The year-long program about Susan B. Anthony intrigues me. I’m especially interested in how women frame the issue of “equal rights.” One of the organizers, Nora Bredes, in her discussion published in the Rochester Review, makes nothing of the fact that women have outnumbered men in college since at least 1983.
Apparently, the SBA program will not give any attention to this and other areas where females have the advantage, such as women’s better health, exemption from military service, reproductive and automatic parental rights, lower accountability for crimes they commit and disproportionately large share of consumer spending.
Not that I’m surprised. My observation is that women strive for “equal rights” only when they stand to benefit and rarely, if at all, when they stand to lose. This really makes it difficult to take women as seriously as Susan B. Anthony hoped. She said in 1872, “For any state to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people, is to pass a bill of attainder, or, an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land.”
An article on the website of the Anthony Center for Women’s Leadership, “What Would Susan Say?” is another interesting example, making an issue of the sex composition in Congress. Only 15 percent female! Does anyone really think men don’t or can’t represent women’s interests?
And never mind about the homeless who are only 10 percent female, the imprisoned which are only 10 percent female, workplace deaths that are only 5 percent female and casualties of war less than 1 percent female. These statistics, and the 56 percent of voters who are women, are apparently not important in the discussion of “equal rights.”
As for women being “architects of peace,” they are far from it. Condoleeza Rice is an architect of war in Iraq, like Margaret Thatcher, who invaded a tiny helpless island with nuclear weapons, Indira Gandhi who spearheaded India’s acquisition of nuclear capability and Madeleine Albright who facilitated U.S. military action in Bosnia.
Don’t get me wrong. I love women. Many women I talk to about these issues plainly see the unfairness feminism has created. Prominent people though, especially women like the SBA program organizers, keep the blinders on. The best I can do is call it selfishness when I see it and plan on taking women seriously when they take me seriously, too.Then again, it will probably have to wait until some Title IX lawsuits.
-Marc RoemerBA 1988, MS 1997
