If I was a woman I'd be a radical
feminist and darn tired of sick jokes like, "My wife ran off with my
best friend and I miss him." Or, "women have smaller feet so they can
stand closer to the sink," or a sign on the door of a hardware store,
"Gone to wife's funeral. Back in half an hour."
Women
have long been oppressed. In the 1400's a man was allowed to beat his
wife as long as the stick he used was smaller in circumference than his
thumb. That's where we get the phrase, "as a rule of thumb." And listen
to Napoleon Bonaparte's feelings about the fairer sex: "Nature intended
women to be our slaves… they are our property; we are not theirs. They
belong to us, just as a tree that bears fruit belongs to a gardener.
What a mad idea to demand equality for women! Women are nothing but
machines for producing children."
It's
only been in the last 100 years that women have been looked upon as
anything other than babysitters and housecleaners. James Fargo, brother
to the founder of American Express said, "When the day comes that
American Express has to hire a female employee, it will close its
doors." If I was a woman I think I'd tear up my American Express card
upon hearing that.
If you think women
are discriminated against in the workplace now consider that in 1900 for
a woman to be a telephone operator she had to be between 17 and 26 and
be unmarried. Up until Pearl Harbor half of the then 48 states had laws
making it illegal to employ a married woman!
I
used to be proud that we in the west were more open-minded because we
were the first to give women the right to vote, initially in Wyoming and
then Colorado, Idaho and Utah. Then I learned the real reason wasn't
that we were thinking with our brains but another part of our anatomy,
as men often do. In the west in 1850 it's estimated there were only
3,000 women to 70,000 men and the sight of a woman was a rare treat. Of
the 36,000 people who arrived in San Francisco in one Gold Rush year
only 2,000 were women and it's estimated that females made up only 2 to
4% of the entire population of San Francisco. At a dance in Gold Country
there were 150 men and only 9 women.
The
west's politicians and newspapermen laid awake nights trying to devise
schemes to lure more women westward and one was to give them greater
legal freedoms than they enjoyed east of the Mississippi. For example,
California passed a law that all assets a woman accumulated prior to
marriage and during her marriage were hers to keep. Giving women the
right to vote was just another one of those enticements and it had
nothing to do with we westerners being more fair.
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