A Piece of a Woman's Mind

“In the history of human beings gender has proved to be the single most important factor in determining the fate of an individual. Gender is more important than ethnicity, skin color, religion, or economic status. Indeed, the influence of these secondary factors is merely magnified by the gender of an individual.” These are words I wrote in my book A Women’s Paradise.

For centuries powerful men have assumed that what is good for them is good for everyone. This has been true in the United States. From our inception the rhetoric from our all-male leadership has always assumed total inclusivity for everyone, male and female. You know. Liberty and Justice for All. Our male leaders have always preached to women as if what is good for men is undoubtedly good for women. As a matter of fact they have spent a great deal of time and trouble convincing us, indoctrinating us, to believe that their politics, their religion, their values, their economy, their wars, their society includes women and is good for us. They never make a distinction that tells us that something that is good for men is not necessarily good for women. These men want us to support them wholeheartedly, enthusiastically, without questioning what they say and do. They have been extremely successful, and women have been extremely, naively, and stupidly compliant.

How do I know? Everyone understands the concept that there is power in numbers. In fact our society is accustomed to accepting, even if not always agreeing, with the concept that the majority rules. Mother Nature has seen to it that at any one time the percentage of females and males on the earth is split evenly, 50/50. The only time the statistics wildly vary on a local basis is because of a high death toll of one gender vs. the other due to war, famine, pestilence, natural disaster. Still Homo sapiens are distributed 50/50. So if the majority rules, it follows that in making decisions one gender has to convince or coerce the other to support its position. If that never happened, there would be a stalemate and the genders would live totally apart and each have their own separate society.

Let’s look at the current status of our major lawmaking entities in the United States. First the legislatures. In the 118th U.S. Congress there are 100 Senators of which only 25 are women (25%). There are 435 Representatives in the House of Representatives of which only 126 are women (30%). In the 50 states in 2023, only 33% of the members in the legislatures were women. Only three states have elected a majority of women counting both houses of the legislature where applicable: Nevada 60.3%, the District of Columbia 53.8% and Colorado 53%. At the executive level, we have never had a female President of the United States. Out of 50 states, currently only 12 have female governors. At the judicial level, since April 2022 there are 4 female Supreme Court Justices out of 9 total (44%). This is the highest percentage of women serving on the Supreme Court in the history of our nation. From the year 1789 when the U.S. started operating under its Constitution, it was 192 years before the first woman was appointed to the Supreme Court (Sandra Day O’Connor appointed on September 25, 1981). That is why my picture for this post shows the 1925 Supreme Court under the administration of Calvin Coolidge. Justice has been mainly male since the inception of our nation. At the State level, as of 2022 59% of State Supreme Court Justices were men. If there is power in numbers, the men are totally and completely in power in our country and WE THE WOMEN ALLOW IT.

Another popular saying is Power to the People. This slogan has been used in many places to convey widely disparate messages. In the 1960’s it meant that power should be transferred from the stodgy Establishment consisting of people over 30 to the younger generation who supposedly had all the answers. In some cases it has been used by leftwing, populist parties to the chagrin and criticism of rightwing political factions. “People” in this slogan must by definition include both males and females. And yet, females have never gotten any real power over their own lives. The saying should be Power to the Males. Males have reserved it for themselves and want us to accept that their version and realization of power is good for us.

You see, it is so much easier for men to disregard, manipulate and dictate the opinions and needs of 50% of the population. When women made it a point to insist on sharing power as in the case of demanding the right to vote, U.S. men blocked it until August 18, 1920, 131 years after the country started operating under the Constitution. During those years, men made all the laws, established all the precedents, organized society in their image, and divided all the wealth and power among themselves. Women have been playing catchup ever since and have never caught up. As we are seeing in the past couple of years on some issues such as the right to abortion, the progress we have made can be taken away from us in an instant by male-dominated courts and legislatures. Our promising successes in elections can be reversed if we don’t vote and if male-led anti-female factions work against emerging female leaders as we have seen in some states. Are you happy with the decisions made for you in your daily life by the men in charge? Surely not.

If we ever want to have power over our own and our children’s lives, we will have to demand it and do what it takes to get it. I would like to share a few important quotations with you to inspire you in your thinking.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Frederick Douglas
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” Alice Walker
“We are the ones we have been waiting for.” Alice Walker
“Activism is my rent for living on the planet.” Alice Walker