A Day For Women

We've been predicting this for a while, and it never really happened like we thought. I really feel like, whatever happens this week, it will be a moment for the women of America. At least, I hope so.

There's a moment in "Angels in America" where the character of Roy Cohn talks about how women never had the political clout to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed. Even though this came from a guy playing Satan himself, in a quote that's attributed to the actual man, he's right. Women in America always struggled to realize their immense political power.

There was a moment on Fox News Entertainment last week where one of their leading commentators said it would be over for his marriage if his wife lied about how she voted. While I don't think you should lie in Marriage, I don't think you should ever have to either, and I guess that's the point he didn't get.

My point with political issues relating particularly to women, and there are lots, was that I should fight to hold off the barbarians long enough to let women decide things in whatever way they see fit before men like myself break through the line and decide it for them. I've gotten a lot of hate, even from people I deeply admired for taking that position when it came to the issue of abortion and women's reproductive health.

People get mad when I say gender is a construct. I know people who were assigned female at birth but are now male, and people who were assigned male at birth and are now female. I know women who cut their hair and decided they wanted to keep their parts but live as men. All of these people have their future on the line this week.

I've never had my future on the line like that. I'm an over-educated, over-privileged white man, born in the sixties. The only time my rights were ever "threatened" was when they made anabolic steroids illegal, and I was still taking them. The only expansion of my rights I've ever experienced was when they made it legal for me to buy weed long after I quit smoking weed. I used to buy it from a Millsaps Student who grew it to supply himself. Now you can buy it from a Millsaps Alumni who is making an obscene amount of money from a grow operation.

In the same period of time, women have won and then lost the right to have safe abortions. Women have won the right to serve at every level of the military. Women have won the right to sue anyone who inhibits their lives or careers based on their gender. Women have the right to have a fucking credit card in their own name.

I have a cousin. She's maybe twenty years older than me. Her father, my uncle, was one of the most successful businessmen in the history of Mississippi. You'd be surprised how many people who read me once worked for him. She's brilliant and beautiful, but she was a woman born in Mississippi.

She did her banking at what we now call Trustmark. In those days, Trustmark had just switched from calculating your bank balance by armies of clerks in their capitol street building with mechanical calculators to using an actual computer.

One day, she got her bank statement and she was convinced it was a couple of dollars off. Taking her passbook downtown, she met with whichever vice-president was operating the floor. Since her name was no longer her father's name, he had no idea who she was. He also didn't take the time to check how much she had in other accounts.

Arguing that there had been a keypunch error and showing him exactly where the keypunch error was, this man with thinning hair and a pressed suit was determined not to give her the two dollar and something cents credit that she proved she was due.

Visibly upset and raising her voice, the security guard began hovering behind her, ready to eject her bodily if necessary.

What happened next, she always said she wished, didn't happen because she was ready to and wanted to win this fight on her own.

Over her shoulder, she first smelled, then saw the cloud of cigar smoke associated with Bob Hearin barreling down the open space between the teller cages and the manager's desks in the bank lobby. On his way out the front door onto Capitol Street for lunch, he stopped long enough to call her by name and ask about her, "How's your momma and daddy?"

Although she never mentioned the conflict she was having with this underling over two dollars, and he never helped her out, as Mr. Hearin walked out the front door to go make his lunch date, it was clear that the power dynamic had changed.

Excusing himself for a moment, the vice-president with thinning hair took the time to look up her other accounts, and someone whispered to him who she was, and who her father was.

After apologizing and giving her the two-dollar credit she had requested, he thought this unfortunate event was over. He was wrong. She informed him that she wanted one of the new First National Bank credit cards. He said it wasn't the bank's practice to give credit cards to women. She pulled out her address book, gave him the number to Mr. Lampton's office upstairs, and told him to ask Mr. Lampton if she could have a credit card. He did.

I'm told she was the first woman in Mississippi to have a credit card in her own name.

I tell this story because, it was just about six years later that all I had to do to get a Trustmark Credit Card was fill out a form, but I'm a man, not a particularly impressive one, but demonstrably a man.

I've been waiting a long time for the women of America to have their day. I think we're really close now. So close I can feel it.