The Regeneration of Women in American Society: Has It Been Co-Opted? / #criticalthinkers #humanrights

updated 4:36 pm 6/24/18 (2100 words, 6 minute read)

Conviction to start new journeys is needed to motor over and beyond self-doubt and a heart brought to a lull through the travails of life; of dreams believed to be perished. Courage to fire up the heart and soul is needful to defy complacency that settles in. Courage that refuses quiet submission to time; to not rocking the boat; to not doing leaving off doing great ‘life work,’ and courage to surrendering to a mindset that welcomes endless grey clouds and naysayers that say, ‘it is over.’

Such an inward action requires critical, thoughtful introspection. Critical thinkers can arrive on the scene from anywhere. We are, in our best moments, the protectors and creators of freedom and liberty. An education in the academic sense is not as necessary as a willingness to grow one’s critical thinking instincts, including the power of observation, reflection, and expression. To think critically then, is not a negative connotation, but a mindful practice of detaching from one’s own preconceived biases, prejudices, and ideological view of the world, and allowing self to enter a non-tribal and objective stance. This requires mindful introspection that brings a ready awareness of how our own thinking has been shaped over time, and who and what has impacted it. More so, why such forces have purposed to shape our thinking in a certain way.

In her sixties and seventies, my maternal grandmother, Elena, mother of seven, began to paint. She took art classes, changed a room in the house into her personal studio, and painted long hours day after day. She kept an old radio and a large table with all her brushes, palettes, and finished work. The walls of her house were lined with her work. She painted woman, still-lifes, scenes of people.. it varied. Dozens and dozens of canvases were produced, shared amongst the family, and sold locally. She was both mathematical and abstract in her work, detailed and original in her methods, and  inspired by Paul Klee.

A frail woman of ninety-four years of age now, it has been nearly nearly two decades since she stopped painting. It was a twenty year period of work that she produced, a twenty year period of her own regeneration forever changing the life experience of the family around her. This eruption of passion, creativity, focus and persistence extrapolated itself, I am certain, into the lives of her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. I can see how her self-empowerment gave new lifeblood to the heart and mind of her husband, my late-grandfather, and as a clear marker that one’s life is not over in old age, but ready to be regenerated again and again.

She was not allowed to go to college. Her Dad had told her that was not for her. She married a lawyer and birthed seven children. In the adolescence of her oldest children (my aunts), the country’s government ceased, and the posh life they had enjoyed stopped abruptly. The new leader had ordered that the bourgeoisie’s children had to go work in the sugar cane fields as laborers. They would have to squander their education and dreams for the benefit of the agenda of the new administration. My grandfather would not have this be. The decision was made to leave. Nothing could be brought on the plane. They left their their wealth, property, family and culture, scarcely being allowed to leave with all the children. The authorities hassled them at every step of the departure attempting to make their exit as difficult as possible.

This was Cuba in 1959. It was the end of an era.

There was no time, room or space for Elena to flourish. The time for her to create her way had not arrived. The seven children had to be fed, the clothes and house had to be cleaned, a new language had to be learned; a culture assimilated to as the 1960s started in America. Her husband, Enrique, a sensitive and caring man, known affectionately by the family as Papí, left the legal profession of Cuba and would work long hours year after year in the insurance industry. The family was tight-knit. Mamí and Papí were the backbone working like a tag team to make it all work for the kids. It was an operation and labor of love.

……………………………..

About one hundred and thirty years prior, in the Seneca Falls convention of 1848, women in the United States of America had begun a forward march to boldly demand equal political rights with the movement to establish voting rights.

 In 1870, Victoria Woodhull, a writer,

 a newspaper publisher and stockbroker, declared her candidacy for the presidency of the United States. This was the first time a woman attempted to lead the country. She advocated for the protection of human rights at all moments of life, even in the womb. So important was the idea of human rights in the womb to her that she co-wrote an article with her sister, “The Slaughter of Innocents,” bringing awareness to a growing apathy in the country:

“… Wives deliberately permit themselves to become pregnant of children and then, to prevent becoming mothers, as deliberately murder them while yet in their wombs. Can there be a more demoralized condition than this?… We are aware that many women attempt to excuse themselves for procuring abortions, upon the ground that it is not murder. But the fact of resort to so weak an argument only shows the more palpably that they fully realize the enormity of the crime.”

Mrs. Woodhull had an education, and achieved a level of independence that gave her the breathing room to develop herself and her aspirations. On a very humanistic level, she was able to operate on a different playing level, not needing to scrounge for her basic human needs, perhaps due to a moderately wealthy and uninterrupted upbringing,  Woodhull literally had the time to think critically, write, organize with others and campaign for a change in society. Invariably, her financial independence and educational wherewithal allowed for her to plan and work for more lofty aspirations.

Another woman of the same time as Mrs. Woodhull, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, editor of the newspaper, The Revolution, and mother of seven, wrote on the issue of human abortion too:

“There must be a remedy for such a crying evil as this. But where shall it be found, at least begin, if not in the complete enfranchisement and elevation of women? Forced
maternity, not out of legal marriage but within it, must lie at the bottom of a vast  proportion of such revolting outrages against the laws of nature and our common humanity.”

The Revolution 1 (10): 146 – 147 (March 12, 1868)

From where, it is pertinent to ask, did this cavalcade of women appear? Where there forerunner women pioneers before them who had actuated in like manner as these?

Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, was the first woman in the United States to earn a medical degree. Apparently, she found it important to also expand on the most precious of rights, seeing that human rights start with the right to life, with everything else being a distant second. 

“Little by little the faint specks will appear in the enlarging cell, which marked the head, the trunk, the budding extremities; tiny channels will groove themselves in every direction, red particles of inconceivable minuteness will appear in them – they move, they tend towards one central spot, were little channel has enlarged, has assumed a special form, has already begun to palpitate; finally the living blood in the small arteries joins that in the heart, and the circulation is established. From every delicate incomplete part, minute nerve threads shoot forth, they tend invariably towards their centres. They join the brain, spinal marrow, the ganglia. The nervous system is formed. The cell rapidly enlarges, it attaches to the maternal organism become more powerful… The human type is surely attained, and after a brief period of consolidation the young existence, created from that simple cell, will awake to further development of independent life.”

These woman of yore, created not only a true movement of women’s rights and womanly achievement as equal and dignified as that of man, complete with the right to be citizens with equal citizenship rights, but were forward-thinking forces, whom had catapulted into the national stage through the attainment of critical thinking and the forms of publishing production. This must have only been possible once their basic human needs were not at stake. For who begins to change hearts and minds on such a scale if they have not their basic needs met?

FOR WHO BEGINS TO CHANGE HEARTS AND MINDS ON SUCH A SCALE IF THEY HAVE NOT THEIR BASIC NEEDS MET?

Many have actually— and it has been within the struggle of life that some of the most outstanding individuals have moved mountains within our hearts and minds, even without access to the available forms of publishing production in their times. Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, though not published writers managed to leave their mark solely through their presence and their heart work for others, at the last, having their stories historically captured and distributed through the available forms of production in those times, and now in the present, with the reality of the digital internet age. These last two were unspoken hero’s operating at times in the cover of night, away from the gleam of established society, yet wholly within the light of God’s will; not having their life’s work sung during the time of their contribution, nonetheless captured for posterity for all of us to read about now. These two ladies had no meaningful, formal education, but were guided through a very Christian morality that imparted wisdom and understanding to them. 

These women of the 18th century were brave when no one asked them to be. This topic of human rights was inextricably woven into their own campaign to bring about a respect for women in society. Human rights encompassed their social purpose and struggle. Their ability to think critically, organize and campaign through spoken and written word; even through the ownership or use of printing presses (forms of production), allowed them to reach the level of being able to educate the public, impressing upon others hearts and minds through the message of their writings, presence of life. Woodhull’s action to run for executive office was groundbreaking. Blackwell’s achievement of a medical degree was the first of its kind for a woman. Stanton’s newspaper organization achievement set a beachhead that would not be erased. Elena’s twenty years of art production as a women in her senior years forever changed a family’s understanding of when it is time to give up. 

But such women are not heralded today. The current forms of production are largely held together through the control of what is known as the ‘mainstream media.’ A conglomeration of connected and independent enterprises mostly housed under one overarching ideology that is socialist-democratic and in staunch alliance with the abortion industry eugenics view that humans need to be managed somehow, rather than be empowered to be these critical thinkers.

In effect, these early forerunner women as Victoria Woodhull, Elizabeth Stanton and Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, signaled the regeneration of womanhood, and have had their contributions silenced in favor of a competing mindset that does not see human life in the womb as separate to the human life of the mother, nor the right of humans as existent until they are born into the world at full-term.

How can the ‘needs of women’ be met if abortion has been offered as a viable solution, even a human right, that the woman may have a second chance at life at the expense of another human life? Does the act of killing a child in the womb require a degree of indifference? Are not the promulgators of abortionism (eugenics) also pushing a global sexual revolution, (Target Africa: Neocolonialism in the 21st Century, Obianuju Ekeochoa)? In America, have we not been taught to believe that it is morally fine to kill the unborn, and that in fact, it is an exercise of freedom and liberty?

How does the violence to the human womb of the woman co-opt the social regeneration of women? What message are we sending to each new generation on the sanctity of life?

No longer constrained into her role as an exceptional chef connoisseur within her own home, Elena, became a creator of content, and in effect, a regenerated women of accomplishment beyond her work as a mother and survivor of incredible challenges. An exile from Cuba months into the totalitarian regime of Fidel Castro, she was able to finally disembark, take the beach, climb the ramparts and plant her flag. 

Certainly, my understanding of the woman, whom my late-eldest cousin began to call ‘Mamí,’ was inextricably woven with her art, and her art, for me, was woven into my understanding of who she was. Her daily purpose said, ‘I am not old, I am young. I am productive to my soul. I keep moving and caring for my heart, for my mind.’ In doing so, she regenerated herself, continuing onward from where her own father had told her what her place and station was.

In our best moments, I think, we grow and unloose our souls, somewhere a garden not seen with eyes grows a little bit each time if we tend to it. It can be cultivated by inward stewardship, both conscious and unconscious, of a very human need to deliver, render, and compliment releases from deep within ourselves. Is that too abstract a thought? Is it beyond comprehension? If so, do some gardening, develop someone else, move to music, write something, sit quietly and then you may understand. The allowance of my grandmother being creative was a powerful action that both gave and received. In her out-pouring of art, Elena, a woman who was told that her place was in the kitchen, created a gentle revolution within herself, a positive disruption, if you will, if not a disentanglement of her humanity as a woman.

Elena “Mamí” and some of her great-grandchildren.