As the Women's March is fast approaching, I spent some time reading about the breakups, spats, legitimate arguments, the oppression olympics, the misuse of the word intersectional, the single river splintering into tributaries of self-importance. All of it is right on time. Entropy does not only apply to taking a car off the lot or putting a brand-new couch in the living room. The visionary’s image is clear at inception, the founders embody it and. as it spreads out into more people's consciousnesses, it dilutes rather than reducing into something stronger.
When I began devouring American Women’s History, it was because I was in the middle of a profound fight for women’s rights. I wanted to know more about the ERA’s Visionary and understand the obvious entropic degradation to its, then, current status. What I learned is still unfolding. Thirty-six years of reading and six of which are dogged, heads-down study is still not enough to fully understand but, certainly, gives me some particular insight. It also gives me a lot more questions than answers as answers are deeply perishable, dependent on their ineffable environment. Maybe historians can tell us about life a hundred years ago but never can they measure heart.
The Visionary is all heart, often ignited by an epiphany; as was the case for Alice Paul, Gerda Lerner, Oscar Romero, Mohandas Gandhi and Francis of Assisi. It was not a low boil as was the case with Theresa of Avila or John of the Cross or Robert Greenleaf or Bill W. The poet slowly peels. The Visionary is thrown off the horse, stuck by lightening which makes it impossible to measure or ignore. They are lit up and, regardless of its solitary revelation, must proceed.
Following the provenance of the idea of liberating American women, there were a handful of spiritual women, mostly Quaker, inspired by the Iroquois, who coalesced a vision over a cup of tea. Importantly, one essential question remains, liberating from what? Simply put; invisibility, unpaid labor, non-citizenship, living a relative existence with zero agency. They were either unrealized or holding varying degrees of realization with proportionate agony. Let this be stated squarely, the Visionary suffers with seeing full possibility while painfully trying to pare it down to fit the, “conscience of the day,” in hopes of sharing it.
My expertise is studying and testing the heart of Miss Alice Paul. She was struck with one single insight that never diluted in her 92 years. She saw that American women will never realize the possibility of society’s equality without explicit, absolute equality in the US Constitution. She was smart enough to know that the vote was a required stop on the road but never the destination.
Miss Paul had something that no one today has, no one. She was absolutely absolute. Not only was she single-focused but it was irresistible. Women, old and young, took her direction as orders. Moreover, they wanted to be trusted with those orders. Women who had barely spoken in their own parlors, stepped onto truck beds with flyers in hand to speak in open air about their rights, all because Miss Paul’s “violet eyes,” asked them to.
Perhaps the first woman who posted on Facebook, in November of 2016 calling for a Women’s March, was inspired but it was never a sole vision, with a sole purpose. Within days it was diluted, distributed, dissected, and the suffocation of entropy was in full swing. Millions of women with their specific ideas of liberation, of resistance, of protest took the street. 2017 and 2018 held banner marches and 2019 will as well but banners will have many colors, many causes, many agendas. Each will indicate a fissure, a separate understanding of liberation based on an interpretation and assignment of oppression.
I believe Miss Paul would advise that all of those tributaries would have a more prosperous future if one single item was won; full explicit irrevocable inclusion in the US Constitution. Her vision assigned a wise priority. Without that we are but a patchwork in search of a quilt.
As William Carlos Williams wrote,
so much depends
upon
the red wheel barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
