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 19^th 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.

An off week, to say the least

 

Jacob and my brother
Looking for jackrabbits
at the ranch

It’s not been a week for blogging. I have started several times, even wrote a longish blog about what I feel is ludicrous objections to any sort of gun control. But then I thought who am I to preach on a subject so well covered in the media? Or is it?

It seems to me this country bounces from one crisis to another. Right now, there are three huge balls in the air, and we cannot afford to drop any of them. Public furor was high over the carnage at Uvalde—until Thursday night, when the first public hearing of the January 6 committee captured everyone’s attention. Well, not everyone, but some twenty million of us plus who knows how many who watched it after the fact or livestreamed it, as I did. And, of course, the third big ball in the air is women’s reproductive rights, which sort ol leads to a fourth ball—how in heaven’s name did we end up with such a mess in the Supreme Court as the Constitution seems to be being overridden in favor of personal beliefs.

I guess at my age it’s good to feel passionate about anything, but I feel passionate—and helpless—about those three problems. I cannot weigh one more heavily than the other, and I have done what I criticize in others: I’ve become an extremist, thinking the claims of the far right are ludicrous (that seems to be a favorite word of mine recently).

At any rate, with our country beset by such complex problems, it seemed a bit lighthearted to write anything like, “Guess what I cooked for supper tonight?” or “Know how many words I wrote today?” The one constant I hold to is that I am an optimist. My mom used to say to me, “All things work to some good.” I wish she were here now to say that, because sometimes it’s hard to see. Yet, maybe it’s my faith that tells me fascism and authoritarianism won’t win, that we will have effective gun control laws, that trump and company will be not only exposed but appropriately punished, that women will always have access to good reproductive health care.

When I expressed outrage on a Facebook post (yes, I’m out there and vocal—I can’t walk the block, host campaign parties, etc., but I can sure speak out), someone who basically agreed with me wrote that she avoided outrage because she thought it put bad stuff into her system. It probably does, but in this case, I think it’s necessary. If we aren’t outraged enough to fight for our way of life, we’ll lose it. And the absurdity of some on the right causes my outrage—charging a woman with murder because she miscarried (what the medical profession calls a spontaneous abortion and what, to my mind, indicates that God and our biological systems know best), the congressman who said banally that he was sorry Uvalde happened but it didn’t change his mind (how could it not?), the cultists who deny the facts presented by the January 6 committee and call it partisan even though the co-chair is a Republican (isn’t she tough?)—it all outrages me, makes me fighting mad, and maybe that’s been what’s stifled me. I have no place to go with my anger, but I don’t want to foist it on others.

There have been pleasant moments this week. One morning I watched Mama Cardinal hopping around on the deck. To my disappointment, Papa didn’t join her this time. I guess I was looking for the comfort of thinking two from the other side are sending me messages. Another day the most magnificent blue jay hopped among the pentas, which are just now blooming. I watched him in fascination for a long time. Yeah, it was not a week when I got a lot of writing done, but I did start proofreading Finding Florence.

Posting two pictures with this because they are pictures that make me feel good. Maybe they will you too. They reflect, to me, the fact that our peaceful world of home, families, and friends goes on despite those who would destroy our way of life.

The most spectacular orchid
in its second bloom