“97 YEARS AGO”
Caroline
and I have been visiting on Minnesota’s North Shore with our good and long time
friends Dee and John Cole Vodicka. For a
Southern boy like me, it is a wild and rough place with its sheer cliffs down
to huge Lake Superior. A storm also stirred up Lake Superior more than usual,
so it seemed like the powerful Pacific Ocean to me. I did learn why it is
called “Lake Superior” – it is bigger than all the other Great Lakes combined.
An article
in the Minneapolis Star Tribune reminded me that this past Saturday was the 97th
anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment that gave
women the right to vote. The newspaper
article indicated that a celebration would be held because it is believed that
a South St. Paul referendum on August 27, 1920, on a water bond was the first
election where women cast the vote after the 19th Amendment
passed. Although women could already
vote in some Western states and in some municipal elections in the USA, the
water bond referendum in South St. Paul seems to be the first one after the 19th
Amendment passed. It was for an upgrade
to the water system, and with the vote of the women helping the community, the
referendum passed.
As I think
about rights for women, I am reminded that we have elected a president who considers
women to be only objects for him to grab and to use. I am also reminded that
part of the reason that he won the presidency is that he had a very competent
woman opponent, and that we are all still afraid of having a woman in power
over us. Statistics show that a majority
of white women voted for Donald Trump and against Hilary Clinton, although the
vast majority of African-American women voted for Hilary Clinton. From the white male point of view, we were
already mad that we had an African-American man as president for eight years,
and we certainly were not ready to have a woman as president after that,
especially a highly competent woman.
As I think
over the long sweep of our history, I give thanks for all the women and men who
worked so hard to obtain the right for women to vote. I also recall that it is a complex issue,
with many of those who fought for the vote for women refusing to work for black
and native women to have the right to vote.
I give thanks for people like Ida Wells who fought so hard for the right
for all citizens to vote, regardless of gender or skin color or economic
status.
I’m also
aware of the continuing power of patriarchy in my own life. Whenever I see a woman, my first thought is
not to wonder what her story is or whether she is a community organizer or a
home organizer or both. My first
reaction is whether she is attractive or not.
I have been so well trained by the patriarchy that this principality
still holds sway over me. I can say that
I no longer judge the value of women because of how they look, but it is still
a factor in my perceptual apparatus. I
must grind on this power daily, and it speaks to me again of those insightful
words in Ephesians 2:2 that I am captive to the “power of the prince of the
air.” This idea that men are superior
and that the only value of women is that they are property and sexual objects
for men - this value was taught to me by
both men and women who loved me and whom I loved. That is one of the reasons that it is so difficult
to eradicate in my life and perceptions.
I am grateful to the many women and men who have taught me that there is
another way, especially the primary
witness my spouse and partner Caroline Leach.
I am
grateful that this issue of the value of women as partners and equals is very
much in the public square. I hope that
this issue will not fade from the discussion until it is very well established
that women are indeed equals in human status and partners in community
power. As I have discovered in my own
life and in the lives of others, it will take all kinds of witnesses and
struggles to make it so: we are in a
battle for our lives.
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