I’m an educator by vocation and profession. I love learning and teaching others. When I was a child, I often lined up my dolls to play school and I was their teacher. I began college as an education major but on the advice of my parents, I switched to business because they feared I could never make a decent living as a teacher. They were right. They never wanted me to be dependent on a man for my wellbeing. I confess to being resentful at the time, handing my mother my mock diploma at graduation and declaring that my “debt was now paid”. However, taking my parent’s advice has served me well. After my mother’s death and my subsequent divorce because of his second incident of infidelity, I eventually returned to my first love, education, earning both a master’s degree in counseling and a doctorate in education to support and advance my career. The combination of my business degree and my education degrees helped me negotiate fulfilling and acceptably high paying positions as a counselor, university administrator and part-time professor.
I’m actually grateful to my parents because my finance, accounting, marketing, organizational behavior, and business law classes proved useful to me in my early business career wherein I made good money and it especially helped me in my work in education and enabled me to build a strong financial investment life that has resulted in financial independence and multiple protections against fraud and financial exploitation over the years.
I am well aware that none of the life I have experienced would have been possible without the fight of the feminist who came before me, opening up access to education, personal banking and investment accounts, as well as the ability buy property in my name and to advocate for myself. I recall having to obtain my husband’s signature in order to get my tubes tied after the birth of my third child. In 1985, the doctor advised that it would be dangerous for me to have another child, and yet my husband’s approval was required. I’m glad that is no longer the case for women today, but some are trying to return to those days.
The workplace was no freer than the hospital for women. At one point, I was subjected to sexual harassment prior to laws protecting women. My choices at the time were to stay at that high paying job and endure it or to leave. I chose to leave that very lucrative finance position only to learn a few months later that my first husband (we’re now divorced) was sexually harassing our young live-in nanny at the time. She also quit. The level of anger and betrayal I felt was nearly overwhelming, but my pastor convinced me that it was my Christian duty to forgive my repentant husband and to take some responsibility for the infidelity. I hurt for me, but I hurt even more for young woman whom he violated in our home. When Donald Trump was confronted with the possibility of his daughter being sexually harassed in the workspace, his response was to say that he hoped that she would have the courage to quit that job. Notice he was not at all interested in prosecuting the harasser or changing the conditions in the workplace for women.
Sadly, our nation remains plagued by the dangerous Trumpian attitudes toward the sexual exploitation of girls and women, where sexually assaulted girls and women are either ignored or even blamed for their own exploitation and sexual assaults by clergy, by wealthy Epstein Island offenders, by random men in public spaces, by dates or boyfriends, by coworkers or bosses, and on college campuses. We are watching the “boys will be boys” defense regarding the gang rape of a female college student by seven fraternity men at Cornell College. For years, judges have given young white men a slap on the risk for their sexual assaults, claiming they didn’t want to ruin his life. Notably, black and brown men were never given a pass that way.
What does it say about our country that we knowingly elected a president who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy and who was accused of sexual assault by 26 different women and was eventually found liable for sexual assault in court? It turns out that he was besties with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and his name is mentioned as a perpetrator in the files. What does it say about our society when female sexual assault victims are bombarded by questions like: why was she there? why was she dressed like that? why was she drinking so much? why didn’t she run or fight back? why was she there alone?
Our society, including too many women, hold women responsible for the lustful and unhinged behavior of men as though men cannot be expected to exercise decent levels of self-control and women must somehow protect men from their own despicable behaviors. Jesus’ answer to men was to take responsibly. “If your eye offends you, puck it out!” The Taliban’s answer to the problem is to have women cover themselves from head to toe in public and to be escorted by a male at all times. Women in Afghanistan are no longer permitted to even speak in public nor to take public transportation alone. In some countries, the shame of a woman being sexually assaulted by a man leads to her marriage to her perpetrator or worse, her death at the hands of family members. I’m concerned that there are Christian nationalist in our country who want to impose some of these restrictions on women to protect men from their uncontrollable lust. You hear them on social media talking about how some women deserve to be sexually abused for how they present themselves.
It is despicable that child marriage is legal in the U.S. despite the overwhelming evidence that child marriage is emotionally, educationally, physically and financially harmful to young women and yet this Republican Congress has failed to pass the “Child Marriage Prevention Act of 2024” that was introduced by Democrats on August 1, 2024. As of today, only thirteen blue states have raised the minimum age to 18 years old for all parties. Girls as young as 10 years old have been married off to adult men in recent years, although most are 16 and 17 years old. We know that human brains aren’t even fully developed until our mid-twenties, so it makes no sense to allow a girl to marry a grown man.
The saddest part to me is that Republican women, particularly those with religious values and who genuinely care about others are completely blind to the conservative policy agenda that is designed to protect men who sexually assault girls and women, while simultaneously actively working to remove the voting rights of women, to prevent women from accessing bodily autonomy, and placing limitations on their access to healthcare, education, jobs, promotions in their chosen fields, and even their right to leave a bad marriage.
The vice president, JD Vance, and Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, are advocating that women remain in abusive marriages by pushing for an end to no-fault divorce. In fact, conservative lawmakers in red states like Texas, Louisiana, Nebraska and Oklahoma are actively trying to end no-fault divorce for irreconcilable differences. This means the state will get to decide if conditions in a marriage like infidelity, cruelty, excessive drinking, imprisonment, or physical abuse are bad enough to warrant a divorce. In 1969, California ended what was a nightmare scenario that kept women trapped in unhappy and even dangerous living conditions by passing no-fault divorce. The first result after the passage of no-fault divorce was a decrease in female suicides. Cases of domestic violence and women being killed by their husbands went down. As expected, the divorce rates increased for a time, then steadily declined. Since then, no-fault divorce is legal in all 50 states, but Republicans are trying to reverse that and that is especially scary for the health, welfare, and safety of women. Republican women are told that liberals hate men and marriage and families, opting for debauchery and cat ownership instead, and so they are apt to agree with the “sanity of marriage” without realizing that things can go terribly wrong within it and a safe path out of a nightmare will be blocked, particularly for women.
That conversation I had with my mahjong friend last week briefly continued this week when I was able to assure her that I looked up the facts about post-birth abortion and that harming or even killing a baby after it is born is illegal in all fifty states and that the comments of former Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia, who is a practicing pediatric neologist were taken out of context. I assured her that doctors offer parents at the birth of non-viable infants the choice between palliative care or extraordinary measures to save the life of the newborn. No one is actively aborting healthy late term babies. Her response was that she was glad to hear it, but she was concerned that our country was moving away from valuing human life and I agreed with her. I agreed that we need to do everything we can to value and protect all human life. We agreed that we were torn up over the newborn who was recently discovered in a garbage can. I briefly mentioned how tragic the situation was and how desperate that young mother must have been to do such a horrible thing.
What I am discovering is that Republican women genuinely care about people. However, they are under-educated by design. Because of this, they are particularly vulnerable to misinformation and easily manipulated to vote against their own interests and those of their daughters. It is evident that they didn’t realize the harm caused to women when we no longer have access to medically necessary abortions because they have been manipulated to believe that liberals do not value the lives of babies. They do not know that less than 1% of fetuses are aborted after 21 weeks’ gestation and that the vast majority of those aborted that late is because the fetus is not viable or the mother’s life is in grave danger. Forcing continued pregnancies is causing preventable deaths of women in red states and forcing the birth of horribly deformed non-viable infants is leading to another kind of heartache. If they knew the reality about the rise of infant and pregnancy associated deaths (John Hopkins University study) since the abortion bans have taken effect, they would vote differently. Texas women experienced a 50% rise in the sepsis rate of women who miscarried in the second trimester. Physicians in red states report delaying life-saving care for pregnant women until they become critically ill. We must have the difficult conversations with Republican women to expose the truth of these Republican policies.
Since the abortion bans took effect in red states, the birth rate has more than doubled among Hispanic and black women and other racial minorities. Not so for the many more white children Republicans hoped to have. As expected, the infant mortality rates also increased nearly 11% as severely sick babies (non-viable) were forced to be born.
We must also expose the fact that Republicans are actively trying to limit female access to the ballot box by requiring our current sir names to match our birth names. According to the League of Women Voters, since 2004 women have been registered to vote at higher rates than men. And women make up slightly more than 50% of the U.S. population. And black women have proven to be the most motivated voters. This gives Republicans an incentive to influence our voting habits whether by redistricting or making names an issue. Personally, my sir name has changed three time during my lifetime from birth and two separate marriages. Thankfully, I have my actual birth certificate, marriage certificates, a driver’s license, a social security card, and a current U.S. Passport. I’ve kept all these records safe and accessible. But how many women have them and know where they are?
Of course, there are women-hating influencers on social media and in some churches saying that women should not be able to vote at all. They want to repeal the 19th Amendment. These men and some young women, want women to believe that they are intellectually inferior to men. They themselves know that nothing is further from the truth and these men are terrified that they now have to compete with educated, articulate, strongminded women. Their insecurity is leading them to seek ways to dominate and oppress women. Sadly, some young women are willing to allow their husbands to vote on their behalf. We must educate and empower our daughters, nieces, and granddaughters to defend their civil and human rights or they will lose them. Voting affects the policies that affect our actual welfare, freedoms, and future prospects. We must never abandon our right to choose those who represent our best interests.
This post is getting a bit long, so next week I will address the not-so-subtle Republican policy attacks on female access to education, jobs, careers choices, and promotions by the Republicans in charge.