July 4th Women Survivors
Hopefully, this 2023 July 4th, wise American kids will leave phones in their backpacks, sit at grandma’s feet and listen to stories about hurdles American women cleared over centuries. Grandma’s feet, because women tend to live longer than men.
Curious kids will ask grandma why she doesn’t vote, refuses to take the offer of a Caribbean or European cruise, does not have a driver’s licence, has savings books and waits 30 minutes in line for a bank teller, eats with her hands embarrassing the family in front of dinner guests, sits on the grass instead on a lawn chair and why her English is ‘so poor’ after all these years in America.
Grandma will tell attentive kids that she was a woman not a human being, in the original 13 American colonies. In the south, white women were more vicious to female slaves because they themselves were not ‘women’ but wards of husbands and brothers, thanks to guardianship laws transported from England to the New England. She was not part of the famous 1776 declaration ‘all men are created equal’ because it was for white men with property (land, animals, women and children). We won’t include slaves because they were part of animals. She only got the right to vote in 1920.
Grandma will ignore the shock and disbelief in their faces and continue with how some women disguised as boys in order to be smuggled into America, how some came as mail order brides, as ‘entertainers’ and how some came to work as nannies and nurses in nursing homes where they discard wealthy old men, no longer well enough to make a dollar.
Some kids will not believe grandma and excuse themselves to ask Google and Yahoo. They’ll come up triumphant with the news that the ‘big government’ in Washington passed the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act in June, just a few days before this 2023 Fourth of July.
The grand daughter assigned to grandma for the day stands up and assists her. She’s tired from all that talking and wants to take a nap. Is that a tear down grandma’s cheek? She dismisses it as hallucination because she has never seen her grandma cry. Thereafter, it dawns on her that it is her own tears, for not appreciating that her independence and safety is rooted in the sweat and blood of women before her.
Despite all the turmoil in America, the world says Happy Fourth of July.
By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.
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