#Women of the past were just like us!

[antis-hero]

Finding all the names of women who supported the anti-suffrage cause is really important to me because I can sometimes hunt down more information on them and learn about their lives. Many suffragettes have books on books about them, but sometimes all I find on antis are their writings and then a gravestone. The main figures have whole Wikipedia pages on them, but even then there’s less information than I’d like to see.

When I find more about these conservative women, I can see the lives of what Laurel Thatcher Ulrich called the “well-behaved women” that don't often make history. It looks like the antis who held local, non-political positions to help working moms and children, support victims of WWI, encourage historic preservation, and much more.

Others focused heavily on education, whether it be receiving an education, becoming teachers, or writing many, many books. Some others lived a bit more quietly, educating their children themselves or supporting them as they went to public school, caring for or working alongside their husbands, and managing their home while supporting antis as a hobby of sorts.

I’ve also learned about how odd these women could be, given that all I known of them before was the assumption that they were all old, stuffy, and quiet. Many antis could be reserved, like Madeleine Dahlgren, who once only sent a written letter to Congress on the issue of suffrage while suffragists were there to speak. But other antis, like Mary Wilson Thompson, were much more outgoing and aggressive in their activism. Thompson once asking a politician she knew to send out 260 thousand pieces of anti-suffrage literature to West Virginia and chased down a politician demanding he sign a statement that would let her act on his behalf during the attempt ratification of the 19th Amendment. When speaking for her cause against suffragists, which would end in her victory, as Delaware would not ratify the 19th Amendment, antis lifted her chair and paraded around with her when they won two decisive votes.

All I knew of these conservative women were their “negative” and “weak” qualities. Because of that, I couldn’t have seen their conditions as anything other than sad and powerless. But the truth is that whether they were “well-behaved” or ambitious, lived quietly or did much, conservative women of the past were just as unique, influential, and happy as we consider the average woman today. Our standards back then may have been different, but that doesn’t mean women lived the uniform lives we assume they did.

[hadesoftheladies]

women be like "i can't believe women of the past were so restricted by men like that, i'd never accept it" and then wear heels

[sukibenders]

"I'm team feminist/feminism!" But will quickly drag a female character through the mud without sympathy for their circumstances just because they don't fit your ideals, will get mad when poc criticize a female character's actions that are very thinly coded in racism and say "support her crimes!" while ignoring how that often leads to the harm of poc characters, will shade woc characters or put them on higher pedestals than their yte counterparts while ignoring the harm they face while trying to meet your standards, will victim blame those who suffer (and are still suffering) from abuse when they act out in ways you deem "wrong" because of it, following up with the last point will mock and laugh at said abuse to uplift another female character (pitting women against women, even when the narrative does not ask for that), will dismiss any valuable argument displayed if the said female character is a little mean but then go and say "why can't female characters be mean? 🙄"

I could go on.

[fluentisonus]

guys I'm going to be honest with you I don't think this is a fair comparison at all

[mothsantics]

kind of really sick of transmisogyny being so common on literally every online space i go to

this post has been inspired by someone talking about how sick they are of "exclusionists", that then goes on to include words transfems use to describe specific transmisogynystic behavior next to terms like "transmed" and "trender"

if you sincerely think that the terms transfems have used to describe the hostility (and notably, exclusionism!) fellow queers show towards us is equivalent to terms ACTUAL TRANSPHOBES use, then you need to reflect on exactly why you might think that

[britneyshakespeare]

wait james somerton sounds a lot like some people on tumblr when they start spouting off about queer history or supposed controversies within it. is that where you guys are getting your stuff? is it james somerton brain poisoning?

[mariemariemaria]

i really dont know whats driving all the pro-corset nonsense but its so annoying. girls were put into corsets from young ages, sometimes before they even reached puberty. mothers were often the ones forcing their daughters to wear corsets even though they didn't want to and rebelled against it. honestly i think being critical of corsets is important when discussing today's insane beauty and weight standards for women. 'tiny waist' crazes came in and out of fashion and waist goals could be as small as 16 inches, which is insane and there's no way you're gonna convince me that that's healthy or normal or feminist. how is that any different to women having weight or thinness goals that prioritise their beauty over their health? how is the fluctuating fashion for different waist sizes any different to how different women's body shapes go in and out of fashion these days? body shapes which are so extreme that they are impossible to achieve without either starving yourself ('herorin chic') or getting surgery (bbls). i think we do a disservice to ourselves if we ignore the similarities and dont learn from history tbqh

[maybeicanbesaved]

got into yet another fight with my mom, again about voting/the election, she said that she’s only voted once in her life and never cares to again because she ‘doesn’t care about politics’, saying that shit almost proudly?? and it set me off for obvious reasons, then she got mad at me for saying it’s because she’s privileged and ‘most’ shit doesn’t affect her directly so she can afford ‘not to care’

[dunndunie]

Why are radfems like 10x more misogynistic and lesbophobic than the so called "TRAs" that they're up against

[puthyflapps]

Swifties prove everyday that they’re the dumbest people on the internet and that’s really saying something cuz I’ve dealt directly with blarkes

[rowanthestrange]

The thing is, you could’ve made Rogue entering to “I’m The Bad Guy, Duh.” easily make sense if you’d wanted to. You’d have just written that he thinks he’s a bad guy all cool and nefarious - Rogue neither refers to himself negatively, and the Doctor says he’s cool not him (admittedly you’d still have to explain him pre-approaching the string quartet to play it, or it be magic but whatever).

You have Rogue think he’s A Bad Boy, but the Doctor be all ‘no you’re not there’s a heart of gold there’. He wouldn’t have freed himself with an I Am A Time Lord speech giving himself authority over Rogue, it would be appealing to Rogue’s good side that he doesn’t actually want to incinerate him etc. Rogue would choose to do the ‘good guy’ decisions himself, not have them imposed. He’d convince Rogue killing the birds is wrong, not just take his stuff and modify it - he’d get Rogue to reveal his better nature. The Doctor would convince him to leave his gun on the ship.

This is what would bite them later, where they’d both know, maybe with just a look, that if Rogue could have just shot the birds stuck to the glue trap, they wouldn’t have been in this mess. With Rogue then acting correctly ‘sometimes you need someone to be the bad guy’ by taking the controller when the Doctor was busy snogging him and dispatching Ruby himself.

Leading into a finale where Ruby is in a different dimension and relying on her battle-earpiece skills to fend off 5 murderous birds as long as possible, giving us an opportunity to engage with whatever her reality warping powers are but it ‘could’ just be dimensional weirdness, and if the TARDIS was still the one who programmed the teleport she knows where Ruby is, and luckily for her if unluckily for the universe, the dimensions are now all bleeding at the edges and seeping out and Doctor Who is a TV show, yada yada yada.

[eowyntheavenger]

It's just one of those days when I'm REALLY mad. One of the editors at work has always been rude, condescending and disrespectful towards me. But of course he treats my male coworkers with the utmost respect, so they think he's a normal and reasonable person. Yesterday I heard my male teammate talking about sending the editor emails updating him on a project, and I was like wow... When I've sent him emails he has literally lost his temper because I was "wasting his time" by "emailing him too much," FOR WORK, ABOUT THE WORK WE DO, meanwhile it's totally fine for men to send him as many emails and updates as they want because????? Like what the fuck? I've had it. I've fucking had it. I'm just done.

To clarify: the "too many emails" that I sent the editor were literally either a) me correcting typos that he had posted ON OUR WEBSITE AND FAILED TO NOTICE or b) drafts of papers that he needed to receive so that he could edit them. Because the authors (who we contracted with) did not have his email address. I was literally a messenger. Meanwhile, the emails my male teammate was sending him were needless little updates of "I'll send you my paper soon!" and then two days later "I'll send you my paper soon, but it's not ready yet!" and then two days later the same thing. Like. SOME OF THESE THINGS WERE NECESSARY. OTHERS WERE NOT. Guess who got criticized and insulted, though? Me.

[universalthaumaturge]

ok i get why anthy has creature of delirium now

[quatregats]

Have been thinking for the past few days re: a post I was reading and I'd really like to know if there's any specifically Nayar feminist work that's been done, (1) because I think that could be really interesting if it was written by actual Nayars and (2) there's just so much feminist work which I really struggle with since a lot of those things they discuss, while they are major critiques and important to raise for many situations, assume that things have been one way for everyone, particularly materially, and I'd like a discussion from a Nayar perspective that addresses other things without stemming from that assumption. In particular with nuances of caste because I think that's a very important part of the discussion to have, but also because the way that patriarchal structures do and don't play out in Nayar society is very different from many other cultural backgrounds, and I'd just appreciate reading something that doesn't automatically assume that xyz thing is true for everyone and their ancestors.

[mejomonster]

Usually i dont have long hair so i guess its just hitting like a truck lately how femininely long hair is viewed, how much its used to identify women, how shallowly many people expect women To have long hair

And wowza does it make me realize 1 why my mom must've internally felt such a great need to make me grow my hair 2 makes me immediately wanna chop it the fuck off, because the people most pleased with long hair are the people id like to stay away from me 3 kind of irksome cause im growing my hair out, for the first time by choice in like 2 fucking decades, because i wanted cool long hair like guys in shows i admire

[silverislander]

email from school abt a seminar for "women and people who identify as women" i am so fucking tired