Dispatch #95 White Lesbian Age 70 Considers Dobbs & Audre Lorde’s Warning: “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House

June 24th 2022  

519 Days Since Inauguration of First Woman Vice-President

576 Days Until the 2024 Presidential Primaries Begin 

Today June 24^th 2022, the Supremes make crystal clear that our white supremacist patriarchy will not be challenged by its own institutions.  Women’s human rights will never be recognized and protected by the patriarchy.  Today’s action has been in the making since 1960 when our white supremacist patriarchy became concerned about the emerging civil rights movements. Even limited constitutional protection of women’s right to control their own bodies, despite the fact that millions of women can’t even exercise this right, could not stand for long. 

As Audre Lorde proclaimed “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”  Dispatch Readers, you are rightly out-raged, however, you should not be surprised. Take a moment right now to be encouraged by Audre’s brilliant out-rage. https://genius.com/Audre-lorde-the-masters-tools-will-never-dismantle-the-masters-house-annotated 

The War on Women - ongoing for millennia – is armed, fed, and enforced by the institutional and cultural Misogyny that defines women as less than human. Misogyny ensures that we live and breathe a gender binary world because the gender binary allocates power and oppression, i.e., men/masculinity have the unassailable power to oppress the less than human other/women. (Individual assertions of non-binary-ness and gender fluidity are just background noise in a gender binary hierarchy of power.)   

Enforced by Misogyny, the Patriarchy effectively dehumanizes, disables, demeans, and destroys ½ of the population.  A core tenant of newly-popular replacement theory/dog whistle is that women must serve their purpose as the means of production for, in America, white people. 

The American War on Women wreaked its most egregious consequences on black women, and low-income and poor women. Consequently, the achievements of economically privileged, primarily white, women create the illusion of progress for women.  The degrading of feminism, the celebrating of individual accomplishments, the blaming of women for our gender-based violence culture, and, finally, emerging efforts to cancel-erase-make-invisible women as a group are all evidence for Audre’s insights.  

To all those liberal organizations that do not explicitly fight for gender justice and women’s human rights from their work.  To all those liberal organizations that think trumpeting support for LGBTQI+ somehow addresses women’s human rights.  To all those entities that agree to substitute “pregnant people” for pregnant women and “people giving birth” for women giving birth and can’t see their actions as facilitating the erasure/cancellation/ invisibility of women.  You are participating in the patriarchy’s power to absorb and deflect any potential threat to their power to continue oppressing, dehumanizing, and disabling women.  

Until the structural/institutional oppression of women is eradicated, no lasting progress toward a just, economically equitable, and peaceful world is possible.  

Concluding paragraphs from Susan Faludi’s Guest Opinion Essay, New York Times June 20^th, provide instructive reflection: 

The right to an abortion is not just about choice but fundamentally about the survival of women who have no choice, who are faced with dire necessity. That is, the vast swaths of women segregated in low-paying pink-collar occupations, women unable to reclaim jobs lost in a pandemic that drove them out of the work force at four times the rate of men, women unable to afford education or decent housing or child care and soon, it seems, unable to get an abortion when they need or want one.  Effectively confronting threats to women’s material welfare requires a reckoning within feminism. 

As the court’s coming decision brings our attention back to basics, there are other models we can turn to. The National Domestic Workers Alliance, for instance, whose advocacy and organizing of low-income household laborers led to passage of Domestic Workers Bill of Rights laws in 10 states and two cities. Or Fair Fight Action, founded by Stacey Abrams — a voting reform campaign that helped flip Georgia to the Democrats for the first time in a generation and helped rescue the nation from another term of Trumpism. Or the “green tide,” a multipronged mass movement of Latin American feminists that stressed health equity and economic issues to build a wide spectrum of public support and legalize abortion in Argentina, Mexico and Colombia.

In the late 19th century, the Illinois Woman’s Alliance brought together almost every women’s organization in Chicago — including suffragists, unionists and socialists — forced a congressional investigation into female sweatshop labor and pushed through the state’s Workshop and Factories Act, creating an eight-hour day for women and children and banning factory labor for children under 14.

The coalition’s efforts were reflected nationwide in the work of diverse groups, Black and white, including the settlement home movement, the Women’s Trade Union League and the Neighborhood Union in Atlanta. The last was organized by the social reformer Lugenia Burns Hope, who was married to Morehouse College’s president and deployed other faculty wives to fight for education, day care and housing for poor Black women.

All of these groups subscribed to a fundamental principle enshrined in the mission statement of the Illinois Woman’s Alliance: “The actual status of the poorest and most unfortunate woman in society determines the possible status of every woman.” As the Supreme Court may soon remind us, it’s a principle we ignore at our peril.

www.nytimes.com/2022/06/20/opinion/roe-heard-feminism-backlash.html