They Decided To Share

digby, on Hullabaloo, has posted this quote from Chris Matthews, Tweety of the day

"This gender thing is so tricky. Here's my theory. Men voted in the first part of the last century to give women the vote. They had all the votes and decided to share them. They thought, 'they're smart, we're married to them, if momma's not happy nobody's happy' sort of thing."

Let's try telling that to my great-grandmother, the suffragist, shall we? To all of the women who marched and went to jail and were force-fed to break their hunger strikes. To all of the women who heard that only ugly women who couldn't catch a husband would ever want to vote. To all of the women who died before it ever happened. To Abigail Adams, who asked her husband to "remember the women" in the Constitution.*

Even a child's publication, the Scholastic, says on its suffrage page, Women's Suffrage

Woman suffragists often met hostility and sometimes violence.

Yes, yes. Hostility and violence. That sounds to me like deciding to share. Doesn't it to you?

And how about this (also from Scholastic)?

During the Civil War, suffragists shelved their cause temporarily, hoping that at war's end, women as well as emancipated slaves would be enfranchised. After the war Republican party politicians believed enfranchisement of the ex-slaves would be defeated if harnessed to the even more unpopular cause of woman's suffrage. They succeeded in passing the 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which gave the vote to black men but not to women.

It has always amazed me that men were willing to give the vote to men of other races before they were willing to give it to their own mothers and daughters and sisters. I could understand their not wanting to share power with their wives and even their sisters. But their mothers and daughters? What kind of person doesn't see the humanity of his own parent and child? What does that say about those men?

* Let's remember that there have always been men, like John Stuart Mill and my great-grandfather, who believed in the equality of the sexes. I am not talking about them here. I am talking about the majority of men, who had power and did not gladly give it up.

photo, National Archives of Scotland, Photograph of Janet Arthur, suffragist, 1912, taken from the Home and Health Department criminal case files, NAS ref. HH16/43/2

Mom's Overture

Anita Renfroe is one funny woman.

The Great Berkeley Shopple Off of 1963

When I was pregnant with Richard, I seemed to be incredibly attractive to men. More of them tried to get involved with me than at any other time of my life. It was rather amazing. Among the men who were interested in me were Dick, who I later married, and Tom. I had known Dick for a couple of years, but Tom was new. I was sitting in a local hamburger joint drinking a Pepsi and he came over, asked if he could sit at my table (there were no empty ones about) and when I agreed to that, asked if I was someone's wife or girlfriend. I answered that I wasn't, but I was pregnant. Which seemed to be icing on the cake.

Anyway, soon I had Dick and Tom vying with each other for my attention. Since dueling had been outlawed, they had to find some other way to compete. The Shopple Off began when Dick walked out of a garden center with a six foot tall potted plant and gifted me with it. This was followed by Tom shoplifting the ingredients for dinner, which he then cooked for me.

So, Dick countered by liberating an entire bolt of peacock blue silk from India Imports. Tom responded with a mop and bucket for my new apartment (which happened to be with Dick), so Dick had to obtain a kitchen table with chairs. The mop, bucket, table, and chairs had come from a laundromat, walked out with in the wee hours of the morning.

Then, in what surely should have been the boldest move of all, Tom and his cousin went to the UC Student Union when they opened one Saturday, moved a couch out onto the front porch, and sat and talked until midnight, when the Student Union closed. Since the staff who closed up was not the same as the staff who had opened, they didn't know the couch belonged inside, and left it. After the streets had quieted down, Tom and his cousin carried it the three miles to my apartment. When they heard a car coming, they would sit the couch down, sit on it, and pretend to make out.

Pretty bold, you say? Well, you don't know Dick. A couple of nights after Tom brought me my couch, Dick borrowed a pickup and drove over to the UC campus at about 2:00 a.m. Outside of the Student Union were a number of slate topped coffee tables, six feet across. As Dick arrived, he saw that the cleaning crew was picking up garbage and sweeping. He checked a number of the tables, finally approached one of the crew and asked if he could help get the table on the truck so Dick could take it to be tightened.

He got the help. He got the table. He got the girl.

In A Nutshell follows with a further example of my lawless past.

Talking to BoysTake Two

And here we have a picture from SFGate.com that wonderfully illustrates how male creatures act when face-to-face with other male creatures. This bird is ready to put on a threat display for or even fight his own reflection because it dares face him. Is it any wonder that your hubby finds it difficult to face you and talk about problems? Something this hard wired is hard wired indeed.

In A Nutshell follows.

Talking to Boys

Getting a man or a boy to talk to you about important issues can be hard. Moms sit down with sons, wives sit down with husbands, and somehow it just doesn't work. The woman is very frustrated, because when she sits down with another female, they seem to be able to get right to the heart of the matter, but those male creatures skitter off or get angry or tongue tied. "What," she wonders, "is wrong with him?"

Well, other than the sometimes reported* finding that, under PET scan, the female brain can be seen to access seven sites when she talks/thinks about feelings, and the male only two (which would make it easier for her to know what she is feeling, as well as talk about it), there is the issue of posture. When women sit down to talk about important things, we tend to sit face to face, looking into the other person's eyes.

But, what I learned in the 60s in my anthropology classes, but was never mentioned in my psychology classes, is that in no culture that we have reports on has this been true for men. Nor is it true for males of any species of mammal or bird or even fish. In nature, as in culture, when two males are face-to-face, what we have is aggression.

In human cultures, men go face-to-face with children, mostly when scolding them, and with women when courting them. So, for a man to sit face-to-face with his wife, or a boy with his mother, sends messages of wanting to either knock her head off or jump her bones. Neither a good ground for talking about how to get the budget to balance or what happened with that sweet girl he had the crush on.

So, how do you get those important discussions with a man? Well, you sit with him side-by-side. For a good primer on this, watch "The Hunt For Red October." There are, for all intents and purposes, no women in this film. It is a movie about men and by men. The postural body language is perfect. There are few moments in that film where the men are face-to-face. When Ryan comes onto the carrier, one of the senior officers doesn't trust him and you can tell because he faces him off. When the Americans enter the Russian submarine and don't know if Ryan was correct and these men want to defect and the Russians don't know if they have found safety or not, the two groups stand face-to-face. Until, by the way, Ryan asks for and then chokes on a cigarette -- allowing himself to be seen as harmless. The intimate moments of this film, are very different. When the Russian captain and his first officer are talking about what they want to do when they get to America, they are sitting facing the same direction. When Ryan and the Russian captain are talking about having gone fishing with their grandfathers as boys, they are standing facing the same direction.

It also helps to not put attention on the boy/man. Doing something with him allows talking to naturally occur and deeper subjects to arise. My mother does jigsaw puzzles with one of her great-grandsons. They talk about all of his hurts and dreams as they do.


Richard and I have had many a deep conversation while in the front seat of the car. As I drive him somewhere, I am amazed at the things that he spontaneously tells me. That activity and having the pressure of posture taken care of leads to confidences that might never arise over a cup of cocoa.

* and sometimes not found at all!

In A Nutshell follows.