The V-Word

Reclaiming Our HistoryIt's Women's History Month, a time when we commemorate the powerful history-making women on whose shoulders we stand. Many of these influential women have become household names: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony who spent their lives organizing women and fighting Congress for the right to vote and the right to have the women’s voices be heard; the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who spent her life fighting for equal rights for women through decades of legal battles in the Supreme Court; and Rosa Parks brought that fight to life when she refused to sit in the back of the bus.

Amazing things happen when women banded together in friendship to make  change. Just think of the national suffragette movement or the powerful groups of women trying to make equality for the sexes a real thing.

One of the most important attributes of our humanity is that we crave a sense of fairness and equality the way we do food or sleep. More than just an aspirational concept of governance, like “by the people, for the people”, all of our relationships thrive within the honest intentionality of creating equity between people. It is part of our DNA as we all recognize the plaintive cry of a child’s “it's’ not fair.”

When we consider the efforts that women have made over generations for equality, it humbles you. Today while interviewing the president of Planned Parenthood of Southwestern Oregon, I learned that the early beginnings of the organization began with women sewing diaphragms that they procured in Italy and Japan into their petticoats. Many women were arrested when they were handing them out on the streets in New York.