"Not Alex" — and Women

By Sniffles

Hendrik Hertzberg, whom we generally love and admire, has a piece in the June 23 issue of The New Yorker about Senator Clinton's campaign and whether sexism is stronger in America than racism.

"There is no gender equivalent," Mr. Hertzberg writes, "of the nightmare of disenfranchisement, lynching, apartheid, and peonage that followed Reconstruction, to say nothing of 'the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil' that preceded it."

We cats are not inclined to get into the "who suffered more" argument, especially since no one suffered more than we did during the witch-hunting years of The Middle Ages. But we'd like to remind Mr. Hertzberg that women were disenfranchised until 1920 — and that, even now, the campaign against reproductive freedom is alive and all too well.

Like the anonymous blacks who have been lynched across the South, the number of women who have been enslaved by lack of access to birth control, or who have died at the hands of illegal abortionists, is impossible to count.

In a similar spirit, then, we applaud the latest anti-John-McCain ad — if only because it gives some voice to women who have, for millennia, sent their sons (and now, daughters) off to fight in ridiculous wars.