Open Your E To New Danger
Nodding princesses snooze and snore throughout the old European fairy tales. They recline in glass coffins, toss and turn on pea-filled mattresses, dream near magic spindles as the years pass and brambles overrun the castle walls.
Slumber’s solace provided the perfect escape for a young woman who lacked the freedom to shape her own life.
But there can be no sleeping now. Today, a world-view lurking in the woods of the Inland Northwest represents a new danger to women, an archaic sexism as dangerous as racism. As the radical fringe of the movement that opposes abortion blends into violent militia network, it’s time to become increasingly vigilant to protect women’s freedom.
Many of today’s women - and men who care about their wellbeing - take women’s recent emancipation for granted. They view feminism as a quaint relic of the ‘60s, an idea as easily discarded as a peace symbol necklace.
For young women, raised on an “I can be anything” message, it’s easy to yawn, serenely assured by these fragile new freedoms.
But as the country snoozes, those of the radical fringe envision a return to the days when a fertile woman’s only choice, aside from the convent or the coffin, was the bearing and raising of child after child after child.
These radical groups desire a return to the time when women lacked the freedom to choose birth control, let alone whether to carry a pregnancy to term. These radicals argue not only against abortion, but also against contraception itself. They advocate crime and violence, and even justify murder.
Their words are wrapped in an Old Testament literalism, an interpretation of the Bible that makes men the gun-wielding heads of households, women subservient second-class citizens, and the Christian religion as repressive as Muslim fundamentalism.
It’s important not to sleep through this danger, not to take for granted freedoms so recently won. It was 1973, a mere 25 years ago, that American women gained the right to a legal abortion. It was 1960 when the birth control pill suddenly changed the facts of women’s lives.
The pill allowed a range of new choices: from raising planned, well-loved children, to delaying motherhood to pursue a career, to allowing life to flourish in another direction entirely.
It was 1916 when Margaret Sanger opened America’s first birth control clinic to save the lives of poor women dying from endless pregnancies and botched abortions. Sanger’s own mother died at 50, after bearing 11 children and suffering seven miscarriages.
It was contraception that freed women from the shackles of economic dependency and from marriages as hateful as a Klan rally.
Imagine a world without it, a world where the Michelle Kwans quickly cease to skate, the Jessye Normans cease to sing, the Bonnie Dunbars cease to soar.
Scholars searching for the creative legacy of history’s women artists, poets and musicians find a limited legacy. With a few notable spinster exceptions, most women were simply too bound by the mechanics of their own bodies to leave creations other than their own children.
Today’s radicals promote the killing of abortion doctors, restricting contraception and reining in the world of women.
For all of America’s newly freed and empowered young princesses, this is no time to slumber.