Not When But Who

Yesterday I picked up the first book in Jodi Taylor’s time traveller series (Chronicles of St. Mary’s – Just One Damned Thing After Another) and of course it got me fantasizing. If I could, what time period, what grand past events would I want to witness?

The Battle of Greasy Grass?

Martin Luther King's I Had a Dream speech?  I’d just turned five. CBS broadcast but, that was kind of a long-ass time ago, I don’t recall watching it with the folks.

How ‘bout the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the kick off to the fight for our rights as fellow humans in this damn country. Elizabeth Cady Stanton proclaimed:

We are assembled to protest against a form of government, existing without the consent of the governed—to declare our right to be free as man is free, to be represented in the government which we are taxed to support, to have such disgraceful laws as give man the power to chastise and imprison his wife, to take the wages which she earns, the property which she inherits, and, in case of separation, the children of her love.

72 years passed before we got the right to vote. My grandmother, a nurse at Toledo General Hospital, wasn’t legal to vote for Woodrow Wilson in 1916. My grandfather was. They were both eligible to vote in the 1920 election though.

There's when I’d like to visit but, more interesting to me, there's who.

I’d love to travel back, notebook and pen in hand to interview big, important women like Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great. They were all born to their positions of power but did that give them a pass in the Misogyny Games?

At this point, Cleo’s known best for her sexy times with Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony. Imagine, 2,000 years have passed and what’s this impressive ruler most known for? Her hotness and the dudes she banged.

Catherine? Again, what’s remembered is who and what she supposedly fucked. Yup, a lurid and disgusting rumor, not her accomplishments, is what popularly survives 222 years after her death.

Hillary never had a bloody chance.

Longest ruling of the three (at 44 years) was Queen Elizabeth I. She didn't escape the gossip hounds completely BUT managed to survive, thrive and mostly avoid the trashtalk legacy. I'd like to meet her and get the scoop. How'd she do it?

Dorothy L. Sayers, in her book Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society writes that:

It is extraordinarily entertaining to watch the historians of the past ... entangling themselves in what they were pleased to call the "problem" of Queen Elizabeth. They invented the most complicated and astonishing reasons both for her success as a sovereign and for her tortuous matrimonial policy. She was the tool of Burleigh, she was the tool of Leicester, she was the fool of Essex; she was diseased, she was deformed, she was a man in disguise. She was a mystery, and must have some extraordinary solution. Only recently has it occurred to a few enlightened people that the solution might be quite simple after all. She might be one of the rare people born into the right job, who put that job first.
~~~
In fact, there is perhaps only one human being in a thousand who is passionately interested in his job for the job's sake. The difference is that if that one person in a thousand is a man, we say, simply, that he is passionately keen on his job; if she is a woman, we say she is a freak.

Are things, for those very few women in positions of power, really any different now, in the 21st century? Ah, not so much. See Hillary Clinton, MIchelle Obama, Nancy Pelosi, etc.

What about us normals? Those of us with brains but no power, position or big bucks? The Ghastly Old Party is attempting to ram a partisan hack into our collective uteri. Rapey Boy Kavenaugh is their guy to kill off our legal right to our own damn bodies. Why do it? Control and BONUS, keep the religious rubes' vote.

I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.
~ Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
~ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

And by interesting, I believe Ms. Woolf means wickedly telling.

If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.
~ Abigail Adams

Gender and the complications it gives rise to simply aren't relevant to the lives appliances lead.
~ Thomas M. Disch, The Brave Little Toaster


Obvs, I shoulda been born a toaster.