In honor of the 100th anniversary of the signing of the 19th Amendment, when women won the right to vote in the United States, I'm sharing an excerpt from my long-in-the-works book The Spiritual Mission of a Princess.
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SECOND-CLASS CITIZEN
Diana Frances Spencer knew a thing or two about being a second-class citizen although she was born into a wealthy, aristocratic English family and married into perhaps the most renowned royal family in the world.
“‘In the Spencer family the gender issue
is a big one,’” biographer Sarah Bradford wrote, citing a Spencer cousin,
“‘women are very much second-class citizens.’” Diana’s sense of being “lesser
than” began at birth. After Diana’s two older sisters were born, the pressure
intensified for her mother to produce a son to inherit the family title; but
when a boy was born, the malformed infant died within days.
“Diana was intended to be the replacement
child, the longed-for heir,” reported Bradford. “By the time she was born, her
parents’ marriage was in trouble, which the arrival of yet another girl did
nothing to improve.” So, by all accounts, Diana’s feeling of being a
disappointment went deep, wounding her on many levels, diminishing any
self-confidence, and perhaps setting up the more suspicious and manipulative nature
of her personality.
It also seems the naïve, yet headstrong
Diana felt like a “second-class citizen” in her ill-suited marriage to Prince
Charles, an older, cerebral man who was caught in his own web of deep
disappointment. She similarly felt “lesser than” in his family’s stuffy, staid
and paternalistic world where it appeared, to this heart-centered young woman,
the Palace made decisions based on duty first at all costs and desires of the
heart be damned. (That strident sense of duty may have worked in earlier
monarchic decades, maybe even served a higher purpose at times, but not in the
more open, free-spirited modern world emerging—a world Diana came to
represent.)
~~~
Many
women, for thousands of years of patriarchal laws, have not only felt like second-class citizens, but
have been regarded and treated as less important than men. Thwarted by their
religions, governments and families, denied education and work opportunities to
earn their own income, generations of women had their dreams, ideas and talents
squashed. A few found ways to flourish in their personal goals and public
ambitions—usually at a great cost or compromise—and there were certain women
who used what they had been denied to help set others free.
“Long
before she was First Lady, Abigail Adams was a trusted advisor and supporter of
husband John’s political efforts, and shared his patriotic fervor,” wrote the
authors of Reflecting Freedom. While he was away with the Congress, she,
like thousands of other women before and since, took care of family and farm
and whatever business the men left behind when they went off to govern or to
war. “John and Abigail shared their devotion to the cause of freedom, their
politics, and their ambition for his advancement, but their views were not
aligned on one issue. On March 31, 1776, Abigail wrote to her husband John as
he worked on the formation of the new nation….”:
....in
the New Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I
desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to
them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the
husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuilar care
and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determine to foment a Rebellion,
and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or
Representation.
The
notion of “second-class citizen” was so ingrained in the patriarchal mindset at
the time (not only about women, but about Native Americans, all people of
color, and anyone else considered “lesser than” because of some prejudice
against them) that Abigail Adams’ request fell on deaf ears. No one “remembered
the ladies”! Moreover, according to Gail Collins’ book America’s Women: “John’s answer was, ‘As to your extraordinary code
of laws, I cannot but laugh.’”
Over
200 years later, fifteen-year-old Heidi Schreck from
Wenatchee, Washington, put herself through college by giving speeches about the
United States Constitution. As an adult, she turned her knowledge and
experience into an award-winning Broadway play, “What the Constitution Means to
Me.” The play is witty and shocking and revelatory as it discloses that the
actual word “woman” is not mentioned in the Constitution. Not once.
Not anywhere.
When
Susan B. Anthony met Stanton a few years later, a chance meeting that changed
the world, they formed a lifelong partnership of political activism and
organizing. “Elizabeth and Susan were a perfect complement to each other,”
continued Eileen Tannich Gose and Kathy Wiederstein DeHerrera in Reflecting
Freedom. “Elizabeth had bold and radical ideas and Susan possessed
independence and self-discipline. Together, they worked better than they did
alone and they made a formidable team—Susan supplied the facts and Elizabeth
wrote the speeches.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton became known for her radical,
sometimes incendiary, writings; but Susan B. Anthony didn’t mince her words
either: “It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we,
the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.... Men,
their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.”
Around
the time of this first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, Harriet
Tubman was planning her escape from a Maryland plantation. Born a slave
(records mark the date around 1825), Tubman grew into a barely five-foot-tall,
fiercely determined abolitionist leader and political activist. She escaped
from slavery, found her way to freedom above the Mason Dixon Line, yet returned
south and, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as
the Underground Railroad, guided many slaves to their freedom. This Moses of her people said: “I freed a
thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were
slaves.”
The
new century brought many “uppity, contrary women” into the public sphere! One
of those groundbreakers was Margaret Sanger. Sanger, a “nurse who had watched
her own mother die from the strain of too many childbirths, promoted birth
control,” explained Gose and DeHerrera. “In 1914 she was arrested for obscenity
charges for mailing birth control literature, and two years later she was
jailed for opening a birth control clinic in the Brooklyn slums.” The authors
write how this was a time when “many women wanted to control the number of
children they bore. Also, pregnancy was risky; during World War I the U.S.
women who died in childbirth outnumbered the men who died in battle.” Margaret
Sanger continued her work for women of all classes and became even more
effective in saving women’s lives after 1921 when she founded the organization
later known as Planned Parenthood.
Once
the 19th Amendment was signed into law in 1920, Alice Paul, and
hundreds of other women, didn’t stop there—especially since it took decades
more for women of color to be allowed to exercise their right to vote. Paul
knew that the fight for gender equality was not over and in 1923, on the 75th
anniversary of the original Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New
York, she organized a second meeting to introduce and launch the Equal Rights
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And in 2020, we were still working on it!
All
of these revolutionary women were not only guides to freedom for others—and
many did not live to enjoy the freedoms they fought for—but they also acted as
clarion calls of courage for us today, to awaken us all, so we demand our “unalienable rights.” ~
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