PAGE
12
MS . SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON
Women urge Congress they be granted the right to vote on the basis of the 14th & 15th Amendments
BY MICHAEL McCUSKER
"W om en m u s t g e t in to the p o litic a l g a m e a n d s ta y in it. "
-ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
Despite the fact that the binary political party system
seems determined to stick with two (white) males for the nation’s
highest office, a woman elected President of the United States
in the year 2004 could definitively alter the course of empire
and radically avert the bullying schoolyard machismo that has
characterized American politics since the beginning of this new
century/millennium, which Richard Goldstein depicts as “terror
of a world without white male power."
It is shameful that women are summarily cut out of any
viable prospect for attaining the Presidency. Prominent and well-
qualified women of the two major political parties are seldom
given a decent opportunity at the White House (except as ‘First
Lady’) which was certainly demonstrated in the first Presidential
election of the 21st century. Quite the contrary, the nation has
been saddled with the swagger of blustering maleness despite
a popular majority of women voters whose choice was denied by
fraud and corruption at the very top of male-dominated power.
American women have had the vote for 84 years, an
almost equal amount of time women spent fighting to attain it.
For most of those years women rather passively voted the way
their husbands or boyfriends voted. Women voted for the first
time in equal numbers as men in 1980, and in 1982 more women
voted than men; although women voted differently than men that
year and succeeding years, they did not necessarily vote for
women.
A significant change was made in 1992 when women
campaigned in unprecedented numbers for every conceivable
office in the country, local, state and federal — including at least
one woman for President. Women entered politics backed by
other women, finally using their majority power to elect women
to public office
It is not impossible to imagine a woman as President.
It is a much better idea than the knee-jerk assumptions that
only two (white) males — George W Bush Jr. the uncontested
Republican incumbent and John Kerry for the Democrats (third
parties are especially anathema this year) —are the only reason­
able choices for the Presidency, a form of gender apartheid by
a status quo unwilling to see beyond its own shriveled genitals.
There is certainly precedence. Liberals and leftists have
periodically fronted women for President, more often as VP in
third parties (such as the American Green Party in 2000 with
Winona Leduc sidekicking Ralph Nader), and once in the
Democratic Party with Geraldine Ferraro in 1980.
Women have contributed hugely to American history,
but as it is with blacks and others who have helped build this
nation, their contributions have been ignored and under valued.
COLUMBIA RIVER
MARITIME MUSEUM
VISIT THE MUSEUM SHOP
IN ASTORIA, OREGON
Even before Europeans settled the Americas, American
women were powerful forces in their separate communities and
tribal councils. Iroquois women owned the land and controlled
the economy by supervising the distribution of food. The
Cherokee Women's Council helped select male leaders,
declared war and determined the fate of captives. In 1540
Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto was welcomed in present
day Georgia by a woman chieftain who gave him a string of
pearls.
Perhaps the beginning of the present day women's
movement was in 1640 when Ann Hibbens of Boston insisted
she had the right to complain about male carpenters she had
hired. Church elders attacked her for thinking she could handle
such affairs better than her husband, "which is a plain breach of
the rule of Christ." She was excommunicated, and was hanged
for witchcraft 16 years later.
During the Revolution women served on battle lines,
manned cannon (such as the famous "Molly Pitcher" who took
over a cannon when her husband was shot), nursed wounded
and cooked for the militias and regular troops. City women raised
money for food and clothes for Washington's ragtag army. In the
meantime frontier women fought Indians unleashed on western
settlements by the British.
In 1777 several Daughters of Liberty stripped a man who
criticized the Revolution, covered him with molasses and stuck
on dozens of flower petals.Philadelphia women in 1780 called for
action in a broadside titled The Sentiments of American Women.
They described themselves as "Born for liberty, disdaining to
bear the irons of a tyrannic government."
In 1787 the new United States Constitution left the
determination of who was eligible to vote to the states, but did
not specifically bar women from holding federal office. States
rights meant then as now limited participation or none by those
outside the white male status quo. New Jersey's state constitu­
tion gave the vote to all property owners worth a certain amount,
which left wives as well as unmarried women ineligible; however
the state's election law was briefly revised in 1790 and referred
to voters as "he or she.” New York specifically denied voting
rights to women in its constitution in 1777, and other states
quickly followed suit.
Thomas Jefferson, principle author of the Declaration of
Independence which the month of July is annually obliged to
celebrate, said as President in response to a suggestion in 1807
by Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, 'The appointment
of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not
prepared, nor am I."
"Is the needle sufficient?" Judith Sargent Murray wrote
in her essay "On the Equality of the Sexes" which appeared in
Massachusetts Magazine in 1790. Writing under the name
"Constantia," she argued that women's and men's mental
abilities were equal and proposed full education for women.
"Will it be said that the judgment of a male of two years is more
RECORD & TAPE SHOP
POPULAR MUSIC FROM THE 17TH TO 21ST CENTURY
& ALLEY C A T ESPRESSO
389 12TH ST. ASTORIA 3338-6376
M U SIC N O N -P R O FIT TO THE
SPAY
A NEUTER H U M A N E A SS O C IA T IO N
sage than that of a female's of the same age? I believe the
reverse is generally observed to be true. But from that period,
what partiality! How is the one exalted and the other depressed,
by the contrary modes of education vyhich are adopted! ...Grant
that their minds are by nature equal, yet who shall wonder at the
apparent superiority. “
The 19th century began with women voting in substantial
numbers in the 1800 Presidential election, but in 1807 New
Jersey changed its election law once more by inserting the
words "white" and "male" into its voting requirements, and
women were not permitted to hold office in any of the states.
In a manner similar to the civil rights movement of the
1960s spawning white anti-Vietnam War activists, the women’s
rights movement of the 19th century converged from the pre-Civil
War abolitionist movement. Men initially controlled abolitionist
groups but frustrated women broke off and formed their own
abolitionist societies which generally included black as well as
white women.
Women agitated for equality long before the American
Revolution. A group of women complained in a letter to the New
York Journal in 1733; 'W e are housekeepers, pay our taxes,
carry on trade, and most of us are she merchants, and as we
in some measure contribute to the support of government, we
ought to be entitled to some of the sweets of it."
As the result of a successful case by a Virginia slave in
1655 that she was a free woman because her father was white,
southern colonies (including Virginia) declared that all newborn
African-Americans were slaves regardless of the parents' status.
(A century later a woman won her freedom in Massachusetts
after arguing that she was illegally enslaved because her mother
was white which meant she was born free.)
In 1701 six men and six women were selected for an
Albany N.Y. jury, which was an exception. During much of
American history women were kept off juries; not until 1975 did
the U.S. Supreme Court rule that woman's automatic exemption
from jury duty is unconstitutional.
Many other instances of women defying religious and
royalist male authority occurred before the Revolution. Hopes
were high among many women that the Revolution would be
truly revolutionary and allow them equal status. But "Liberty for
All” was selective and left out women and slaves of both sexes
(and as it turned out, working class people as well).
"In the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be
necessary for you to make I desire you would remember the
Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your
ancestors," Abigail Adams wrote in a 1776 letter to her husband
John, a delegate to the rebel Congress in Philadelphia. "Do not
put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Re­
member all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care
and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to
foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any
laws in which we have no voice, or Representation."
(She scolded her husband for not taking her advice in a
letter two months later; "I cannot say that I think you very gener­
ous to the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good
will to Men. . .you insist upon retaining an absolute power over
Wives. But you must remember that Arbitrary power is like most
other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken.")