Episode 12: The patriarchy gives up some power—but why?
Women’s history is human history, and feminism is something we should be talking about in our homeschools.
Transcript:
We use an automatic transcription app for our podcast, which makes it possible for us to include transcripts for our podcast episodes — but it does sometimes make weird errors! We do edit it, but I’m sure we miss things sometimes.
[00:00:01] Amy: Hello, and welcome to Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy, brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life. Today is Sunday, May 19th, and Blair and I are talking about something that popped up in a conversation and that we've been texting back and forth about for the last week, like a homeschool case study over here, with women's rights, feminism in the 21st century.
Okay. so before we get started, I would like to say, and I think I speak for Blair when I say this, that when we talk about feminism, we're going to define terms, and we're going to talk about different ways that we talk about feminism, but all feminism that we are talking about is trans inclusive feminism, no trans exclusionary feminists over here. Just to get that out there.
[00:00:57] Blair: Yeah, a lot of what Amy and I, decide to talk about comes out of these conversations that the two of us had. And I thought, I went and pulled this out a couple days after we decided to do this episode, which I'll tell you what made me start texting Amy. The, kicker for the, actually it was Kansas City Chiefs, Harrison Butker came on.
I thought it was very interesting. The headline says, “Man who kicks balls wants women to stay in the kitchen,” which I thought was really interesting because there's multiple ways you can kick balls.
So I thought that was interesting. Now listen to this. Imagine for a moment that you are a young woman who has spent more than $100,000 on your university degree. After four years of hard work, it's your graduation, and Harrison Butker, a kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, is the commencement speaker. During his speech, the NFL star, who has made millions by kicking a ball, kindly informs you that your hard-earned degree was a waste of time and that your true role in life is supporting your husband.
Imagine what that would be like.
He doesn't just take issue, by the way, with women. he—IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia. He's got some pretty strong opinions about that. Pride Month happens to be a deadly sin, the entire month; he said some pretty anti Semitic things. And no, women have been subject to the most diabolical lies.
And while some women in the audience may go on to have successful careers, the majority should be most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.
Now, I just want to say that it's a good thing not all men think that way. When I read Harrison Butker's, speech and what the Guardian had to say about it, I gave some thought to both of my husbands. I have been married twice and, I didn't really put it together that both of my husbands had actually been raised by their mothers. My first husband, his father abandoned his mother and three children. Luckily, she had a degree and was able to get a job to support all four of them.
And my current husband, who I've been married to a long time, his mother was widowed when my husband was 10 years old. Good thing she had the skills needed and the education to get a job because she supported the two of them. It's really not just sexist when men say this. It's also really ableist.
there are women who, to be able to support themselves. it's this ridiculous notion—first of all, that all men are worth staying married to. But also that women might not be in a situation where they need to support themselves. It is so offensive, isn't it?
[00:04:16] Amy: No, it absolutely is, It's so problematic because I think that a happy marriage and a family can be amazing. I am thankful every day for my partner, my husband, who I adore and my children, who I do consider to be one of the greatest parts of my entire life. But I am so thankful that both of those things are choices that I got to make for myself.
They were not choices that anybody else made for me. And, I adore my husband. I think he is the best. But if he were abusive, if he were to die, I would still be okay because I am a whole and independent person besides that.
That is a part of my life. That is not my whole life. I think, I think homeschool moms, I think we, we really feel it as our kids get into high school, where if you've spent your whole life basing your life around other people and other people's needs and fulfilling other people's needs. There comes a time where people don't need that from you anymore. And so what are you going to do? You don't even know what your own needs are if you haven't been paying attention to them for all of these years.
[00:05:34] Blair: I'm sorry to interrupt you. so first of all, I want to say that I find it very interesting that you said paint.
[00:05:41] Amy: it's the Gauguin joke, right? Because he ran off to Tahiti painted beautiful women.
[00:05:49] Blair: Okay. I thought that was very interesting, that you would go there. so we've got an issue where, we are bringing, we're putting the cart before the horse. And what we're saying is, hey, this, sexism, this misogynistic, viewpoint, it's pretty pervasive and it's even pervasive in places where we feel women have rights, that there is some equality.
So the way this came up is Amy and I, as we told you in the last episode, Amy and I are working on writing a curriculum and we're starting with the evolution of humans, and I started to think, we've been doing a lot of reading about the going from hunter-gatherer societies to farming societies, and I really started to think about this patriarchal system that began to evolve and we, the history seems pretty clear that not all but most civilizations existed as a patriarchy. Now I've, there are some of you telling me, Blair, you are wrong. in order to get to where we are today in the United States, this is what's really interesting. This is what sparked the conversation between Amy and I. The patriarchy had to give up some power.
Women didn't get their rights just because of women. Women got their rights because some men supported women getting their rights.
[00:07:26] Amy: We see this surge in rights for women around the world.
The late 1800s the early 1900s when various U. S. states, one at a time, and then the United States as a whole, and European countries, start giving women rights. And they do this, and I don't think it's a coincidence, but they do this at the same time that literacy rates are rising, and women are agitating for voting rights specifically.
Because all of a sudden, if you give women rights, you have a whole new constituency. So you can get them to vote for you because if you're gonna increase the voting population, then you're gonna want to sweeten the pot a little bit so that voting population wants to vote for you.
We see this system of getting women on the sides of various politicians, various political movements, getting women to do work for those movements, and then giving women little rights in exchange. So like the right to possibly have access to your children if your husband leaves you, the right to own the stuff that you own instead of having it all belong to your husband.
These tiny little rights start to get eked out as women become part of the voting population.
[00:08:48] Blair: Did you see that, Ben Carson is now saying that the next thing that he and his little coterie or big coterie of people, they want to do away with no fault divorce. Now I don't see that really catching on because men also, men are the big breadwinners still today in lot of marriages, and so I'm thinking they like no fault divorce.
[00:09:21] Amy: Well, people like, historically it's been incredibly difficult for women to get out of a marriage. In what? A bad marriage. A good marriage. It's been incredibly hard for women to get out of a marriage, often impossible. And while there have been periods where it's harder for men to get out of a marriage, it was almost always something that was doable.
If you had enough money and were willing to go through certain steps to do it. The Pope would annul your marriage for you if you paid him enough back in the day. Obviously not today.
[00:09:58] Blair: I don't want to go there. Okay.
[00:10:01] Amy: And for a lot of history, I think it's fair to point out that divorce was problematic because marriage wasn't a romantic thing. Most people would not fall in love with somebody and then use that as the basis for deciding to marry them. Marriages were economic alliances, they were political alliances, they were community alliances.
So they were very much, not necessarily about being in love with somebody as they were about building a foundational, a societal structure. so divorce didn't really come into that because love didn't come into it, so it's not like your marriage isn't working, so you get a divorce. Your marriage is doing what it's supposed to do, like that's what marriage is.
[00:10:43] Blair: A society that doesn't have equality for women often it leads to what Harrison Butkus is saying, recommending, and that is to get married and if you're lucky you marry somebody makes millions of dollars. it's how you—Because you don't have as many avenues open to you to be successful to get a job, to go to college
[00:11:12] Amy: Yeah, it's a really limiting set of beliefs. It's a really limiting way of envisioning your future. It's very retro, but not in the cool poodle skirt way, this idea that women can have children, or they can have a career or, like superwomen can have both, but the family is the most important part.
Women who have kids are always doing the majority of the kid-related stuff, the labor of setting up doctor appointments and remembering to bring sunscreen and bug spray to the park and making sure that there's milk for people's breakfast. Just like all the various responsibilities still fall on women.
It doesn't matter whether you are a mom whose whole life is staying home with your kids or if you're a mom who's going out and working, women are still doing most of the house labor
[00:12:08] Blair: So let's first discuss how you can teach—So the very first place that we start any academic discussion is by defining things.
And I think one of the things we should, talk about is what does equality mean? What exactly does it mean to be equal? And in this case, let's really talk, in terms of women.
For example, are women equal in the United States? We don't make as much money. Women tend to be paid less. And If you are a woman of color, you make substantially less than a white male who is doing the exact same job.
If you are—we can't get the Equal Rights Amendment passed. Women don't fully support the Equal Rights Amendment. Do we have equality?
[00:13:07] Amy: We don't even have basic health care rights across the United States. we don't have, autonomy, bodily autonomy the way that men do.
[00:13:14] Blair: Correct. The whole thing where Viagra is easy to get, but birth control pills aren't is pretty insane. So if you're looking in, because when you start bringing that issue in, and I think it's a valid issue to bring in, and I think it's one of the reasons it's important to teach this is, But that means that a state like California, where I live and a state like Georgia, where you live, I have more rights than you do.
Yeah. And that is interesting when you think about it. So let me just go for one minute about why I think we should be teaching this. If you were listening to the science discussion that we had a while back and one of the things that we talked about is how you need to look at adults and the adult population to see if we're doing a good job of teaching things.
And there's a lot of really sound reasons for women to have the same rights as men. Women, because we do most of the child rearing, the more equal we are, the more, reasonable it is to think that, our children will have more options, more alternatives, that we'll be able to make better choices and more complete choices for our children.
Agree Amy? Yeah. Okay. the fact that we can't get the Equal Rights Amendment passed, or that people aren't really looking at, some of the other legislation that's happening, and the Harrison Butkers of this world being given a stage, means that we don't view women's rights— where adults don't really think this is an issue And it's not just adults that live in a country that has way more rights like ours does There are countries where women have a lot less rights that also think it's okay. It's the status quo.
[00:15:26] Amy: Yeah, I am always gonna talk about this, I know, but I will never forget When I was in 10th grade, I took this women's studies summer class and it changed my life. The first thing that we did was we read this essay, “Person Paper on Purity in Language.”
And in this essay, what he does is he switches out all gender coded words in the English language for black and white. So every word that would be specific to women. He would substitute black and every word that was specific to men, he would substitute white. And so he would say like all whites are created equal.
it was fascinating to me because I had not ever realized how deeply entrenched. patriarchal thinking was in the words that we use every single day. We can't dismantle the patriarchy with language when the language that we use enforces the patriarchy. This blew my mind and I vowed that I was never going to use the singular he. I was always going to use the singular she in my sentences. My parents were very annoyed by this because I became a very feminist kind of person. I was, like, calling out sexist language everywhere. But yeah, it is so entrenched in the way that we, even the ways that we talk about feminism, our patriarchal ways of talking, it's fascinating.
[00:17:01] Blair: That's one of the things that I think makes the conversation right now about pronouns being very profound. I love that we, obviously not all of us, but probably all of us who are listening to both of us on this podcast and probably most of you listening, think that you should be able to choose any pronoun you want, because it's you. You get to make those decisions for you.
When I first started using she, it was I felt like I was doing something really radical. I didn't feel radical at all!
[00:17:41] Amy: That is one of the definitions of feminism that I really love is that feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
[00:17:50] Blair: Now, I think that the feminist movement gets in its own way, and it does it by insisting that there be mono definitions for things,
[00:18:00] Amy: Yes, but this is true of every kind of movement, right? It is that people who are extremist within the movement become the people that everyone fights when they're talking about the movement, even though they're not really representative of most of it.
[00:18:19] Blair: Okay. That makes a lot of sense. so I'm going to go all the way back. What does equality mean? So first of all, men gave up some of their power to make women more equal.
And. That is radical. It's radical. We've got to give some of those men that were with women making this happen, some chops and I'm not saying it only could have happened because of men. It took a lot of women fighting really hard, but it couldn't have happened without men because they were in power.
And that's one of the most fascinating things about this Is we've entitled this episode the patriarchy gives up some power women get rights because You've got to realize that they do have to give up some power
[00:19:10] Amy: And I think that when we talk about this, it's really important to talk about white feminism and how white feminism is not representative of all feminism because I think that one of the things that the white patriarchy has done it's brilliant—It's terrible, but it's brilliant—is they've been able to convince marginalized groups, women, people of color, LGBTQ plus people, disabled people, all kinds of people, that they have to fight. And so we see ugly things in white feminism, like after the Civil War, where white women feminists argued that they should be able to vote and said some really racist things about Black men being able to vote.
Meanwhile, nobody's paying any attention to Black women who are marching at the same marches, at the back of the line. So I think it's really important to remember that. The patriarchy is also set up to divide women into smaller groups, and you notice that's exactly what happens in the southern United States.
When women get the vote, they really start pushing the Jim Crow laws that take voting rights effectively away from Black people.
[00:20:32] Blair: And that's, that to me is really, frightening. Back to the who raises the children situation, because when you have cohorts of people who are disenfranchised from, having the same economic benefits that those of us who are white have had the advantages because That then makes it harder for their children throughout their whole life and their children's children and it, many years ago, I was in, Washington, D.C. This was before it was even that crazy. I think, I don't remember who was the president then. It might have been Reagan. And, someone was standing there with a sign that, was a, pro life. And the person came up to me, it's a white woman, came up to me to talk about it. She was the only protester there.
And she walked up to me as if we would agree with each other. And I said, are you pro welfare, pro WIC, pro aid to dependent children, pro Head Start? And she said, no. I said, then you and I don't have anything to talk about.
[00:21:53] Amy: Yeah. There, there's this whole weird like pro fetus thing. They don't even want it when it's a baby, like just when it's a fetus,
[00:22:02] Blair: Can you imagine being raped or, having your child die, the fetus die and not be able to, terminate? Yeah.
[00:22:15] Amy: I don't always talk about this, my daughter, when I was 20 weeks pregnant, they found, that she had aortic stenosis and Turner syndrome, and there were a lot of risks associated with that.
I'm so glad that she's alive and my daughter and she has done great, but I was really thankful as a 28, living in New York, in graduate school, not making a lot of money. And I was really thankful that all of my healthcare professionals really laid out for me what all of my options were.
I picked the one that felt most right for me, and I'm glad I did. But I was really thankful to know that I had options. Having options helped me immensely.
[00:22:58] Blair: And that's really what it's about. And frankly, that's what ProChoice is about. ProChoice is about, okay, here are the options.
Pick the one that works for you.
[00:23:08] Amy: I think is the problem is that you shouldn't be trying to pick for other people
[00:23:13] Blair: No, it's this entire ableism. Somebody like Harrison Butker. I thought they, I wanted to start with the Guardian’s article or just their the way they interpret it and because I thought they did a really good job.
[00:23:26] Amy: Patriarchal thinking really is about telling women what they can do with their hands. Their money, their income, their bodies, their free time, their families, and I just don't think that we see that with any other group of people.
I think we do not see it as much with any other group of people as we do with women where the patriarchy feels like it's entitled to all of these things that should belong to women and should be women's decisions to make.
[00:23:57] Blair: One of the interesting things that happened as you and I began to talk about it is the historical context.
And I'd love to have you explain that. we're going to go back to hunter gatherers and I would, if you look at the hunter gatherer tribes today, don't think you can have the same definitions that we do in a more modern way.
I don't know if I have the perspective to know if those societies are particularly sexist, so I won't make any comments about it. but I'm thinking that in hunter gatherer societies, and maybe you know the history of this, Amy, that it was much more egalitarian.
[00:24:42] Amy: Yeah it seems that there were divisions of labor, and that some of those divisions might have been gender based, but that most people in communities had equal say over what happened in the community, or at least, proportionate say over what happened in the community and we know that this isn't just about like men and women, right? We know that, there's a really beautiful story in David Graeber's book The Dawn of Everything, where he visits a site where a very clearly disabled person, who would have—it would have been impossible for this person to walk without assistance—was buried really lovingly in late middle age on a mountain pass, where it was very clearly, like, his people were traveling that way and he passed away while that was happening and they buried him with honor and love and respect.
And that is often not what we think of, right? We do not think about, we think, oh primitive people would, if a baby was born disabled, they would just let it die. But it turns out that often, that wasn't the case. It turns out that people were very inclusive in a way that we could read as more inclusive than we are now.
And yeah, it seems like a lot of these early societies were, as you say, much more egalitarian, and that unfortunately, with record keeping, what we end up with is a lot of records of societies that veered more towards a patriarchy.
[00:26:19] Blair: Yes. So one of these, I think I've already talked about it, but I've volunteered a few times at the Lakota Sioux Reservation on Pine Ridge.
And you get, have a lot of opportunities to talk to people and they have speakers come in. One of the speakers was talking about when the first colonists, encountered the Lakota Sioux and it was, matriarchal, but the colonists were offended that they kept wanting them to talk to the grandmothers and they refused to have any interaction except with at first, the males just spoke for the grandmothers, but eventually through the adoption of some of the, ways of the white colonists, that society moved to more of a, patriarchal one.
[00:27:20] Amy: So this is the thing that I think is so interesting is that at a certain point, people decided to start keeping records. And this point seems to correlate to a shift to patriarchy in a lot of what will end up being modern civilization. And the reason seems to be because, why do you want to write things down?
The earliest written records that we have are basically receipts. Sales, people calculating how much stuff they own and have sold and records of property that people own, right? so capitalism comes into this, right? This idea that like people own stuff and who owns what and how much of it do they own?
And so you may say how does this connect to the patriarchy? I'll tell you, I think it's really interesting. So I own a bunch of stuff, right? I'm a rich man. I'm a very rich man. And I'm going to die as all mortals must. And so who do I want my wealth and all my property and all my awesome stuff to go to, I want it to go to my beloved offspring.
But there is a problem because a woman can always be sure whose child she's giving birth to. It's her child, right? She knows that the child she's giving birth to is her child. But a man can't ever be 100 percent sure that the child a woman is giving birth to is his child. And so we start to see all these attempts to control women, to control the line of inheritance, so that property continues to belong to this man's genetic heritage.
Which I think is really fascinating the way that capitalism and the patriarchy come together and become way of controlling women that gets more and more extreme, right? Women eventually become like a kind of property, more than individual people.
[00:29:16] Blair: You end up with the strength dynamics that allows that to happen.
[00:29:20] Amy: Yes. And women's lives are definitely set up in a way where, we joke about like the horror movie, but girls in horror movies, right? Why are they running around in high heels and a little dress through the woods, in the dark, but women are set up to do that historically. They, women's clothes are designed to confine them and to make it hard for them to move freely.
The work that they do keeps them indoors so they can't get out and build strength, They're not going to get away from the house often enough to be familiar with the area that they live in the same way that men are. So it's really fascinating.
[00:29:57] Blair: And so your take on it is that the patriarchy gives up some of the power Because they began to see it as a way to pass certain legislation.
[00:30:12] Amy: I feel like when the patriarchy as a group, not, I'm not talking about individual awesome men here because there are individual awesome men, but when the patriarchy as a group gives up some power, it's because doing so, enables them to hold on to the big power, right?
You let a woman on the Supreme Court, but most of the justices are still men and most of the people in power are still men. You give women the right to vote, but you know that for a lot of women, that's not going to mean that they're able to vote independently. Lots of women we know, especially in the early years of voting, would vote exactly what their husbands told them to.
[00:30:54] Blair: Do you think that still happens today?
[00:30:57] Amy: Our Butker guy would hope so. I think.
[00:31:01] Blair: What's the argument against equality for women? What was it historically and what might it be today, Amy?
[00:31:09] Amy: They are unable to think reasonably. They are led by their emotions. Also, there's a really good chance that if they fulfill their biological duty and pop out a baby, they will die because childbirth is incredibly dangerous.
[00:31:24] Blair: percent mortality.
[00:31:26] Amy: Yeah, so why would you bother,educating women or trying to help them learn anything if their whole mission in life is just to have a baby and that's all they need to do?
[00:31:35] Blair: Okay, Aristotle valued the vital force, I'm thinking is sperm.
[00:31:39] Amy: And women are like flower pot that holds his vital force. So it's really sad if your flower pot breaks, but you can get a new one.
[00:31:50] Blair: Okay, so that is Aristotle.
[00:31:53] Amy: And of course, in the Western Christian mythology, women are essentially the cause of humanity's fall from closeness with God, right?
Yes. It's women's fault. And so that's why women have periods, because we deserve to suffer every month for ruining things for men who just, in their love for us, followed along with our misguided ideas.
[00:32:18] Blair: But the whole patriarchal society, although that supported it, had been around a long time before that.
In, European culture as Christianity spread, the women who had held power began to see that stripped from them. Actually, what about witches? Is that a way of stripping power from women? I know things I've read seem to support that.
[00:32:55] Amy: For sure, I think for sure, because witchcraft, if you were a woman who could read, if you were a woman who ever used any kind of herbal remedy, which, In a world without drugstores women who couldn't use herbal remedies were probably not gonna last very long. Their families were not gonna survive very long. yeah, it's very much about controlling women, controlling their access to information, controlling how they use their knowledge. Women were targeted for witchcraft if they were single. if they were really wealthy, independently wealthy, or if they were really poor, if they, were pregnant and not married, like basically anything that men didn't want women to do could be considered proof that you were a witch.
And so that towards the end of the European witch trials, it gets to where like women who are bad housekeepers could be witches,
[00:33:56] Blair: This, orchestrated, legislated violence toward women that makes them fearful enough to continue with this imbalance of power, this dynamic where there's an imbalance of power.
Is that kind of what you're saying, Amy?
[00:34:18] Amy: I think so. Because women, I think that, safe legal abortion is one of the best things that could have happened to women because women have historically been so biologically vulnerable. You could be sexually assaulted by any man and if you ended up pregnant, you have no control over that, right?
Maybe you would have to marry this man, maybe you would have to go live in squalor, maybe you would die giving birth, but you could really be physically controlled.
[00:34:50] Blair: Maybe you could be sent to, what was it that was, that, remember the, have you seen some of those documentaries of the women in Ireland you would be sent to?
[00:34:59] Amy: Magdalene homes!
[00:35:01] Blair: Oh, get you imagine your father raping you and then sending you to Magdalene home where, for those of you who aren't familiar with that, these are run by the Catholic church and they are basically jails, although they don't call them that women are sent to, their babies are taken from them, given up for adoption and then the, Women often never get out of there.
And what they do is they work in like laundries and they're just enslaved.
[00:35:35] Amy: And I think that this is a great place to talk about how women of color—Particularly, I'm thinking about the, United States and I'm thinking about the institution of slavery here and how women's bodies were used as weapons in this war, right?
How they changed the laws so that the status of a child was the same as the status of its mother, not its father. So if you sexually assaulted, one of your enslaved labor force, you could impregnate her over and over again and get more enslaved labor from it.
[00:36:09] Blair: I think it was in my early 20s when I read the historical account. It was very clear, I know it's totally, naive of me not to realize this before, but that women were sexually assaulted and men were sexually assaulted. If you were enslaved, you could be sexually assaulted. And I guess it wasn't even really considered legally sexual assault.
But I hadn't realized it until then,
[00:36:36] Amy: No, it's horrific. It's horrific the way that, because women are biologically vulnerable in this particular way. so I think that because of this biological vulnerability, historically women have, sometimes passive resistance is just that, is just waiting.
Right, is trying to do what you can in the little specter of space that you are given because the alternative, in Mesopotamia, if a husband wanted to divorce his wife, he could just come up to her and be like, we're divorced now and she would have to leave his house, but a woman couldn't do that to a husband according to Hammurabi's code. And if a man thought that his wife was having an affair, he could kill her. And that was fine. That was a hundred percent fine in, medieval England. If a man wanted to marry a woman and her father wouldn't let him marry her, he could capture her and sexually assault her and get her pregnant and the father would let him marry her.
That's where the honeymoon comes from. That's actually the origin of the honeymoon.
[00:37:44] Blair: So why, what does this have to do with homeschooling? You might be wondering. And we discussed a little bit about having this conversation because while it is intellectually interesting, at least to Amy and I, what is the purpose of it if you're a homeschooling, parent?
And I think that one of the reasons to have conversations like this is that big discussions get people thinking, get them making connections, researching, engaging their brain, This is the sort of conversation, think about having a conversation with your children of any age, probably middle school, high school, certainly.
What does equality really mean? Do women have it? Extend that to, different groups, LGBTQ plus community, the, people of color. Indigenous people, especially those who are still living on reservations. That's particularly interesting because they're it's fairly complicated. The legislative situations, you've got a reservation that's in a state, but it's federal land. And they are not bound by all the same laws. It's, it's, what do you do? What is, what does that mean as far as, the rights of different groups and how do we ignore those rights? How do we continually strip people of rights? We think of ourselves as more modern, but we just lost the right to choose in the United States and a lot of states and other states like mine, it's now a part of our constitution.
What does it mean?
[00:39:40] Amy: And if you're, this is the answer to the question when you're looking at a bulk of US presidents and you're like, why has there never been a woman president? This kind of patriarchal structure is the answer. Why has there never been an openly LGBTQ plus president?
[00:39:55] Blair: You know what, let's talk about that for a minute, because I actually think she's like a really good case in point, whether you like Kamala Harris or not. I want you to think about, we have a person of color who is a woman who is the vice president of the United States. And I find it really interesting and in a horrific sort of way, the way she is talked about.
Yeah.
[00:40:31] Amy: You would never, no one would ever talk about a male vice president the way that people talk about Harris, even the way that we refer to her by her first name so often. And I do it too, cause I feel like we're friends or at least friendly. but yeah, like you would never ever no one's going to call Donald Trump, Donnie.
[00:40:53] Blair: I think of other Dan Quayle, I didn't call Dan, I called him Dan Quayle, he misspelled potato and it was all downhill from there for him.
[00:41:02] Amy: In the earlier idyllic days of my youth, Dan Quayle represented everything that was wrong with American politics with like privilege and intelligence and, and wow, I miss those days.
[00:41:16] Blair: I know, but, so people will talk about Kamala Harris and they'll say, and by the way, she was in, she's a politician in California. I loved Kamala Harris and I have not stopped. loving Kamala Harris, but the, I think people miss her accomplishments, who she is, how thoughtful she is, how absolutely brilliant she must be to have gotten where she is.
There's a lot to love about Kamala Harris. What people talk about with Kamala Harris. is she's strident. She's allowed in some ways, abrasive. It's she went to a country and she wasn't effective. And yet, if you really questioned someone about why she wasn't effective, they can't tell you why, there's just this sort of mystique because we have about her that she wasn't effective.
And I think one of the things that we have to be careful about, because the people that hate her the most are the white Christian nationalists, and they are really good at shifting the conversation just enough to an area where they get some agreement, but you know what I think they don't like about her, she's not white and she's not easily controlled by the white male patriarchy.
[00:42:56] Amy: And we have such a double and triple standard for women and what's acceptable for women to do. Women aren't just getting judged on the content of what they say. They're getting judged on how they say it, and how they look while they're saying it, and what they wear while they're saying it, and whether they move their hands while they're saying it, or hold their hands still, or sit down, or stand up, or cross their legs, or don't.
And it is really hard, like I can't imagine having that spotlight on me, where I'm trying to negotiate political action with another country and people are making comments about my shoes.
[00:43:39] Blair: Or, do you wonder if she just wishes she could put on a pair of leggings and a Okie sweatshirt and stick it out and not look perfect. Rumpled, disheveled. Now we like presidents that look pretty neat too. Although, we did elect—So we can't care that much about it, but I encourage, and so here's why this might be important, so I encourage you to think about this.
If you're wondering why Amy and I blew an episode and trust me, we have a list of episodes, we bumped to talk about this. Why can't we elect a woman in the United States as a president? I want you to think about during this election season, pay attention to the way the, white nationalist party talks about Kamala Harris, how she is spoken about, what is this concern?
Ooh, Biden's going to die and then we'll get Harris and she's going to be really bad. Why? She's actually, fairly moderate Democrat. Yeah she's from California. She's, she is not on an extreme on, she's not an extreme liberal.
But anybody in the middle, anybody who's a centrist who doesn't like her, I don't think it's because of her policies.
[00:45:21] Amy: No, it's definitely because she's a woman of color. And we talk about feminism and we talk about racism, and women of color absolutely are buffeted on both fronts in ways I think that we don't even yet understand as a society all of the ways that women of color are impacted by the intersection of racism and sexism in our country.
I think we talk about it and we still have no idea the effects of that, the implications of it.
You never have to think about that if you're a man. And I think that there must be a million things like that for women of color that, we just miss.
[00:46:03] Blair: I was, I have science degrees and physical chemistry degree for my master's and as someone in chemistry, a woman in chemistry, I benefited enormously from affirmative action, like a lot of white women.
I benefited from affirmative action and the group of women that benefited the most from affirmative action, when they did studies of why it was white women who benefited more than any other group, what they realized was that the people that were selecting these candidates, there's this big bucket of people that you could bring on and they would meet different criteria for affirmative action, what the studies show were that white women benefited the most because these were somebody's sister. Some of these, they reminded them of people that they were familiar with. White men were making the decisions because that was who was in power primarily at these colleges and they were choosing people that looked like their family members.
And so where we're talking about the patriarchy, That's what it means when patriarchy is making some of these decisions, because I actually think that women, no, I could be wrong, disagree with me, feel free to disagree with me if you do, but I think women are more sensitive to issues of all colors are more sensitive to issues affecting marginalized groups, because we know what it means to be marginalized.
[00:47:47] Amy: And I think that this is why we have to talk about this in our homeschool because none of it occurs in a vacuum. Sexism doesn't occur in a vacuum. Racism doesn't occur in a vacuum. Homophobia, xenophobia, none of this occurs in a vacuum. It all impacts and intersects each other in these really complicated ways.
And if we're not talking about it, we're missing it, right? Our kids are missing it. We're not teaching our kids to be the kind of people—to try to look at the world and see the way that it is, because you have to see things the way that they are if you want to make things better. this is my personal goal for my homeschool, and it may or may not be your goal, but I feel like if you're listening to this podcast, it is partly your goal, that I want to raise kids to make the world a better place.
I want my kids to contribute to making the world better, not making the world worse. And I feel like talking about this stuff is a big part of that for our homeschool.
[00:48:42] Blair: I thought we were a lot closer to this than, I know you think it was two steps forward and right now we're one step back cause you said it before, but I'm not quite as optimistic about us being that much further along with egalitarianism.
I just am not. when you see, what can be taught in schools being legislated in a way that fits into the white Christian, Nationalist philosophy, which is extremely patriarchal. My guess is Harrison Butkus. I think we know who he's voting for. It's not Kamala Harris.
I really think that, we, have to be having these conversations. And once again, it's where secular homeschoolers can save the world because we are having conversations with our children. We're educating our children around issues that are incredibly important. If this one is important for 50 percent of Or population.
I think it's really important. It's interesting, in kind of a reverse sexism, my husband and I, we have, six grandchildren. And Sean doesn't have any children, but my stepkids kids, we have three granddaughters and three grandsons, and we have sat down with the father, one person has three girls and one son, and we sat him down and said, Have you been putting aside money so the girls can go to college? Have you been putting aside money so your girls have every single option that, that they want? And because my husband and I both feel it's really important that you make sure that women, we don't want our granddaughters to ever be in a situation where they feel they have to get married to have what they want to go everywhere they want.
We, we disagree with Harrison, because we think that is no way to be raising your daughters. Oops. That is so judgy. I can't believe I said it. We'll see about Satan.
[00:50:59] Amy: I think that's because if we want an egalitarian society, if we want equality, then we have to mean everybody. That is the definition of the term.
And so anyone who says, Oh, this group of people should have a different set of rights or expectations. Then that's not what you want. You don't actually want an equal and egalitarian society. That is what I want. And that's what Blair wants. And I bet that's what you listening to this podcast want.
The talking about feminism with our kids is one way that we can do it. Is there anything else that we wanted to add?
[00:51:39] Blair: Oh, no, we could. No, I definitely is a topic we could talk about all day. That is and I told you so much. I'm sorry. Oh, my goodness. No, don't be sorry. I do think it's important to understand that when you frame this and it's one of the reasons that it's important for us to be educating not just our daughters about this, but all of our children about this.
So much. It is, or not just our sons, because it, there has to be an agreement. There is an imbalance of power, even in a country like ours, even in my state, there's an imbalance of power. And we don't just need to rethink the way we whether we are equal or not, we need to rethink the way we talk about and look at women.
There, there's just, I can think of so many ways, it just the way we think about women who might be promiscuous, but we think of boys or men differently or, just this. whole notion that women shouldn't be able to have the same body autonomy as men. The way we talk about women, if we don't think they're attractive, then we don't talk about men the same way.
It's just and I think that through a discussion of what it means to be equal, I think that's really important. Even if it gets uncomfortable sometimes as our kids begin to assert that they want certain rights or that they want to, certain, ways of being able to discuss different things.
I think that's important. And in a culture that has as much toxic masculinity as we do, what is the guy that got arrested in Romania, and he's got this huge following, and Andrew something, Andrew Tate. In a world where that sort of horrible individual, in a world where anybody could get elected that has said that, I'm not even going to say it because it's not a word that I use, that they could use their fame to grab certain, the genitals of women.
Eww. No, it's horrible. What, two of our Supreme Court justices have been accused of? One of rape, the other of sexual assault.
[00:54:10] Amy: It's—this is why we want the bear. This is why if we're stuck, we would rather have a bear.
[00:54:16] Blair: Okay. I'm hoping that my great first ancestress. Wouldn't have rather had a bear. I'm hoping. alright everyone. That is it. Did you see anything, watch anything, do anything? Oh, I watched a very funny movie I wanted to see for a long time, finally talked my, somebody into watching it with me, my spouse watched it with me. Wicked Little Letters. If you haven't seen it, and that actually has some, that thematic elements of this one sort of, She's promiscuous, so it had to be her is the theme, but it was pretty funny. Have you seen it?
[00:55:02] Amy: No, I haven't. I'll check it out.
[00:55:04] Blair: Jim and I like Britflix a lot, and it was this just, I think it might have started out as a littler movie, but it caught on, and I loved it.
[00:55:16] Amy: And that's—I'm always looking for good movies, especially to watch, for summer movies with my high schoolers.
[00:55:24] Blair: I think this would be great, and it, I think you could use it as a touch point for, to talk about feminism.
But that's not really the whole point of it and it's based on a true story. Jim looked it up, and it Oh, really? It starts and it says This is more, the events portrayed here are more true than you would believe.
Okay. All right, everyone, I hope you are having, this isn't going to be out until the I hope you're having a marvelously fantastic And if you ever would like to hear Amy and I, if you think there's a good talk topic, send it our way. Yes,
[00:56:04] Amy: Email us at podcast at homeschool life now.com or you can email Blair directly at Blair at seahomeschoolers. com, and stay tuned because we have, we've hinted at a couple of things, but we have some big, exciting projects that are coming up in the next few months. Some of them are big SEA projects. Some of them are big Amy and Blair projects.
Some of them are cool individual things that we're working on, but we're exciting to share. We're excited. to share, some new homeschool surprises, y'all. So thanks for listening to Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life We'll see you next time.
