For the past several months I have been examining the women’s suffrage in the United States. What I found was a bucket of worms that I still haven’t been able to untangle. It seems, surprise-surprise, that women’s right to vote is far more complicated than feminists would have us believe. For the sake of brevity I will only briefly touch on women’s voting rights and female elected officials. However, my search, in which every answered question leads to three more, has uncovered many female historical figures that feminists wished hadn’t existed. These are the women I would like to concentrate on in this article.
For most of the history of the United States, the life of the average man or woman was far from easy. It consisted of working from before daybreak to long after sunset during the spring, summer, and fall to plant, grow, and harvest enough food to last you through the winter. The mere struggle for survival was all that most people had time to worry about. The only exception to this were the wealthy. They had time on their hands to contemplate things other than “What do I have to do today so I can eat tomorrow?’ If we are to believe feminists, then all women were chained to a wood-burning stove while their husbands led a life of ease and luxury. Setting aside the blatant bigotry in that statement and the disregard for the hardships that men faced alongside their wives, this statement is historically false.
Yes, feminists, I just called you a bunch of damn liars. As with most men, most women could only worry about survival. That’s literally all they had time for. However, those few women who were lucky enough to be able to have spare time on their hands and had the drive to get up off their privileged asses and do something besides drink tea excelled in their endeavors and accomplished great things.
You will hear many battle cries from feminists attempting to shame modern women into pledging allegiance to the ideology of hatred and violence known as feminism.
Here are a few:
“Women had no voice in government before feminism.”
“Women weren’t allowed to go to school.”
“Women couldn’t read before feminism.”
“Women had no legal rights before feminism.”
“Women couldn’t own property before feminism.”
“Women couldn’t even have an opinion before feminism.”
The list goes on and on, but you get the idea.
Before we delve into evil and oppressive HIStory to find the truth, we must define what feminism is and when it began.
Feminism is an ideology. All feminism is based on something called “patriarchy theory.” Patriarchy theory is the idea that all men oppressed all women for all of human history, even until this day. This oppression always benefited men at the expense of women, according to feminists. The beginning point of feminism is the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. This is where we see feminism first expressed through the Declaration of Sentiments. Sure, there were rumblings of feminism before 1848, most notably as expressed in the “Tender Years Doctrine,” which established female superiority in child custody–and which women fought for.
However, the Seneca Falls Convention was the point where patriarchy theory was revealed to be the driving force behind the movement. It is at this point where we can make a distinction between the feminist movement and an equal rights for women movement as being two separate entities. Any feminists that disagree with this can shove off. You forfeited your right to define feminism when you decided to manipulate the definition at will to suit your purpose at any given time. The “that’s not my feminism’ or “that’s not real feminism” has been used to protect feminism from the words and actions of feminists to the point where feminism means anything you want and none of the things you don’t at any given time depending on whom you’re talking to and the what you are talking about. As a result, feminism means whatever anyone wants it to mean.
So now that we have defined feminism, we can look at what influences feminism has had on our society and when. The feminist movement was only interested in obtaining voting rights for women in the beginning. Any other accomplishments made by women prior to 1920 that were not related to voting rights are not feminist accomplishments. Again, feminists, if you don’t like the definition of your movement, that’s too bad. The history of your movement is not yours to write since it is obvious that you cannot distinguish facts from feelz.
Here are just a handful of great women who owe absolutely nothing to feminists or feminism. These women existed long before the United States even existed, but for the sake of brevity I will focus only on the U.S. and the preceding colonies. What follows is far from a complete list of women’s accomplishments before feminism:
- Margaret Brent immigrated to the Maryland Colony in 1638. Brent brought with her a land grant for 70 acres. She later acquired 1,000 additional acres from her brother. Brent appeared in court several times to argue her own case against her debtors.
- Anne Bradstreet was the first published female author. Her book of poetry, The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America, was published in 1650.
- Anne Catherine Hoof Green ran her husband’s printing business after his death in 1767. In 1768, Green was named the official printer of the Maryland Colony.
- Mary Catherine Goddard had a long career as a printer, publisher, and postmaster. Goddard and her mother started working with her brother in his printing shop in Providence, RI, after her father’s death in 1762. Goddard played an active part in publishing the weekly Providence Gazette until 1768. She then joined her brother’s printing office in Philadelphia, where she managed the Pennsylvania Chronicle. In 1774, Goddard moved to Maryland to become the official publisher of Baltimore’s first newspaper. In January 1777, her paper published the first ever printed copy of the Declaration of Independence. In 1775, Goddard became postmaster of Baltimore until 1789 when she was relieved against her will. A failed petition to have her reinstated was signed by over 200 of Baltimore’s leading businessmen.
- Mary Kies became the first woman to receive a patent in the United States in 1809.
- Catherine Elizabeth Brewer, by virtue of alphabetical order, became the first woman to graduate from college. She was one of 11 women who received their diploma on July 16, 1840, from what is now Wesleyan College.
- Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to become a medical doctor. She graduated from Geneva Medical College in 1847.
- Ellen H. Swallow was admitted to M.I.T. in 1871. Three years later she earned a B.S. degree in chemistry.
- Mary Harris Jones, a.k.a. Mother Jones (1837?- 1930), whose life of standing up and speaking out for causes she believed in is far too notable to be condensed into a couple of sentences. People may disagree with her politics, but everyone can agree that she was a leader and that she played a major role in labor reform. I must say that her ideas on feminism made me chuckle.
No thinking person would deny that women deserved more rights than they had for most of U.S. history. However, those same people would also see that women weren’t the only ones trapped in restrictive gender roles and imprisoned by economic conditions. Economic conditions that were both man-made and a natural result of building a new nation. Yes, women needed a movement for their rights. But no one needed feminism. No one needed a movement to turn women against men as men were often times slaving away under similarly restrictive conditions. No one needed a supremacist movement like feminism. Despite what social justice warriors would have you believe, you can’t create equality using discrimination. No one needed a movement that blamed the very men who were suffering right alongside the women they loved. That is like Black women blaming Black men for slavery.
No one needed a movement that advocated equal rights for one group without equal responsibility. No one needed a movement that would erase the women listed above, along with the many who aren’t, just to maintain a lie of victimhood. A lie of victimhood that serves no other purpose than to maintain control. The lie of victimhood that allows feminists to manipulate the good intentions of a well-meaning public into giving all women a superior position in our society. What we need is more women who will be the strong and empowered women that feminism claims women should be. We need the women who will become CEOs, inventors, and political figures by their own drive and determination. Not women who want any easier road or a lightened load simply because they are women, all in the name of “equality.”
We need to teach our girls and young women that anything is possible by showing them that a woman has already done it. Nothing can stop them if they want success badly enough. The proof is right there in the history books. Yes, we also need to teach them about feminism as an example of how not to gain true equality and real success.
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