to send
women back to the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. The dismissive attitude is
summed up by a recent incident in Arizona: when Gov. Katie Hobbs called for
reproductive freedom in her State of the State speech, a male legislator who
must have thought he was clever said there’s already aspirin. He advised women
to hold an aspirin between their knees, a suggestion so demeaning and insulting
I hardly know what to say.
In her March 8 column, Letter
from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson traces the demonization of
women back to the Sixties and cites protests over the 1968 Miss America
contest. She doesn’t say it, but the early 1960s saw publication of Betty
Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique, the book many credit with starting the
late-twentieth-century feminist movement. Richardson traces the status of women
through those years: Nixon’s turn against abortion in an effort to win the
Catholic vote, Phyllis Schafly’s screeching attacks on the Equal Rights
Amendment, the 1973 Roe v Wade, which did so much to free women from traditional,
pre-WWII roles, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House on the Prairie books
which Richardson suggests reinforced the idea of women needing men to take care
of them. In 1984, Walter Mondale chose Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate,
and they were soundly defeated. And then there was Rush Limbaugh with his “feminazis”
and right on up to Hillary Clinton’s battle with donald trump. I urge you to
read the entire column: March 8, 2024 -
by Heather Cox Richardson (substack.com)
Of course, the battle began at
least a century earlier than the Sixties. It was 1848 when women met in Seneca
Falls, NY to plan their fight for rights. There followed years of protest,
jailings, beatings, and unbelievable courage until in 1920 the 19th
Amendment gave women the right to vote. The fight is different today but nonetheless
intense. Anger and indignation are not good motivation for action, but in this case,
I think they are appropriate. I hope women across America will see the insidious
nature of this campaign against us and rise up en masse to tell right-wing
extremists we are no handmaidens. Will you join me? I am tempted to say “Vote
Blue!” but much as I personally want to see Joe Biden in office for another
four years, that’s not the point here. I think every woman should evaluate each
candidate on his or her stance not only on abortion but on women’s rights and
the rights of minorities, because the two go hand in hand.
In peace.
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