The Melinda's picture

Why now giving women their rights created injustice for all

When any of us allow the dispassionate understanding of individual rights to be subverted in the pursuit of advantage then it is wrong. The system under which we live is a mine field of statutes. (I do not call them laws because Law is a term that properly refers to something like the speed of light.)
Flame wars on issues that use personal examples are incendiary, sad, and not to the point. What that commenter is saying is that because one female wronged him he will not help someone else who happens to be female. Your choice, but short sighted since, presumably, you do not expect some other female to make restitution to you for your asserted losses.
The present system of law is used by the least ethical to their advantage. It also generates a huge profit for the attorneys, courts, and other professionals who benefit when there is conflict. Notice who it was who created the system. Most legislators are white males and they are the ones who voted for the statutes under which you sufferings took place.
Man or women, it does not matter because as Libertarians we are seeking solutions that are not based in state or federal law but allow individuals to make their own agreements. I refer you to such alternatives as Stephen Safranek's True Marriage approach which allows individuals to write their own well thought out, community supported, and mutually beneficial marriage contracts.
If legislatures were never allowed to write law that truncated the inherent rights of women then they might not have become used to using statutes to tinker with our lives. But as it is even Libertarians accept the bizarre idea that it is alright to pass laws that modify what the individual can do. In California married women did not get the right to control their own earnings until 1953. Marital rape was not a crime until the 1980s. If you accept injustice when it harms others then why do your expect outrage when you are impacted? All legislation used to mandate how we live our lives is just plain wrong. But this is the world sent in motion when the rights of women were ignored and legislation was used to mandate what privileges they would be permitted.
I wish that had never happened. Then the brilliance of women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and countless others could have been used in other arenas. Or reformers like Parker Pillsbury could have spent his life involved in business instead of working first for Abolition and then for Suffrage. But that is not what happened. You have to start from where you are.
What happened instead was that ten generations of women struggled to achieve the vote. In that time legislatures, and I agree with Mark Twain that no one is safe while the legislature is in session, have busily been carving up the autonomy of our rights to create avenues for their own profit.
Who had taught them by example that the appropriate tool was statute? You are talking about people who did not even possess the right to vote or own property, remember.
How many Libertarians understand what it took in committment to achieve for women a place in the world of business? It did not happen automatically. Women who struggled to get an education were eager and happy to have jobs that paid 1/3 what a man with the same education would earn. That is why they could have a job at all in the mid 1800s. It was a quiet revolution that took place because they kept at it. Marriage was nothing less than serfdom for a woman. Some few women were able to marry men who understood and respected the inherent rights ignored by the State. This is an example.

May 1st Text from Lucy Stone Marriage: The following was signed by Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell prior to their May 1, 1855 marriage. The Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who performed the marriage, not only read the statement at the ceremony, but also distributed it to other ministers as a model that he urged other couples to follow.

While acknowledging our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relationship of husband and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a great principle, we deem it a duty to declare that this act on our part implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage, as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should possess. We protest especially against the laws which give to the husband:

1. The custody of the wife's person.

2. The exclusive control and guardianship of their children.

3. The sole ownership of her personal, and use of her real estate, unless previously settled upon her, or placed in the hands of trustees, as in the case of minors, lunatics, and idiots.

4. The absolute right to the product of her industry.

5. Also against laws which give to the widower so much larger and more permanent interest in the property of his deceased wife, than they give to the widow in that of the deceased husband.

6. Finally, against the whole system by which "the legal existence of the wife is suspended during marriage," so that in most States, she neither has a legal part in the choice of her residence, nor can she make a will, nor sue or be sued in her own name, nor inherit property.

We believe that personal independence and equal human rights can never be forfeited, except for crime; that marriage should be an equal and permanent partnership, and so recognized by law; that until it is so recognized, married partners should provide against the radical injustice of present laws, by every means in their power...

My name is Melinda Pillsbury-Foster because I took the names of two lines of my family who put doing the right thing for future generations over their own immediate self interest. Benjamin L. Pillsbury, my great-great-grandfather and his wife Mary Jane Sargent, used their homestead in New Hampshire as a stop on the Underground Railroad. That was an actionable offense. They ran the first high school and Benjamin was superintendent. The school educated both girls and boys. Their son, Harlin, married Harriet Foster, from Andover, Mass., with a similar agreement to the one above. Harriet was one of the first women physicians in the United States, graduating from the Women's Infirmary of NY in 1880. She ran clinics for women in California, educating on such subjects as birth control. That could get you jailed. too, back then.

After the long, hard march towards freedom women learned the lessons that were taught them both by those who opposed their struggle for their proper rights and those who failed to stand up for the principle that they possessed those rights. They used legislation to simulate affirmation of the inherent rights denied them because THAT was possible.

None of it is our fault but it remains for us to decide what happens now. Ratify the ERA; rescind all legislation that intrudes on peaceful, individual action. Until we are all free no one is.

The Melinda

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