Chris Jepson: Voting for Colonel Sanders

“If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop? — Mary Wollstonecraft

Things that make you go, “Hmmm.” One of my many liberal Facebook friends, a woman, an individual I’ve known since college in the ’60s, posted the following, “A woman voting Republican is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.” It made me laugh out loud.

I’ve been consistently reading history for 50 years and one observation, nay, one take-away conclusion, is that women, historically speaking, have had an exceedingly tough slog of it. To the degree that happiness—its meaning evolving—has been the female experience was no doubt inextricably linked to 1) general environmental conditions (war, famine, drought, societal structure, etc.), and 2) the men (fathers and husbands) they experienced while living.

Since mankind started organizing into cities, male hierarchies (often theocratically based) determined that women were “substantively” inferior to men and put in place laws (restrictions) governing their movement, their right to own property as well as their ability to participate in governance, etc. We can argue over why this occurred but we cannot deny that that was essentially the female condition up to the 19th century. Of course, there are historical examples of exceptional women rising to prominence, but I believe we can all agree their exception proves the rule.

The Western trajectory toward individual freedom is one we all applaud. Just bear in mind that such freedom was for men. I use the example of “awarding” the right to vote to newly emancipated slaves at the conclusion of the American Civil War in 1865. It took another 55 years for American women to achieve comparable equality with freed slaves. Women, in other words, were determined less capable of participating in the American experiment than recently liberated illiterate male field hands.

Of course we recognize today the inherent unfairness of discriminating on the basis of one’s sex. As advertised in 1968, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” Indeed. Yet there remains (at least) one major piece of unfinished business for American women and it can be framed by asking one simple question: “Does the individual woman own her own body or not?”

This gets wrapped-up in the emotional issues of sexuality, fertility and reproduction. Again, this (sex) has been an historical consideration when men structured society so as to limit female mobility and accessibility. To suggest otherwise depicts historical ignorance.

I am pro-choice because to be otherwise is to be anti-female. I, for one, believe human life begins at conception. It is intellectually disingenuous to argue the obvious. Rather, the issue on the table is, “Who is to control an individual woman’s body? The woman herself or the state?”

No self-respecting man would ever allow the state to regulate his scrotum, so why advocate that a woman’s uterus is public property, subject to government oversight and regulation? I’ll be damned if I would ever insist any woman do anything but what she alone determines is best for her.

The issue of reproductive rights is part of a long historical continuum of freedom and equality for women, of which the Republican Party and its historically ignorant minions are most decidedly on the wrong side.

Feminist Mary Wollstonecraft quite reasonably asked, “Where are we to stop?” I suggest here. Now.

Women, vote as if your freedom depends on it and support Planned Parenthood of Greater Orlando at 407-246-1788.