Women know what's up.

The focus on this week's readings was all about how women are equal to men and the fight for equal rights that women have been engaging in for many years. the most compelling thing that i read was "why i became a woman's rights man" by frederick douglass. he talks about the conversation that he had with Elizabeth Cady Stanton all about women's rights where he tried to justify that women aren't equivalent to men and shouldn't be allowed to vote. all he could come up with to justify the sanctions against women was the normal,"women belong in the household" garbage and the "women aren't intelligent enough to vote" and "custom" trash. he talks about how our society idolizes violence and spends millions on making huge armies to destroy nations but we don't spend the time or money in order to help out our nation's problems with civil rights or anything relating to the progression of our country. the same problems effect us to this day; we don't pay any attention to the working class. we pay attention only to the people with the money, therefore the ones with the power in the society. haliburton gets all the coverage and the war in iraq is the most important. wars are important, don't get me wrong, these things are very important, but, the issues at home are more important because they are the issues that run the government. without the stability of the people at home, we couldn't get anything done overseas because no one would be making the things that we use against other countries because no one would believe in our government. i kind of got side-tracked there. what we really need to focus on is that women run our economy. without women we wouldn't be where we are today. during the depression the women took over our working class, saving our economy and country from a major downfall. elizabeth cady stanton writes about this in "a history of feminist movements in the US". she talks about how women have helped us and we don't appreciate the work that they do for us. nowadays we devalue women, treat them as sexual objects, and commit heinous acts of violence against them, mainly because men feel threatened that maybe women actually are just as qualified as them to do things, if not more. we have no idea what women are capable of if they ever got the chance to accomplish anything in our overbearing society. sojourner truth recognized this when she says "i could work as much and eat as much as a man--when i could get it--and bear the lash as well." she recognized that the difference between men and women is close to nothing in few areas. (i.e. women are equal.) the work that the women that participated in the women's suffrage movement did was AMAZING. few people in the world would do such things to themselves and go through something that chaotic just for something that they believed in. other than the monks that lit themselves on fire for their temple, the pain and suffereing that these women went through is astounding, there's no way anyone can doubt this. hunger strikes and years of struggling all for a cause that hasn't been achieved by women yet, and was JUST achieved by black males, of all people! they deserved it way earlier don't get me wrong, it's just that the one's that were put into serious slavery got better treatment. although you could say that women have been in slavery for quite some time. they have been second class, arugably third or less, forever. as far as time goes women have been below recognition by men, consequently recieving everything after males. now that men feel threatened by this new power that women have, they can no longer take away their voting rights or their rights in society but so they try to take away the small things under the radar that actually mean the most to these women. like, birth control and abortion. they restrict the things that matter the most but fly undetected because it doesn't legally challenge women's rights. maybe eventually when we get a woman in office, but for now there will be a deadlock between pro life and pro choice and all those pro and con birth control.