How About Some Goodwill Toward Women?

Perhaps the problem with the phrase “Peace on Earth, Goodwill Toward Men” is, like much of the history of humankind, it fails to acknowledge women as sentient beings deserving of good will, not to mention recognition of the reality that without women, men wouldn’t exist on Earth.

Females have been treated as less than, as second-class citizens, in all facets of society and in all corners of the globe. Using everything from religion—which could very well be how this vile, self-serving misogyny began—to politics and socioeconomic status.

When it comes to religion, or selective interpretation of world religions, it’s as if men got together and said, let’s declare this supposedly genderless god we worship to be male so that we can therefore elevate the role of men and deem women inferior, and then proceed to blame females for all ills of the world.

Only men can be priests in the Catholic Church to this very day. For years, women were held as chattel, mere property. In some countries they still are. In some US states, we’re headed back down that dark, pathological pit. And the double standard for so-called “morality” is so sickening and hypocritical as to be laughable, if it weren’t dangerous for women—and girls.

As for the United States of America, the Founding Fathers left out women altogether when they so copiously drafted the Constitution, despite one of their wives warning them. But did they listen?

Abigail Adams, in a letter to her husband John Adams, implored him to “Remember the ladies” in any new laws he might create as he participated in the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1776. Abigail Adams advised, “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands.” Her husband purportedly took it as a joke. So much for revolutionary liberty for women.

Men left to their own devices can’t seem to help themselves, or to stop waging wars against all humankind that doesn’t look or believe as they do.

The US Supreme Court took its sweet time carving out rights for women, which it now aims to decimate. Equal protection for Americans other than white males was bestowed via the Fourteenth Amendment, yet racial inequality is still given greater legal scrutiny, with a higher test applied by the Court, than for gender discrimination.

The daunting reality is that non-white men, as in freed slaves, were granted the right to vote before women of all races. Women had to wage a hard-won battle for a participatory voice in the last century. Not until 1920 did women get the right to vote via the Nineteenth Amendment. Given what we know of how this nation perceives and still treats Black men, that leaves a damning notion of how our nation’s leadership regarded women.

You’d think as 2021 draws to a close, it wouldn’t still be an ugly reality, men seeking to control women, deeming them as objects to do with as they please. And not merely rampant misogyny, which I and other women, including the female protagonist in my Other Worldly series, have endured plenty.

It’s never been more abhorrently clear than when modern-day men will stop at nothing in their quest to deny women autonomy over their bodies, to deny reproductive rights simply because these fragile male egos cannot countenance or accept the irrevocable biological fact that females can do something they cannot. Give birth.

What these men do in retaliation for this feminine ability is proclaim themselves intellectually superior—conveniently easy when they long ago created a playing field with no competition. Such weak-willed men should not be running this nation, much less an entire planet.

No wonder we’ve been plagued with war and violence since the dawn of time, making peace on Earth a mere pipedream that folks so blithely pay lip service to this time of year.

This is a global crisis, where women are not held with respect, treated equally, and granted the free will that men flaunt when it comes to autonomy of the corporeal body. In fact, men, especially in Texas and Mississippi, deem it their right to control the female species through rape or legislation or armed vigilantism.

No good will there. So much for Peace on Earth.

As Abigail Adams also wrote, “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.” She also said, “My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.” I know just how she felt.

If you want this ubiquitously touted Peace on Earth to ever be more than a trite phrase, stop waging war on women. Because we’re not the ones responsible for starting wars in the first place.

Women don’t owe men children, a date to the prom, or a roll in the hay. Especially given the oft-violent manner in which we have been treated and continue to be abused if we dare tell men no. We are clearly not the weaker sex, as hapless men perpetuated for centuries, yet those who seek to control us have definitely shown themselves to be inferior. In every way that matters.