What depends on Women? Everything. And this means, in my mind at least, that women must take on the highest leadership roles if we are to find ways out of the corrupt mental, moral, political and economic sand-trap we find ourselves in, not only in the US but in Canada, too. In fact, male hierarchical leadership is a global problem. But hasn't male hierarchical leadership always been an iffy business one may ask, bringing wars and pestilence upon us, but at the same time, also brought very many good things that has made our lives better?
Certainly, in many ways this is true. I was born in 1928, and my earliest memories were about kerosene lamps for reading in our little farmhouse in Louisiana. We had a huge cistern in the back yard to collect rainwater for bathing and cleaning, and a sweet water hand pump in the front yard for drinking. I remember my mother's delight when our house first got wired for electricity and after that the good times just kept coming. Our small battery operated radio was replaced with a handsome electric one so large it was the centerpiece of our living room. A gleaming new refrigerator replaced our battered old ice box. Indoor plumbing replaced the outhouse and the huge wash tub in the lean-to reserved for bathing. Yes, we were moving on up, well into the twentieth century.
Of course I still vote for all the labor saving devices that were invented and promoted primarily by males that gave women at least some time for themselves. My mother began teaching me to read early, not because I was precocious, but because she knew something was wrong, or different, by the way I processed the written page. Now I know it’s called dyslexia, but what it meant for me and my mother back then was that she kept insisting that I must study a page to center my focus on the letters themselves, before I attempted to decipher their meanings when grouped together to form words. Because of this early training, to this day when traveling or waiting in the dentist’s office, I can tell from the briefest glance at the magazines offered, even if the magazines are upside down from where I am sitting, if they will be of interest. Somewhere between seven and eight years my reading began to definitely improve and I started to notice what my parents were reading. I wasn't supposed to look at their magazines, they gave me Sunday School magazines instead. Or the Sunday funnies.
I would glance at one of my mother's magazines thrown aside when she heard something boiling over on the stove or heard my young sister waking up from her nap. Once in a while my father would take to his chair with his latest magazine and be interrupted by a knock on the door to admit a neighbor needing help with a cow or his car or some other emergency. I wouldn't dare touch the magazine, but if my mother wasn't in the room, I would walk around and take a good look at the cover of the magazine called True Crime. The cover itself was usually very scary. There would be a man threatening another man and sometimes a woman with a gun or choke hold. The scariest was an actual photo of people peering into a reopened grave.
And my mother's magazines? My mother's magazines, different from her pamphlets on sewing or raising chickens, were titled...True Love or True Romance. The front covers would usually depict a very pretty young woman rather scantily dressed being embraced by a very handsome young man. But not always. Sometime a different but equally pretty young woman would be holding out an imploring hand to a different but equally handsome but displeased young man. They had evidently quarreled and the woman's posture was pleading for forgiveness indicating whatever had happened was her fault.
Aw, yes. So you think you know where I am going with this! Well, you're right. I believe that males on the whole are inherently more attracted to conflict and violence than females are, and thus our patriarchal hierarchies cannot and will not throw off their five thousand year culture until they are forced to. And who will force them? Well, women will have to. Next time.
