Dispatch 90 White Lesbian Age 69 Considers That Attacks on Women’s Human Rights Are Not Culture Wars

March 7th 2022

410 Days Since Inauguration of First Woman Vice-President

685 Days Until the 2024 Presidential Primaries Begin 

I am always out-raging when the New York Times aka mainstream media refers to the attacks on women’s human rights as the ‘culture wars.’  Should we refer to the attacks on voting rights as the culture wars?  Or observe that the school board bans on teaching historically accurate accounts of America are just culture wars?  

Yeah, how should we talk about the long-standing war on women being waged to control the means of (re-)production by any means necessary?

Poet, Novelist, Warrior Elder Marge Piercy declared the proper discourse 50 years ago:

I WILL CHOOSE what enters me, what becomes

Flesh of my flesh.  Without choice no politics,

No ethics lives. I am not your cornfield

Not your uranium mine, not your calf

For fattening, your cow for milking.

You may not use me as your factory.

Priests and legislators do not hold

Share in my womb or my mind.

This is my body.  If I give it to you

I want it back.  My life is 

A non-negotiable demand.

In her new book, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (2021 Duke University Press), Jennifer L. Morgan explores how the rise of Western notions of value and race in the 17th Century tied reproductive labor to the economics of slavery. During a recent interview, Dr. Morgan notes: 

In the economic system founded on a profound racial hierarchy, racial capitalism commodified women’s bodies.  So if you're asking how does the category of racial slavery get hardened? I think it gets hardened through the reproductive and the productive work of African women and the ways in which enslavers, English and Spanish and French and Dutch, all understood that those women are giving birth to the institution of slavery. https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2021/may/how-the--racial-capitalism--that-commodified-women-s-bodies-haun.html

We Women must name and shame the patriarchal misogynistic premise that women’s human rights must be restricted by her sacred duty to procreate. Using the term culture wars is designed to minimize and patronize resistance to the war on women, to trivialize the dehumanizing colonization of women’s bodies.

We will not be your cornfield, not your uranium mine, not your calf for fattening, not your cow for milking. We will not be used as your factory.