Celebrating Womens Equality Day August 26, Friday 2022

Today I decided to devote the day to all things ERA, so I began by making a portrait of Alice Paul. She is my lifelong hero because of her dedication to the women of the future, her fierce determination, ahd her unrelenting devotion to the cause of Suffrage for women and the ERA.

Along with painting the portrait of Alice Paul, I am reading her biography and have committed myself to finishing Chapter 5 today, and while I am getting my car serviced tomorrow at the Kia Dealer, I will read Chapter 6.

That's not all! Tonight, I will watch one of the many documentaries and films about the Suffrage Movememt: Ken Burn's Documentary NOT FOR OURSELVES ALONE, about Eliz. Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony,or the pbs American Experience documentary about Alice Paul, or the British film SUFFRAGETTE, or IRON JAWED ANGELS. Haven't decided yet and may just wait and see what I can rent or find.

Every time I watch one of those documentaries, I am struck by the disdain so many men had for women and the careless cruelty inflicted upon them. To punish and blackmail women, it was so often the case that men took the women's children away. I remember that scene from the Russian film Anna Karenina. It didn't matter if the children were hurt in the process, all the more pain for the mothers.

In the British film, SUFFRAGETTE, the husband does the same thing; he gives away their son to another family to punish his wife for her persistence in joining the Suffragists and leaving the house unattended. He says "What else was I supposed to do?" What he was supposed to do was find a childminder, like his wife did when she was working.

When I was looking for an image of the Occaquan Work House. the prison that the American Suffragists were sent to for picketing, I found out the prison has been repurposed into an Arts Center and a Museum to celebrate the Suffragists who were imprisoned there, beaten, and when they went on hunger strikes to demand to be treated as political prisoners and not criminals, they were tied down and force fed which left them with damaged throats and noses from the Rubber pipes and hoses forced down their throats.

They suffered all of this and didn't give up. They gave their lives so that we, women of the 21st century might have the opportunity to make our way freely in the world with equal opportunity for education and our legal civil rights as citizens.

Among the many things for which I am grateful, one is that I was able to get divorced from a mentally unbalanced and raging man and save my life, and that I was able to get birth control when young from Planned Parenthood, so I didn't get pregant and give him a weapon to use against me.

By the time I did get pregnant, it was possible for a single mother to have her child, make a liveable wage, and get protection under the law. So I raised my daughter in freedom and independence. My life has been changed by the women who came before me and sruggled in the cause for our equality.

Right at this moment, women all over the Middle East and particularly in Afghanistan, are not so lucky. Women in Afghanistan cannot go out unchaperoned, must be covered head to toe, cannot work or leave the country, and the culture has returned to child bride bartering which is, in fact, child abuse, and enslavement of lower caste girls, the Yazhidi females. Women are beated, abused, and mutilated by having their noses cut off for speaking out. In some places they are stoned to death, and raped with impunity.

I am grateful I live here and now, and that my ancestors came from Europe where strides had already been made for equality for women in some degrees before the modern movement.

Thank you to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, the Wollstonecrafts, the Pankhursts, Margaret Sanger, and all the women beside them, behind them and supporting their efforts to make this mass movement get as far as it has. When I see women tv journalists, print journalists, politicians, congressional representatives, senators, governors, experts in so many fields such as medicine, science, business and education, I look back on my own childhood when none of this was happening.

HAPPY WOMEN'S EQUALITY DAY TO ALL! Jo Ann

BIRTH CONTROL AND THE VOTE - THE MOST IMPORTANT POWERS, having children gives others power over you and makes you a slave to their domination. We must regain the right to Abortion, the right to choice, and young women must become more responsible and use birth control to control their own lives. Take back the power! The power over your own life. And thank you Margaret Sanger!