97 YEARS AGO

“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 97^th anniversary of the ratification of the 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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.