Green, Violet, White

My old buddy Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon posted something interesting before the comments devolved into people (not excluding us Delmedders) trying to reason a crazy person out of being crazy. She noted that an awful lot of anti-feminist women take issue with the 19th Amendment. (It's part of a series on hypocricy, the hardest charge to defend against.)

Ignoring for a moment that this is from the New York Sun, as opposed to a newspaper with a circulation larger than its staff, it's an old and tired trope: suffrgaists, the claim goes, would be appalled by modern feminism. Why, if you could bring Susan B. Anthony (the only 19th-century feminist most people have heard of) to the present day, she would be horrified. Women aren't supposed to have freedom, they're only supposed to vote!

This requires willful ignorance of, well, basically everything. The 19th century was a different time. Medical procedures were different. Marriage was different. The status of women was different. Feminists of the 1800s were in favor of greater self-direction for women. What they opposed -- insofar as there was consensus on that -- were things that took away from self-direction for women.

The example the Sun writer, and hence Ms. Marcotte, uses is abortion. It was a dangerous operation performed to make men's property more available for use. Now it's safer than childbirth and women use it to have children if and when they want (or at least can in many states). Similarly, women working was secondary to married women being allowed to own property, something we take for granted.

Measuring modern feminists by 19th-century standards is about as reasonable as measuring modern telegraphy by 19th-century standards. The world changes. Anti-feminists don't.

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[Stive Angelo]

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