Looking Back to Strengthen our Now
I spent the better part of the morning reading about great women in honor of International Women’s Day.
The theme for March 8, 2019 is #BalanceforBetter, putting the spotlight on gender equality and increasing awareness about discrimination against women.
It is time to ensure women and men are equal in EVERY way.
This means women need to be making the same amount of money for the same jobs.
We also don’t need to be judged for having emotions, wanting to succeed, wanting or not wanting to have children or anything else we choose for our own lives.
WE as WOMEN are THE makers of our collective destinies.
No one said this so eloquently than the great Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the biggest players in the early women’s rights movement in America, in her “Solitude of Self” address before the Committee of the Judiciary of the United States Congress back in 1892.
Stanton fought tirelessly for balance and equality, as she understood every individual needs to stand on equal footing in order to live her or his best life.
An excerpt from Solitude of Self:
The great lesson that nature seems to teach us at all ages is self-dependence, self-protection, self-support.
The girl of sixteen, thrown on the world to support herself, to make her own place in society, to resist the temptations that surround her and maintain a spotless integrity, must do all this by native force or superior education.
She does not acquire this power by being trained to trust others and distrust herself.
If she wearies of the struggle, finding it hard work to swim upstream, and allow herself to drift with the current, she will find plenty of company, but not one to share her misery in the hour of her deepest humiliation.
If she tried to retrieve her position, to conceal the past, her life is hedged about with fears last willing hands should tear the veil from what she fain would hide.
Young and friendless, she knows the bitter solitude of self.
Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility.
Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one’s self-sovereignity; the right to an equal place, every where conceded; a place earned by personal merit, not an artificial attainment, by inheritance, wealth, family, and position.
Seeing, then that the responsibilities of life rests equally on man and woman, that their destiny is the same, they need the same preparation for time and eternity.
The talk of sheltering woman from the fierce sterns of life is the sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of the compass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, to conquer.
Such are the facts in human experience, the responsibilities of individual.
Rich and poor, intelligent and ignorant, wise and foolish, virtuous and vicious, man and woman, it is ever the same, each soul must depend wholly on itself.
So I implore each and every woman to take one step today to make your life better. Whatever that means for you. You have the power. Use it.
Together, we as women, can change the world.
#Internationalwomensday #IWD2019 #ElizabethCadyStanton #solitudeofself #women #greatwomen #womensday #womensrights #love #selfreliance #selflove #stramelpr
sarahstramel 
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