Life has been so busy lately…Mason, school, and now I’m back to work too. I feel like I barely have time to think, let alone write a blog post. But it’s the weekend, and I remembered my promise to myself that I would keep up with this blog. Luckily, one of my classes brought me some inspiration this morning.
This semester I decided to take Women in American History, as I don’t have any degree-required courses left to take and it sounded interesting. On the first day my professor walked in and I immediately thought the class was going to be terribly boring because of how old she was. But I ended up chiding myself later for judging her so quickly…she is actually very quirky and entertaining. I fell in love with her personality when she informed us that she owned several cats and played an assortment of mountain instruments. So I was excited when she told us that we would be watching a movie today, as I was sure that it was going to capture my attention.
Boy, did it ever! The film is called Iron Jawed Angels, and it’s about women fighting for an amendment to the Constitution granting women the right to vote. These ladies had such a passion for what they were doing, and no wonder…to enfranchise women was to give them a voice in the society that they already played such a large role in.
I think that sometimes feminists are subject to a bad stereotype. They are often viewed as “spinsters,” as women who hate men, the institution of marriage, and who never want to have a family because they are so fiercely independent. They are called masculine and are written off as bitter and angry.
This movie pointed out to me that it’s important to remember who the forerunners of the Womens’ Movement were: plain old everyday women, many of them mothers. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who played a large part in writing the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, was a mother of seven. It is believed that she and her best friend, and fellow womens’ rights activist, Susan B. Anthony, took turns feeding and caring for her children while they worked on campaigns and writings for the movement. In fact, mothers may have had the biggest reason of all for caring about being heard– they wanted the rights to their children. Believe it or not, the time when mothers were not considered mentally capable of being parents who taught their children lessons and guided them through life isn’t that far in the past.
Thankfully, ideas have changed since those times, and women tend to be viewed in a much better light. The movie was still inspiring, though, and made me view my role as a woman and as a mother differently. The progress we’ve made is quite significant, but we still aren’t quite at the top of the mountain yet. I mean, women still to this day aren’t paid equally for doing the same job as men (I believe it is 80-something cents to the dollar). Feminists remain scorned and wrongly stereotyped in many public arenas. Women hit glass ceilings left and right, in many areas of life. The fight isn’t over.
I believe that it is our duty to women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton who fought so hard for suffrage and equality, during a time when it was completely inappropriate to do so, to keep on pushing for more. Don’t we also owe it to ourselves? There is more to be gained, and I think that women throughout history, right on into contemporary times, have shown themselves more than worthy of the same respect given to any man. I believe that it is our duty as mothers to teach our children the benefits of a more equal world– to educate our sons to embrace respectful attitudes toward girls, and to instill ideas of self-worth in our daughters. There are conflicting messages all around us in this mass-media society, but if we raise our children in a home that places equal value in both boys and girls, we have a chance to strike down the old-fashioned conventions.
Mothers (I suppose I mean parents in general) are granted the privilege of direct access to today’s youth, and a good shot at influencing the way that they will perceive the relationship between men and women. We have voices…let’s use them!
travels through motherhood 