Sowing the Winter Wheat
Suffragists, Feminists and Other SheroesArchive for Women’s Rights
Don’t Try to Shame Me Anymore……
A while back, I had a friend on Facebook try to shame me by saying that I am only voting for Hillary Clinton because she is a woman. Well, he actually didn’t call her a woman, he described her by her vagina. I felt, as did my friends that we had to defend our position by pointing out her qualifications. He refused to believe that we were that knowledgable so he persisted with his idea. The more he pushed, the more I felt the need to prove that Hillary was more than just a woman. Through out this election, I feel like I have been having to defend her and my position by down playing the fact that she is a woman. I am mad at myself for allowing him or anyone to bully me away from this important historical aspect and the excitement of what is about to happen.
We are going to elect our very First Woman President.
I am done side stepping the fact that Hillary Clinton is a woman. She has fought hard to get to this spot in history. I am done with listening to people whine about how unlikeable she is by using the same sort of the scrutiny that all women have had to put up with through out history…. She is too loud, her voice is too shrill, she is not feminine, she is not pretty, She is not soft, she is too cold acting, she doesn’t smile enough, she wears pant suits, she is too robotic, her hair cut is not feminine enough, she is too secretive, she is not trustworthy, she is too forward.She is too assertive or career minded. And ON and ON…All of her public life, she has been battered by the media so it is little wonder that so many have bought into that sort of propaganda. What Hillary has accomplished in her service to our country outweighs what the opposition is trying to batter us with now. I don’t view Hillary Clinton as Mother Theresa but she is by far NOT the devil incarnate either. She is an accomplished, intelligent and extremely qualified WOMAN.
Her opponent expounds the idea that he is worthy of President because he is an outsider to politics. Hillary may have chosen politics as her career path but as most of us know, her gender has caused her to be an outsider who has had to fight harder to get her foothold. Politics has always been a man’s domain so maybe if it is screwed up, the kind of ousiders we need are informed women. In 2015, 104 (76D, 28R) women hold seats in the United States Congress, comprising 19.4% of the 535 members; 20 women (20%) serve in the United States Senate, and 84 women (19.3%) serve in the United States House of Representatives. Zero women have been President of the United States. That is (0%.)
She will make mistakes along the way. Attacks on her will be brutal. Her opponent and his followers will plague her like the locusts that they are. But like the Suffragists before her, she will set an example to pave the way for more women to be brave enough to step up and attempt to make this world an even better place for all of us. She is about to show us that women can be anything they dream of being…. even President of the United States of America.
Oh, and did I mention she is a WOMAN!!!!!!!!!
What I learned by Watching the Democratic Convention
Okay, I will admit it.. I drank the Kool-Aid that the Democratic Party offered. After the horrifyingly bleak Trump Convention, my mouth was so dry that I gulped the optimistic message this week like a drunken sailor. And by Friday morning, I was so refreshed, enthused about life and ready to take on the world.
What I learned from watching this convention was why I should be on board for Hillary Clinton. It was a stark contrast to what I learned about Donald Trump from the RNC . The first fact is that Hillary Clinton has worked to help our country for over 25 years, as a lawyer, first lady in Arkansas, first lady to the President, Senator of New York and Secretary of State. During that same time, Trump has done nothing but help himself. He has built a business by filing Chapter 11 four different times and in his personal life, has been married three times. This shows me that he has a tendency to give up quickly and take the easiest way out he can find. On the other hand, Hillary worked through the difficult times in her marriage and when her attempt at working on the healthcare program failed, she pushed on to make it work in another way.
I learned this week that Hillary is a fighter, not because she is some power hungry demon trying to destroy our way of life but because she believes in helping people when they are in need and she wants to make our lives better. Her motto is from the Methodist founder, John Wesley “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” I learned that if Hillary had been more public about all the good things she was doing for people, maybe all the demonizing could have been squashed or at least tempered. But I guess her good deeds were not driven by that evil ego that she is supposed to possess.
I learned that Hillary is strong and when it comes to being commander in chief, she has a steady nature that will keep our country safe. She is an avid listener which is a quality for any good leader. By listening, she will learn the heart of a problem and take advice to attempt to fix the problem. Trump feels he “alone” knows how to fix everything and probably with little thought or consideration for anyone around him.
I learned that Hillary is fair enough to acknowledge what Bernie Sanders has done for the Democratic Party. She is smart enough to work with him to include his ideas into the party platform. I only wish some of his “dreamers” had enough vision to understand the process and realize that if they waste their vote by not voting for Hillary, any viable chance of what they have been fighting for will be lost to the wind, if she doesn’t win.
I learned that Hillary gets along with both sides of the aisle. When she was a Senator she was commended by Republicans for working with them. Maybe that is why so many Republicans are with her this time. She understands the system and how it works in order to work with in it. Now this baffles me the most. I understand that our system needs a lot of work and that we need a change. But Hillary Clinton is the most qualified to lead us to a solution. Change does not mean hiring someone for the job who is woefully unqualified. Would you hire someone who knows nothing about automobiles to fix your car? Would you hire someone who knows nothing about the mechanics of your pipes to fix your plumbing? Or any other problem that you have? Now is not the time to be stupid about your choices.
And most of all, I learned that the people who know Hillary the best, trust her. They have dealt with her one on one for years. They trust her nature. They know what motivates her and they trust her. They know her first hand. All we really know about her is what we have read.
In order to get through until November without having a stroke by worrying about the failure that is Donald Trump, I have chosen to visualize our First Woman President being elected. I have chosen positivity over hate, misogyny and bigotry. After all, I belong to an Optimistic Party with a diversity of inclusion.
And as Susan B Anthony instructed us “Failure is Impossible”
So I can very proudly say, “I’m With Her!!!”
Happy 4th of July, Everyone
Today, I am thinking about my Dad. I wish I could talk to him today. He died last August and I miss him. He was an honest man and he was a Republican. We debated many times about politics and although we hardly agreed, we respected each other. Not many debates go that way these days. I learned from listening to his opinions and he taught me how to debate. One thing he explained to me is that when your opposition starts name calling, you have won the debate because they have nothing more to add of importance.
I think of that when I listen to all of the Hillary bashing. Conservatives are so consumed with making Hillary look as evil as possible that they lead with name calling to destroy her character. She is a liar, she is cold, she is plain out evil, she is not trustworthy, She is a shrew who cusses as much as she can. She is a money hungry opportunist . She doesn’t follow the rules about emails. How much did she spend on that outfit? Oh, did I say she is a liar. Well, we can add that in several times because I don’t think you can have a conversation about Hillary without pointing that out, straight up.
When will we ever get to the important part of our discussions if we are always being side tracked to address the name calling. Perhaps that is all the conservatives have. It is much harder to discuss the issues when your candidate has only offered vaguely what he will do. Most of which are not useful because we don’t live in a dictatorship nor are they legal. So it is much easier to just dismiss Hillary by slandering her. What else can they say?
This election will be the toughest for Republicans because most of them don’t like any of their choices. And they have the worry that if they don’t vote at all, will that be a vote for Hillary? So that makes me wonder what my Dad would say and what he would do. I can only guess but before he died we did talk about Trump. I know my Dad would never have abandoned his morals and voted for Trump. He would never have voted for Hillary either. My Dad would have voted, perhaps not for President but for a Republican Congress to do checks and balances on Hillary.
I wish I could talk to my Dad today.
TO The Women Against Feminism:…..
I guess it is time to dust off this blog.
TO the Women Against Feminism:
First of all, I have gone to your website and read your signs and it is clear to me that you have bought into a very negative assumption of who a feminist is .
I am a feminist. I shave my legs and under my arms. Even though I am over weight, I worry and fuss with how I look. I go to the gym. Wearing black is not a militant statement but my feeble attempt to look thinner. I love men. I am married to one. I am a stepmom. We have four grandsons. I am not angry. In fact, I am a pretty happy person. I laugh quite a bit. I don’t feel oppressed . I feel very lucky. Most of my girlfriends are feminists with the kind of empathy and compassion that comes from the experience of living long lives. We are not harpies…
We understand the exhausting work that many women did by stepping forward and demanding that women have equal rights. If you think that women’s struggles are over, you are mistaken. As long as there are discussions about what women can or cannot do with their own bodies, there will be more hard work to be done. Are there discussions of making laws about what men can do with their bodies ? Women need to stick together, not be pitted against each other…
Your agenda reads Women Against Women to me and I am not clear why you feel the need to slam the brave women who have blazed a trail to give you the very rights you are exercising.. These rights did not come to you out of thin air. In Biblical times, men debated whether women had souls and it wasn’t until 1920, after a long hard struggle and a lot of persistence that women won the right to vote. You are able to lead your privileged lives because of feminists…..
Look, this is all about the spin…Being a “feminist” has always met with opposition. Mainly from people who felt threatened by women with an opinion. It was important for these people to give a negative spin on the word as part of their strategy. And sadly, you believe them. That’s okay, I was young and naive once, too.
Now, I am but one of the feminists you are against. But I want you to know that although I know you are extremely capable of speaking out for yourself, I am FOR you. And I will never be AGAINST you, even if you are against me. I can live with that. Women have done that for hundreds of years.
And lastly, I like to have my door opened for me too but I also like to open that door for other people. It is a sign of caring and respect.
Three Suffragists Etchings…..
I started with 3 rather large drawings that I made of 3 suffragists…. Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Carrie Chapman Catt … Sort of the beginning and the end results of the process of getting women the right to vote…. I have been interested for quite some time in the idea of creating images of women using words or objects to form their bodies and drawing their heads… These women had so much to say that I thought it would be quite easy to form their bodies with their words…. Since Susan B was on the road so much, I filled her with advertisements of her upcoming speeches and other ephemera promoting her….. And her infamous statement running down her arm, “Failure is Impossible”.. and a photo of Elizabeth Cady Stanton over her heart…..
I have a good collection of suffrage postcards and wanted to include them some way so I made etchings of three of them and matched them up to the three different women…. The Susan B Lives postcard, of course, was obvious and had to go with my Susan B etching and I think, completes the idea that her spirit is still alive and well in the current women’s movement…. our ever constant fight for equality with the men and generally our place in the world…. Failure is Impossible…. The postcard is something done in probably the 70s…..
For Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B’s best friend, I filled her body with her most important speech, “The Solitude of Self”….. If you are not familiar with this writing, check it out by clicking here.. It is probably the best piece she wrote and speaks passionately of full freedoms of individuals… It was her farewell speech when she resigned as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1892….. Again, remember we didn’t get the vote until 1920….. The postcard I chose to be paired with her etching was probably from either the 30s 0r 40s and was a birth announcement. I felt she was definitely born to fight for this cause …..
And in the third etching of Carrie Chapman Catt, I constructed her body with an article that she wrote for a magazine about Equal Suffrage as an Issue of World Democracy… Carrie Chapman Catt sort of brought a conclusion to the voting struggle along with Alice Paul and all of the numerous courageous suffragists….. I love the postcard that I used with her of George Washington questioning “Did I save my country for this?”….. Well, yes, George W, this is our country too…..
I chose the accent color of red to punch up the striking importance of this part of our history…… Red is a color that is hard to ignore….. And for you printmakers, I printed the two colors on one plate and the color on the postcards was added after the etchings were printed and dried.
Each of these etchings is about 5.5 X 10 inches….
and just a little FYI….. are $145. each, unframed….
Speak Up for What You Believe In…….
This is a rare real photo postcard that I was extremely fortunate to buy at the Wichita Postcard Show a couple of weeks ago….. It broke my bank but I had to have it…. I bought it from Tom Mulvaney, a postcard dealer from Helena, Montana…..He had the image researched because he thought it was of Jeanette Rankin, the first woman congresswoman, who happened to be from Montana, as well…. But he couldn’t find any evidence that it was… It would be nice to know who the woman was but it is more the demonstration of bravery that captured my imagination….
Right after I bought this card, I found another suffrage card…… It is by the artist, Bernhardt Wall……
But I didn’t get this postcard for the front, I bought it because of the message on the back…….
The message reads “I believe I heard you say that you favor votes for women. Do you wear a Suffragette button?” …….. A call to stand up….. Can you imagine what it would have been like before 1920, to wear a button on your blouse or dress, saying that you think women should have a voice as important as a man’s.. I wonder if Miss Ida K. Miller was that brave…..
I will be making an etching that will combine the real photo and this postcard back to convey the message that it is important to not just believe in a cause but to stand up and let the rest of the world know what you have in your heart….. I will post the etching when I get it done…..
You know, it has bothered me that I haven’t been brave enough to put an Obama sticker on my van for fear of having the tires slashed….. It is time that we stop living in a world controlled by fear …… We have to stop letting anyone who disagrees with what we believe to continue to bully us around….. We have had enough of that from the present administration….
Right now, the main thing that we can all do is get out and vote between now and Nov. 4th…. I will be voting for Barack Obama for change and for a better future that hopefully won’t contain as much intimidation by fear …… Okay, I guess, I will go put that sticker on my van now……
Palin’s Abortion Terrorists
I really didn’t want to get into this subject but after watching this video of Sarah Palin fumbling the ball, while trying to answer this question, I found it hard to contain myself any more… When questioned about whether someone who bombs abortion clinics is a terrorist or not, Palin said that she did not know… Wouldn’t anyone with a bomb be a terrorist?…. Is she that immersed in defending her anti abortion crusade that she can’t admonish bombing an abortion clinic?….. How rednecked can this woman be and do we want someone that callous and narrowminded in the White House?
Here are her own words……
To me, this is an extremist stance and is not what I would want in any leadership position ….. I do not deny her right to be anti abortion but evidently she would want to deny other’s rights to be Pro Choice, to the extent of believing that bombing a clinic is a justified kill…. Now that is more than a little scary…
Mainly, I avoid talking about abortion because I feel that to talk about this issue is really a ploy to avoid the issues that are more important and of course, harder to solve……Issues that would make the world a better place for the children who are already here ….
Notice that I have not called her Pro Life because, obviously, by the way she thinks, that description does not really fit her… After all, she kills large, innocent animals from a helicopter and brags about it …Human or Animal, it is all life in my book…..But my point is not to debate abortion….
It is her stance on most of the issues that elude me and unfortunately, I believe, elude her… And there is the problem…. We have had a President for 8 years who could not talk intellectually on the most common subjects….. I want someone in that office who can think faster on their feet than I can…. That position needs to be filled by someone who is not a common person…..Haven’t we had enough of that ?
McCain’s attitudes towards Women and his “Friends”……
“Bathing Beauties”
solar etching by debbie little wilson
If McCain wins and I have to listen to him say “My Friends” a hundred times in every speech, I will slit my wrists…. It is bad enough that we have had to endure eight years of Bushisms but the prospect of four years of Palin’s folksy, gosh darn it nonsense and McCain’s breathy “Listen, my friends” will absolutely do me in….Okay, I had to get that off of my chest first before I could continue…
They say that “Actions speak louder than words” and what I have observed of McCain’s actions towards women is a big shout out…. His voting record alone makes me understand how he views women’s rights.. I could list these but they are too long …. If you are interested in viewing them in detail, check out.. WomenForBarackObama.com
or go to Votesmart.org to learn how he has voted on all of the issues….
In my efforts to tolerate Sarah Palin, I have just come to feel sorry for her….. She is really just a pawn for McCain to add a bust, oh I mean, boost to his dragging campaign….. There were other more qualified Republican women whom he could have chosen but they weren’t sexy enough and we all know that sex sells… Now, granted, Palin did accept the position “without blinking” but she should have known that she wasn’t ready for the job….. Maybe if she had really read all of those magazines or newspapers that she couldn’t name to Katie Couric, she would have been better equiped….. she should have said “Thanks, but no thanks” to McCain’s sexism….
I hesitate to bring up McCain’s first wife but since we are talking about how he views women, I might as well go ahead….. While he was a POW, his wife was in a horrible car wreck…. she became disfigured and gained weight…. He comes home and dumps her for a richer, younger, more fit model…. Not an uncommon tale but if you claim that are in the “moral” party, you might as well “walk the walk and talk the talk” or suffer the criticism …..
Recently during the debate, a young black woman got up to ask him a question…… His body language spoke volumes…. Instead of answering her question and looking into her eyes, he totally turned his back to her when he spoke…… I was in disbelief…. A sharp contrast to the hand shaking and drooling he did over the overweight comrade in arms at the beginning of the debate….I don’t know if this reaction was because she was a woman or because she was black or because he was just too old to be standing that long but what ever it was, it was pretty rude
Women are not the only people he doesn’t respect…. I would talk about the “that one” comment but it leaves me speechless…..There was that moment he told the young man that he probably never heard about Fannie and Freddie until this crisis…. how insulting….
McCain doesn’t even seem to have as much tolerance for women or African Americans as Palin has for the gay community…..and that isn’t saying much….It seems like he only has respect for the old guard Republicans and military men…. that leaves a huge portion of our population at risk….. which scares me…..
and leaves me wondering, who are these “friends” that he keeps talking about………
Sowing the Winter Wheat 