Backward and Unequal

I just read an article by Rebecca Solnit in the Guardian from back in the 2018 midterms called
How many husbands control the votes of their wives? We'll never know.

In it, she shared some of her own and others' experiences door-knocking during the campaign and finding women who whispered their support while looking over their shoulders, or men who yelled there were no Democrats in the house, though the voter rolls showed their wives were registered as such. I remember hearing some discussion of this in 2020 by Lyz Lenz as well.

The thing that made me want to talk about Solnit's piece is her wider point, though. She makes it early and late in the piece:

The women’s suffrage movement clashed with laws that defined women as, essentially, the property or wards of their husbands who had the right to control their bodies, their labor, their earnings, and their assets. It clashed with custom, which held that women’s sphere was private life and role was deference and obedience to the man of the house. Despite the last of those laws ending in the 1990s (when the last US state recognized marital rape as a crime), that clash is not in the past tense.

As a white girl and then a woman born in the U.S. in the later part of the 20th century, I assumed all of those rights were here to stay and even though I worked to extend them instead of resting, I thought we were standing on stable ground, moving forward in some sense of the word. Phyllis Schlafly, the Moral Majority, and their kind seemed frightening but laughable to me. They were obviously backward.

Yet here we are today, with the Republican Party set on rolling back the 20th century in every way possible, including women being considered people separate from men.

Solnit ends with this:

The conservative agenda is, of course, what you could call marriage inequality, an asymmetrical relationship in which men hold disproportionate power.

The right to vote according to your own conscience and agenda is not really so different than the right to control your own body or have equal access and rights in the workplace. It’s a right that we’re meant to have because the laws say we’re all equal. But we’re not.

She wrote that in 2018, remember, more than three years before the Dobbs decision repealed Roe v. Wade. Marriage equality, equality under the law, bodily autonomy, are all antithetical to the white nationalist theocracy Republicans have in store for us.