athousanderrors

via http://ift.tt/2czDyef:
ardatli:

et-in-arkadia:

A radical feminist before the word existed, Isabella Beecher Hooker, my fave, advocated for women’s rights and suffrage until the day she died. She never got to vote.

But she did push the same bill every year for seven years in Connecticut, demanding that women could own their own property – until it finally passed. An elegant eccentric, Isabella was a Spiritualist who believed she could talk to the dead. Spiritualism was a female-driven movement that let their voices finally be heard in public by claiming that they channeled distant spirits. Their own thoughts were not considered to be legitimate, but those of ghosts were. Welcome to America.

I don’t believe in Spiritualism. But today I sat in the grass beside her grave and reversed hearing the dead: I told Isabella, wherever she may be, that a woman was about to become President of the United States, 110 years after the last year she was denied electoral participation.

This November, I hope you will vote, for all of us – and for women like Isabella, who fought their whole lives against oppressive patriarchy that laughed at them, and imprisoned them, for a basic right that we now take for granted. Vote.

“Spiritualism was a female-driven movement that let their voices finally be heard in public by claiming that they channeled distant spirits. Their own thoughts were not considered to be legitimate, but those of ghosts were.“

Ohhhhhhh. OHshit. I never made that connection before, but oh. Thank you, op. That sent a hundred thoughts spinning into a new perspective for me. 

….fuck me. That genuinely never occurred to me.