This is for you, suffragettes.
I registered to vote today. I've never been registered to vote before. I'm 24 and I've never voted. I felt like it was finally time. I still hate politics, and I still don't feel like anyone running for any office is trustworthy and deserving of my support, but women fought for my right to have a voice and a sociopolitical identity in America for over one hundred years. I owe it to them to at least register to vote and make all their sacrifice, struggle, and hard work worth the trouble.
It still staggers me that women have had the right to vote in this country for less than half the time the US has been in existence. There has been a lot of progress in the last century, but I am dismayed to find that it's not as much progress as we would have ourselves believe. Women all over the world are treated as subhuman and subjected to oppression, discrimination, and violence. But it's still going on here, too. The salary gap still plagues us, domestic violence against women persists, women are being raped and sexually assaulted, little girls are taught from the day they pop out of the womb that they should be what society expects them to be and not what they want to be, and on and on. Don't even get me started on the military. And how I had to work twice as hard as any guy in college to be taken seriously, and even then it didn't always work.
After thousands of years of nearly worldwide patriarchal rule, how can we reverse the damage that's been done? America considers itself to be the greatest country in the world, the most enlightened, the most advanced, and yet in some ways we don't treat our women much better than women living (and dying) with the religious dictatorships, culturally inherited inferiority, and social injustice present in so many world regions where it's not illegal to treat a woman like an animal or slave. How can it be stopped? How can you reverse a destructive world trend that began so long ago?
At this point, the best I can do is register to vote. I don't know enough about Hillary Clinton to say whether I support her politics or not, but I kind of want her to become President, just so we can shove it in the faces of every sexist fascist misogynist chauvinist woman hating pig and say that a woman is the President of the United States, a country that wouldn't even allow women to vote until 1920. Yes. Damn straight.
It still staggers me that women have had the right to vote in this country for less than half the time the US has been in existence. There has been a lot of progress in the last century, but I am dismayed to find that it's not as much progress as we would have ourselves believe. Women all over the world are treated as subhuman and subjected to oppression, discrimination, and violence. But it's still going on here, too. The salary gap still plagues us, domestic violence against women persists, women are being raped and sexually assaulted, little girls are taught from the day they pop out of the womb that they should be what society expects them to be and not what they want to be, and on and on. Don't even get me started on the military. And how I had to work twice as hard as any guy in college to be taken seriously, and even then it didn't always work.
After thousands of years of nearly worldwide patriarchal rule, how can we reverse the damage that's been done? America considers itself to be the greatest country in the world, the most enlightened, the most advanced, and yet in some ways we don't treat our women much better than women living (and dying) with the religious dictatorships, culturally inherited inferiority, and social injustice present in so many world regions where it's not illegal to treat a woman like an animal or slave. How can it be stopped? How can you reverse a destructive world trend that began so long ago?
At this point, the best I can do is register to vote. I don't know enough about Hillary Clinton to say whether I support her politics or not, but I kind of want her to become President, just so we can shove it in the faces of every sexist fascist misogynist chauvinist woman hating pig and say that a woman is the President of the United States, a country that wouldn't even allow women to vote until 1920. Yes. Damn straight.