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RaveWhat we Owe the Elder Sisters of GC Movement
The GC movement would not exist without our elder feminist sisters.
It is the women who have lived through previous feminist waves who have the most first hand experience and insights as to the direction things have been evolving.
It is the women who have gone through childbirth, lived longer, and gone though overt and explicit sex based discrimination who can say without a shadow of a doubt that sex matters for feminism.
So often it is the women who are further along in their careers or perhaps retired who have stood up and shouted the loudest and been the most unafraid to put their names and faces to their words and been the biggest, most proactive change makers.
Thank you for all you do and all you teach us. May we all become as brave as you are.
I agree it is nice to have so many older women here! There are women on Ovarit that remember when Roe vs Wade first became a thing... And now that it is down they are still here... They know how things were before, during and after Roe vs Wade!
It's essential. When nonsens libfem talking points dominate the discussion of womens right so much that they are seen as representative of feminism as a whole, it is so important to hear from women who lived through experiences like needing a husbands permission to get a credit card or previous restrictions on abortion and say 'actually I lived through this and your proposed solutions don't add up. This is what worked in the past.'
Aw, how nice to be appreciated! Thanks for that.
Add my voice to the chorus of thanks to our elder sisters.
I often feel that I wound up being in a very fortunate "middle" spot in terms of feminism; although sexism was of course pervasive and obnoxious throughout my childhood, I at least also got Free To Be You And Me and the right to choose.
My elder sisters grew up when women couldn't open their own bank accounts and men could legally rape their wives. My younger sisters grew up with male peers who started watching porn in middle school and fast-tracked mastectomies for tomboys. Y'all have so much courage, on both sides.
My elder sisters grew up when women couldn't open their own bank accounts
Just to be clear: the banking restrictions that used to be in place in the USA applied solely to married women with living husbands. Banks in the US either used to bar married women from opening their own separate bank accounts in their own names that their husbands didn't have access to - or banks allowed married women to open their own accounts, but required them to get their husband's permission to do so.
But these requirements were not placed on women who were never married, widowed or divorced. I was born in 1954 into a family with several great aunts and great-great aunts who never married, and they all had savings and checking accounts of their own. My maternal grandmother was widowed circa 1930 and never remarried - she had her own banks accounts. Ditto older female relatives who who were widowed or divorced in the 1940s, 50s and 60s.
Prior to the reforms put in place in the 1960s and especially the 1970s, it was common and legal for banks in the US to deny single, widowed and divorced women mortgages, other loans and credit without a male co-signer. But long before then, most banks in the USA allowed single, widowed and divorced women to open and keep bank accounts on their own.
Also, minor-age girls as well as boys could have custodial bank accounts opened by their parents or guardians. I don't know if this was true across the board, but the bank my family used when my sisters and I were kids in the 1950s and 60s allowed mothers to be the parent/guardian who opened up and served as custodians for their children's bank accounts.
Finally, although the laws varied from state to state, and the customs varied by banking institution, many women in the USA who had their own bank accounts prior to getting married to men still could keep their pre-existing bank accounts after marriage.
I feel this way too. Things were never perfect, but there seemed to be hope we were moving in the right direction, on so many issues, and I feel privileged to have grown up in a time of optimism. Unfortunately, it didn't last long, and people proclaiming "The End of History" exaggerated the claims of its death.
It feels strange to be more radical in middle age than I ever was in my youth.
Awesome. I was a kid during the Second Wave and my mother, among many other things, had her own bank account because of real feminist reforms.
The wedge between younger generations and older generations of women in US culture (I can only speak for my own country) is one of the most depressing things to me. I wasted my teens and most of my twenties trying to maladaptively resolve (repeat) child trauma by seeking out male mentors when I could have been learning from elder women.
Thank you for everything you all have done. I cannot begin to conceptualize where I would be if I was present in this moment without domestic violence shelters and all of the support structures that exist for women today. There is more to do of course, but it wasn't just a foundation that all you women older than me have built but the vital organs to women's liberation, independence, and freedom.
Whenever I see the Karen or okay boomer rhetoric from young women it looks like divide and conquer. Every young woman who discredits another woman based on her age is going to be old herself one day, where is the logic?
I totally misread the title and thought we were talking about the Elder Scrolls facepalm
The elder scrolls: truly the unsung hero's of the feminist movement 😝
Thank you. But younger women don't always realize that the purpose of the things we worked for - your own credit cards and checking accounts, childcare at work, equal pay and expanded job opportunities, DV refuges, rape counseling, etc - wasn't to just make it easier to tolerate being in relationships with men. Because there was also consciousness raising to figure out what was in it for women in relationships with men, and to learn that there was little to nothing.
All those practical things mentioned were centered around enabling women to walk away from men, to abandon men. I am glad women have at least a shot at some measure of economic independence from men. But what we had really hoped for was that the sisters that followed would ultimately have no emotional or psychological dependence on men.