History is full of cases when men used their physical power to relegate women to second-rate human beings, punished them to keep their control over them, and killed them whenever they felt like it, such as when they had a lover BEFORE marrying them or when they could not bear a child.
So, in the new country founded on the principles of equality, freedom, and democracy, enlightened American women struggled and valiantly fought the American chauvinism to assert their rights, rightly so, to be equal to men’s. In 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment was drafted. It needed the ratification of 38 states to become an amendment to the Constitution. That requirement was not met by the deadline. What happened?
The proposed Amendment was vehemently opposed by, of all people, WOMEN led by a very well catholic-educated, eloquent, obedient, and charming lady named Phyllis Schlafly and her 80,000 followers, who convinced women that equal rights would not serve their interests. Their mission in life, in their opinion, was to serve men, bear children, and do housework. Equal rights would subject them to the military draft and the burden of making money. Many women bought their argument.
It was quite believable that it was a political legerdemain performed by the Republican men who had pulled the trick beautifully. Eh, we have nothing to do with it. That’s what they want. Every Republican, female and male, is happy. Men’s rights are, and power is, intact. They continue to dominate their households which unavoidably leads to women being abused because there is no counterforce as women have no equal rights; they don’t want them. Right?
Women have been put back to their mission position.
In the last few decades, many maverick women have tried to prove otherwise that men’s strength is relative. Technology and science have changed the dynamics that have given men advantages. Women are competent in doing whatever men can do. They can till the fields, fly a fighter jet to defend the country, and run mega-conglomerates. They can even wrestle convincingly and more seductively.
But politics is the last bastion for Republican men to cede to those darn democrat women pretending to run Congress or even for president. Something needed to be done. So, Republican men hatched a scheme to prove to the nation that women are not for politics but in the house, doing what they have been doing best since religions were conceived: bearing children, cooking dinner, and pleasing their male partners.
The scheme has been implemented and successful beyond the men’s dream: they have elected so many female Republican politicians to political powerful positions in state houses and in Congress, waiting for them to prove themselves, and as an extension other women, to be unfit to hold political posts. They have behaved as if they find themselves in a Louis Vuitton shop with thousands of handbags and don’t know what to choose, or act blindly.
A Republican governor shot her dog. When she was criticized, she defiantly told the public she had shot her horses too. In a congressional committee’s session solemnly discussing if the U.S. Attorney General should be held in contempt, one Republican congresswoman loudly smeared a colleague for wearing “false” eyelashes, probably thinking that the chambers of Congress were no different than a cosmetic parlor at an L-shaped shopping mall. Another one took every opportunity to make known her desire to be picked by the former president to be his running mate, publicly shopping herself for the job.
A Republican former governor harshly criticized former president Donald Trump, calling him UNFIT to be president. She even questioned if he was mentally fit. Now she says she will vote for him – she will vote for a person she believes to be unfit to be president, or probably worse, mentally unfit. Such about-face is stunning, a naked self-interest chasing disregarding principles that for some time I thought she alone among the Republican presidential candidates possessed.
The men have proved their point: their counterparts are confused, lost, puzzled, and cases in point bearing out the chauvinistic conviction that Republican men and women are not equal, and where the women should belong.
The Republican men would smirk and quietly spread the words: you see that and still think women are equal to us?
The Liz Cheney Republicans, male or female, seem to be a very rare breed nowadays. But the Party does need them, desperately.
