Women’s voting rights brought to you by our sponsor CRACKER JACKS.
I opened the Cracker Jacks box looking for the peanuts and the prize (I know, I am too old for that) and I found a piece of paper. The prize was a piece of paper with a young girls face on it. I was hoping for a little metal ball you try to roll into an indentation with the higher number on it. With a photo of a girl was a message, you are supposed to guess who she is/was. [What’s the age range, target market? get them young] You see the girls face on the right side and a message on the left and then you open the photo to see who she is. When I saw what the prize was I had to applaud my gender feminist sisters, they know no limits when it comes to getting into the heads of our children. I read:
CAN YOU GUESS WHO I GREW UP TO BE?
“I was the second of eight children born into a strict Quaker family. My father was a stern man who taught us self-discipline and to believe in our own self-worth. I was an intelligent child, learning to read and write by the time I was three. As a Quaker, I was taught that all people are equal, regardless of gender, race, a belief not shared by most people at the time. In fact, because I was a woman, I never had the legal right to vote in my life-time. Who Am I?”
So, I opened the first panel and find “In her fifty years as a reformer, Susan B. Anthony championed many causes, including the abolishment of slavery and equality for all. But it was her tireless work as an organizer for women’s rights which she is best known. She was convinced that truly equal opportunities for women could not be realized until women gained the right to vote. Twenty years after she resigned as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and fourteen years after her death, the 19th Amendment was ratified, giving women the right to vote. ANTHONY CAN ALSO BE FOUND ON THE SUSAN B. ANTHONY COIN”
Feminist: “Her-story” lessons in Cracker Jacks, what’s next, when you unroll your Toilet Paper you get feminist spin about DV, and rape? Actually, maybe TP is suitable for the BS they spew when it comes to propaganda about such issues.
What they could have had for a prize is an honest note about race or racism instead of a questionable view of sexism. Children could learn that: “Black men got the vote before white women” PLUS the reason for that. [Black men getting the vote first is something feminist cites as proof that they have lower status, not just lower than men, but even lower than black men] Were white men once again being unfair to women? That’s what feminist tell us but the truth is more complex than that. Black men were dying in our wars, white women were not. Children would understand this situation easily. Some of our ancestors had the quaint notion that dying for your country as a requirement because of your gender should have some perks, like voting for instance – voting for other men required to die also, voting for other men who must decide if a war was worth fighting or not. It was a trade off. If you were expected to risk having your face shot off, legs blown off, and often dying painfully of infection on battle fields because we didn’t have the medicines to save you… if yes, you get to vote. [And no, it wasn’t a choice for men either, not an “our body our choice” but it was a requirement that is still a requirement of males today. Its men we put on the front lines not women. Hillary Clinton can say women pay the highest price for war and she and others can say “it’s all front lines now” but if so, why is it almost always males in the body bags or males with their faces blown off or blind or brain damage. Talk is cheap, Hillary, put your daughter in the war zone and see if you still feel the same.
Early Americans thought that if black men had the obligation to risk their lives for our government then they had the right to vote for those who govern us.
If you were alive “back in the day” you would have noticed that husbands worked away from home and women in the home and both contributed to the survival of each other and their children. How much sense would it have made for men building the town, water supply, bridges, storage areas for food shipped in and out of their towns to say, “Wait, let me text my wife and ask her where the fire house should be set up” Oh, we don’t have text, what about a cell phone – Of course he didn’t have a cell phone or land line in the beginning either. And if men did, would they call a wife to ask for her vote about how to lay out the sewer and water lines, where they bank and jail should go… And they would not spend two to four hours on the horse to ask her permission at each juncture either. She would have thought he had lost it. Get out of my kitchen, get back to work, bring home the bacon, or deer, or a nice dress, or jewelry but stop asking me such stupid questions, how the *$&@* should I know where the saw mill should be located?
Life was so different then that we really can’t judge our ancestors decisions. What we might have hated then, stuck at home or working in the bottom of a ship at age 14 for a year or two at sea [Boys were often “forced” to do that.] Most of us would not want either choice.
It’s not likely the twin sister of that 14 year-old sent to sea, or coal mines, or behind an Ox all day in the fields under a hot sun, no shower waiting at home, would really have wanted “equal work for equal pay”. If we could go back and ask it’s not too likely that most 14 year-olds, male or female would have wanted to be in the bottom of a stinky old boat wondering if, like many other boats back then, it would be your under the seas tomb. Few teens, male or female would like working for thousands of hours in a dark, smoky, dirty mine shaft while knowing that if the mine collapsed you would deal with hunger, starve, run out of water, or suffocate in a dark cold place where no one would ever find your body. You would die thinking dark thoughts in a dark place knowing you would never see your loved ones again. It wasn’t those jobs women wanted; was it?
Life isn’t as black and white as what most of us have learned about gender. If we learned to see shades of gray or look at the ways men sacrificed in work or war, then what looked like oppression and misogyny to females taught that they were oppressed and men becomes something else. Few men had the vote from the beginning. While some upper-class women in Great Britain were getting arrested while blocking city streets the police arresting them didn’t have the vote either.
And of course you can’t put that in a tiny little book in a cracker jacks box. If children can’t get the gender stories in context and are simply being primed to see history has “his-story” while not admitting that they are trying to tell “her-story” and in her story men don’t count for much… maybe we should just let kids have toys to play with and save the indoctrination for college where some of them are able to question biases that need to be questioned.
