(no subject)

[rm]

http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/29/6970452-from-the-archives-a-message-for-the-women-of-today

History never really happened as long ago as you think. This video interview with a then 87-year-old woman who had been a suffragette was filmed when I was five. Rights that we now may take for granted here are very much things in living memory, or at least in the memories of those who knew them. Hell, in Switzerland women didn't have the vote in all the cantons until the 1970s.

When we think of the past as far away, we think of the future that way too, and it makes it seem more difficult or more foolish to fight for rights we know we deserve but can't necessarily imagine getting.

But change takes not just organizing and patience, but also anger, vision and memory.

Comments

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

And women have been Presidents in Switzerland more than once already since then.

Having family there makes the perspective an interesting one. You're still allowed to stay home with your kids, for one thing and keep a job on a percentage basis. Telling them I *have* to work as much as I do just gets a blank stare. We're supposed to be a civilized nation, after all.

[ladyaelfwynn.livejournal.com]

To keep things in some sort of perspective, I keep reminding myself that my grandmother wasn't born with the right to vote. That I wasn't born with the right to get an abortion should I want one.

When I can make things personal, they become much more real to me. My grandmother's stories about being raised by a single, working mom in Miami, Fla. in the 1920s and 1930s (and going to school with Al Capone's kids) remind me that so many issues are timeless. I'm at least 4th generation working mom and yet that has only been treated like an noteworthy issue since the 1970s.

[tdanaher.livejournal.com]

During the marriage-equality battle I kept recalling back when I was moving into an apartment with my partner. It was the mid 1980's in New York City and according to the policy of the major rental company we were dealing with, same-sex couples were allowed to cohabit in apartments and share the lease, but opposite-sex couples were definitely not allowed to unless they were married. Fortunately we're past all that and everyone can live with anyone they want married or not, but it still makes me want to say to people, "You're so lucky, you don't know there was a time when just wanting to live in an apartment with the person you love wasn't necessarily possible."