08 March 2020

Are Women People? 2020 Edition

I'm starting today's post not with a tweet from this date in a previous year, per usual, but with one I saw about a month ago:


To be sure, the tweet references a book by suffragist Alice Duer Miller that was serialized in the New York Times newspaper (hence the headline above). There has been 100 years since white women got the right to vote in US, and while I am sure that this was who Miller had in mind when asking her question, looking at it now, I think we could still ask the same question...and add beyond her original intention. Are black women people? Are trans women people? Are queer women people?

Yes. Yes. Yes. And yes to every other variation and intersectionality. Yes, they are women. Yes, they are people.

But living in an era where the Equal Rights Amendment remains unratified...where wages are stagnant...where laws focus on what a woman can or cannot do with her body...I am not sure everyone agrees that we are human.

Today's is International Women's Day. Here is the tweet I selected:


I always find it interesting that we celebrate women on a Sunday. Being international, not everyone is experiencing the "spring forward" time change, of course...but it always feels like one more way we get cheated. It's not a big thing, of course, in the grand scheme of it all. It's just a metaphor for everything that happens the other 365 days in this leap year.

I raise my glass, nonetheless, to every woman. May we finally be seen as people in our lifetime.

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