avatarLinda Caroll

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Women’s Day Is Not A Frigging Hallmark Moment. Go Ask Alice.

Give the darlings their own day and they’ll shut up, right?

Couple kissing photo from open clipart // Alice Paul photo source

The whole concept of Women’s Day frustrates me.

It makes me sad.

There’s cards, now, did you know?

You can go to the store and buy a “Happy Woman’s Day” card for the mother, sister, friend you love. Yay, Hallmark moment.

I just wish we could have actual equality instead of another Hallmark moment. The lip service gets tiresome, you know?

Alice Paul was 24 when male prison guards ripped her clothes off and made national news

Shockingly inappropriate. That’s what the media called it.

Course, the men didn’t “want to” rip her clothes off. It’s just that she was fighting so hard the women guards couldn’t get her clothes off.

They “had to” call the men.

The men “had to” tear her clothes off.

Because she “had to” be strip searched. That’s the rules for criminals.

Know what her crime was? Protesting for equality. The cops showed up and a window got broken in the scuffle. In 1909. So, the cops had clubs and uniforms while the women had frilly Victorian dresses and bonnets.

After they strip searched her and threw her in jail, she was so angry she refused to eat. So they force fed her.

They were so brutal in the force feedings, she had to be carried from the prison to the hospital. She had gastric damage the rest of her life.

The rest of her life!

Women aren’t equal because men don’t want us to be equal. Simple as that.

After women got the vote in 1920, Alice and her cohorts sent another request to Congress. They wanted women to be equal under the law.

In 1923, Congress said no. They’re still saying no.

The answer was no then, and it’s still no now. Next year, it will be 100 years women have been asking for equality.

  • Every two minutes, a woman is raped in America.
  • Domestic violence costs 37 billion per year just in law enforcement.
  • Six women are killed by men every hour in a “pandemic of femicide”
  • Only 29% of American households exist on a man’s salary alone, but women still don’t get equal pay.
  • Did you know that over a 40 year career, a woman earns $500,000 less than a man? That’s what 20 cents on the dollar adds up to.

We are not represented equally anywhere.

Only 7% of CEOs are women, only 27% of congress are women and gender inequality still plagues the healthcare industry.

But hey, we have hallmark cards.

Alice Paul lived the rest of her life waiting. It never happened. She died waiting.

She was arrested 7 times. She served three jail sentences. She was strip searched, beaten, force fed and suffered health problem for the rest of her life because of how brutal the prison guards were.

And why? Because she wouldn’t stop protesting for equality.

She died the summer of 1977, age 92, and is buried at Westfield Friends Burial Ground, in Cinnaminson, New Jersey. Two years after her death, she was posthumously inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

To this day, people leave notes at her tombstone to thank her for her lifelong work on behalf of women’s rights.

99 years after Alice Paul and the first wave feminists first asked for equality, we still don’t have it.

What are we on, now, the fourth wave?

Do we need to rival the Rocky movies before anyone listens? Do we need to get to a thirteenth wave of feminism? Don’t answer. That’s rhetorical.

But hey, we have hallmark cards.

We just keep on keeping on…

Most of the comforts we take for granted exist because of a women.

  • Alice Parker invented central heat.
  • Margaret Wilcox invented a way to heat cars
  • Florence Parpart invented the electric refrigerator
  • Melitta Benz invented the coffee maker.
  • Ada Lovelace invented computer algorithms that made it possible for me to write this and you to read this.

I could go on and on. I could write about the woman that invented the syringes you got your Covid Vax with, the women who put men on the moon and the women who discovered DNA, even if a man took credit and got the Nobel prize and no one said anything until she was dead.

For what?

No one is listening.

But hey, we have hallmark cards.

Every year, March is Women’s month in America because a man says so.

Every year, the president will sit at his desk and sign a piece of paper, agreeing that March will be “Women’s Month” again in America.

It’s a tradition that started in the 1970s.

Every year the President of The United States will sign that paper, granting permission to designate March as Women’s Month. That’s the agreement. Whoever is president will sign that paper every year.

Did you know that?

Did you know we get a Hallmark day because a man gives his permission?

Yes, a woman came up with the idea. Printed it in the paper declaring the very first woman’s day and 2000 women showed up to talk about working conditions and the horrible pay they were getting.

Decades later, the president agrees that we “should” be celebrating women’s accomplishments.

Not that we should be getting equal pay. Or equal rights under the law. But that we should be celebrating women’s contributions.

Every March. Because a man says so.

It gets old.

It doesn’t make me proud or excited or happy.

It just makes me sad.

Like Alice Paul, you and me will probably die waiting for equality.

But hey, we have hallmark cards.

History
Women
Equality
Feminism
Womens Rights
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