The commentators on PBS just said that Eleanor Roosevelt would be proud of Hillary Clinton's speech.
I agree. I also think that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone and Lucretia Mott and Carrie Chapman Catt and all the women who fought long and hard to get women the right to vote and equal status as full citizens in this country would be proud.
I want to go back in time and show this to them, to keep them inspired through all their struggles. And thank them for making this moment possible.

And I love Sen. Clinton's speech about whether or not people were in it for her or in it for what she stood for. You don't vote for a person, you vote for a platform. To vote for a Republican because your candidate didn't get the Democratic nomination is foolish, and voting against everything your candidate stood for.

Margaret Sanger

I (finally) saw Juno last night. And any movie or story that deals with unplanned pregnancy is going to eventually lead to discussion of reproductive choice and freedom.
So today I wanted to write a bit about Margaret Sanger, who is one of my heroes. Margaret Sanger came from a very large family. Eventually she became a nurse and was faced with many cases of women whose bodies were worn out from so many pregnancies and births, not to mention the labor required to take care of so many children. She also saw the horrific consequences of abortions (which were illegal and thus unregulated and frequently unsafe). When these women begged doctors to tell them how to avoid future pregnancies, the doctors' only solution was frequently to suggest abstinence, a remarkably unhelpful and impracticle solution. Margaret Sanger knew there had to be a better way.
She set out to inform women about their birth control options, starting clinics that were often shut down. She was arrested for disseminating birth control advice through the US Postal Service, because the information was deemed "obscene." Not only were there extremely limited contraceptive options available, telling women what those options were was against the law. Kind of difficult to imagine in a world where ads for various contraceptive pills air on network television. But it is Margaret Sanger that we have to thank for the existence of the Pill. She realized that it was important for women to be in charge of their own fertility, and helped fund research that led to the development of hormonal contraception. She also started Planned Parenthood, which was connected to the Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut that made birth control legal in the US. Imagine living in a world where it was illegal for married couples (because of course single people would never have sex!) to regulate the number and spacing of their children as they saw fit. Then be grateful to Margaret Sanger and her coworkers that you live in a world where you can decide if and when to have children based on what's best for you and your family.

Never mix your liquors

I'm still recovering from a night of celebrating a friend's birthday perhaps a little too vigorously, especially considering the infrequency with which I imbibe. And so I'm led to thinking about the temperance movement, and its connection to women's rights.

One of the things I find really interesting is the way that basically all the reform movements of the early 1800s in the US were interconnected- temperance, abolition, dress reform, education reform, diet reform, prison reform, etc. And many of these movements were connected to women's rights. Why? Because the educated women of the upper classes who were drawn to this work, partly out of a sense of moral obligation and probably also partly because they were bored (since they weren't supposed to work outside them home) were not allowed to be equal participants. And after being told they couldn't speak publicly in mixed meetings, or at all, and being asked to confine their reform work only to that labor that was appropriate for ladies, they got a bit cranky. The birth of women's rights in the US can be traced back to an international abolition conference in London, where the female delegates (who'd been sent as voting delegates by their American chapters) weren't allowed to speak or vote. They were allowed to sit in their own little section and observe. The dedicated female abolitionists at this meeting were, to say the least, slightly perturbed. And that feeling fermented and eventually became a movement.

Strolling through wikipedia you'll find that many women who were associated with the temperance movement (esp. the Women's Christian Temperance Union) were also suffragists. And since they each deserve an entry of their own, I'll link you to a few of them.

Frances Willard
Susan B Anthony (who will get her own post later on this month)
Amelia Bloomer (a perfect example of the intersection of different reforms)

Elizabeth I

March is Women's History Month, and in honor of that, I'm going to try to write about a different woman I admire every day.
Today's woman owes partly to the fact that I went to see The Other Boleyn Girl last night.
Elizabeth I has long been one of my heroes. After her father, Henry VIII, executed her mother, Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth went from being first in line for the throne (in front of her older sister, Mary) to not being in line at all. The people running things for her brother, Edward, during his brief reign did what they could to make England a Protestant nation. When Edward died and Mary became queen, she became known as Bloody Mary for the number of executions she ordered in her quest to bring the English church and people back to Rome.
Elizabeth came to the throne after her siblings had caused significant religious and political turmoil. She was a woman doing a man's job in a man's world. And she did it better than any man had done it before. She had an official policy of not caring precisely what a person's religious views were, as long as they were loyal to her throne. Her father had been a true Renaissance man who encouraged the growth of art, science and law in his court, and she did the same, reigning over the golden age of England. She refused to marry and let a husband take away her power, and styled herself as the Virgin Queen, but she almost certainly wasn't actually a virgin.
I think in many ways, the female leaders of today would do well to examine Queen Elizabeth's style, because she was respected as a queen without having to sacrifice her feminity, and women in power still struggle with that challenge.