American Women: Once Again, Your Body Belongs to Them

By: Donald V. Watkins

Copyrighted and Published on December 16, 2023

IMAGE: Editorial Cartoon courtesy of J.D. Crowe, Alabama Media Group.

An Editorial Opinion

American women, you have been here before.  Once again, your body belongs to angry white men who exercise dominion and control over it. In many instances, you voluntarily submitted to this male dominion and control over your body.

You are back in the Land of Dred Scott -- a special place where women have no rights which white men are bound to respect.  It took you a hundred years to arrive back at this awful place in America history, but you made it.

For women who pay no attention to American history, Dred Scott is an 1857 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that Blacks in America, whether freed or slaves, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Here is the exact context of this quotation from the Supreme Court's written opinion:

"[African-Americans] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it."

Like Blacks during the Dred Scott era, women in America had no rights that white men were bound to respect from the time the first colony was founded in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607 until the late 1870s, when a husband’s legal right to (a) beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb, (b) pull her hair, (c) choke her, (d) spit in her face, (d) kick her about the floor, and (e) inflict upon her like indignities came to a fitting end through a series of landmark court cases around the nation.

Women did not get the right to vote until 1920.  Furthermore, a husband’s legal right to rape his wife did not end until 1979. A proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution died in 1982 when only 35 states ratified it (out of the 38 states needed to become law).

Today, women in America have legal rights on paper that are rarely enforced in the judicial system.   What is worse, women’s constitutional rights are being systematically stripped away from them, with impunity. 

Now, angry white men dictate what medical procedures women can have and what FDA-approved pills they can take.  These men, together with their subservient female accomplices, routinely threaten women and their doctors with criminal prosecutions over the medical procedures and pills they object to, even when women need the medical procedures to save their liives. 

Of course, women have no say-so whatsoever in any matter involving the reproductive rights of men. Whether a man gets a vasectomy, or not, is nobody's business and no government entity will ever regulate his personal medical choice in this regard.  

Likewise, whether a man takes Viagra, Cialis, Stendra, or whatever erectile dysfunction pills he needs to get it up is generally regarded as none of the government’s business. 

Furthermore, women have no say-so whatsoever in the decision of married male politicians in states where abortions have been banned to get their impregnated mistresses secret, on-demand, illegal abortions. Nobody discusses this unpleasant subject, even though many political friends and colleagues of the male paramour know about it.

This sad paradigm will not change until and unless women change it.  Instead of asking for gifts of jewelry, clothes, or a trip to some exotic port of call this Christmas, women should demand that their men give them the gift of "love and respect" as a Christmas gift.  Often in life, the intangible gifts of "love and respect" are the hardest ones for men to give to the women they profess to love.