I wish the government and business would stay out of my uterus and take care of their own affairs. I give men a tiny pass because I need their sperm to become pregnant, be it through sexual intercourse or artificial insemination. However, I still expect them to stay in their lane when it comes to making decisions about my body. I can’t stress enough MY BODY MY CHOICE!  What I have been trying to understand for many years is, who appointed them meaning the government, businesses, and men as overseers of a woman’s body. In the video clip with John Oliver, he stressed about Hobby Lobby selling materials that can make cock and balls. Luckily, those cock and balls are fake, but if they were real, I can bet that some of them could turn to be delinquent fathers.  As for the glue that they stock on the shelves of Hobby Lobby, children walk in the stores daily and purchase them. I can bet that cooperate is quite aware that they are not using it to glue paper together or a broken toy, many times they are purchased to be used as illicit drugs. Tell the truth Hobby Lobby! You are quite aware that they are using it to get high which is far more dangerous than an abortion. Children are often irrational not by choice but because their frontal cortex isn’t fully developed therefore limiting their ability to make rational decisions. I made this point to say that women at childbearing age can make decisions on their own. I am a mother and I love children; I am also a single parent. Raising a child on your own posses some serious challenges and can render a women’s life stagnant. Especially if you do not have the support of family and friends. In the state of Texas, the people who enacted the new abortion laws most of them men, are the same ones that cry when ordered to pay child support and give up their so-called freedom to spend quality time with their children.

According to Guttmacher institute, “Twelve other states have enacted bans on abortion early in pregnancy, but all have been blocked from going into effect as they are blatantly unconstitutional. While any six-week abortion ban is a radical and immensely harmful measure in its own right, Texas went much further. Abortion restrictions typically rely on the state for enforcement. S.B. 8 is designed to be insulated from federal court intervention by leaving enforcement up to individuals, and even gives people financial incentive to do so.

            The legislation allows anyone, anywhere to sue people involved in providing abortion care or practical support to patients in Texas and win judgments of $10,000 or more. This would open the floodgates for lawsuits, bury clinics under frivolous court cases and legal fees, and likely make it impossible for many providers to remain open and for most patients to get care before the six-week cutoff. This has been aptly dubbed the “sue thy neighbor” law by abortion rights supporters.”

            In my opinion, this whole Texas abortion law, is nothing but a get rich quick scheme cooked up by the government of Texas to limit rendering financial help to the people in need in their state. If anyone can sue some innocent person for helping a woman who decided to exercise her right to choose, once they are granted money, then the government does not have to provide for them. WAKE UP PEOPLE!

Acceptance can set you free. Being comfortable in your own skin plays a very important part in the way one lives their life. As we grow older, we begin to see how diversity is not wanted but needed in our daily life. Who cares if you are green, black, or purple? Oops some people are bothered by the color of my skin, but I don’t care about them all I know is that I am beautiful. Risk crisis was new to me, because where I grew up there was no such thing at risk crisis. All I knew is that we were all humans.

Here is a quote from the article the Power of Identity Politics “I am really sick of hearing all that stuff. Black, white, blah blah blah. We need to stop doing that shit. It only gets on my nerves. When are we going to get around to being human!” The question is, why do white people act so intimidated when they hear the word racism? Not all but most of them quietly throw the race card out when it’s convenient to them. Maybe if they try living in my black skin for a while, they will understand better.

             Oftentimes black people feel powerless when it comes to race, I am the mother of a young black lady I have spent 26 years making sure that she feels powerful every day of her life. According to the Power of Identity Politics “defines power as the ability to make decisions that affect your own life and the lives of others, the freedom to shape and determine the story of who we are. Power also means having the ability to reward and punish and decide how resources are distributed.” We should all be proud of who we are, how we look, and live comfortably without fear ridicule and being misunderstood.

Black people have struggled for centuries not just economically but emotionally, physically, and mentally. The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. Living as a black woman in the United States of America, I have come across many forms of discrimination and racial bias. I can’t imagine living as a transgender black woman. They are looked down upon tremendously and many of them lose their lives. Transgender black women have the highest mortality rates due to the violate crimes they face. It is important that they find a community that is accepting of them so that they can be themselves completely and feel safe. This is way ball room culture is important to the LGBTQIA+ community. They feel at home and accepted. They feel free and loved. ‘Paris is Burning’ shows a great representation of ball room culture.  

            Being a black woman in America, I face double discrimination. As a woman when men see me driving, they try to intimidate me by speeding up or cutting me off, in meetings men try to speak over me or mansplain things I already know. As a black person, white women are often intimidated by me or feel uncomfortable in my presence and white men think I’m not intelligent or capable of doing what they can do. Black women have the highest count of sexual assault cases. After reading Osayanmo’s post, I feel the frustration she feels. She said we should be treated like everyone else but unfortunately, we’re not. As I do believe we have come a long way, we have not made it where we need to be.

After reading ‘The Feminine Mystique’ (excerpts) and watching ‘50 Years of the Feminine Mystique’, I just started writing my thoughts and feelings. Growing up as a young girl, I can remember making some observations of what was happening around me. These articles jolted my memory way back to when I was that little girl. My father went out to work to provide for his family, while my mother stayed at home and had baby after baby until she gave birth to eight children.

            I remember my father coming home and being very angry all the time. He would physically, emotionally, and mentally abuse my mother and one of his favorite things to say to her was “You are only a housewife.” She was completely controlled by my father. Reading the articles for this week I can see a vast difference in the way American women were treated to the way women from the Caribbean were treated. This prompted me to want to be an independent woman when I grow up. Because of my experience as a young girl, when I became a wife, I despise the name housewife, I would not allow anyone to refer to me as a housewife.

            Although the Feminine Mystique was published back in 1963, this shows that nothing has really changed because we see this behavior even today. I believe that it is unfortunate that women are referred to as housewives. Being a wife is a full-time job. You work from the time you rise in the morning, taking care of their husband, kids and all the household chores which includes cooking fresh nutritious meals daily, with very little or no time left to care for themselves. Often wives just keep quiet. This goes back to what I heard almost every day while growing up: “Girls should be seen and not heard.” When I became a mother, I set out to break that cycle. I told my daughter that girls should be seen, heard, and listened to, and have maintained this way all my life. In the article it is stated that “The root of women’s troubles in the past is that women envied men, women tried to be like men, instead of accepting their own nature, which can find fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love.” There is nothing to be envied about men, I can do mostly everything a man can do, and that’s the truth. There is nothing absolutely nothing to envied about men. Most of them are bullies with little or no respect for women, especially women who carried their babies.

Women should stand tall and always assert their presence, holding your own shows that you are demanding respect. I have discovered that my married friends prefer to be referred to as wife not housewife. They no longer want to stay at home pampering the husband and caring for the kids. Women are liberated, they have come to realize that household duties can be evenly distributed among the sexes. Slowly some men have caught on to the trend and are getting more comfortable with sharing domestic duties once thought to be a woman’s job, making it easier to live in an equal household. Finally, a woman’s vagina is not just a tool to produce babies, it is one of nature’s most wonderful pleasures of life.

It’s ok for women to want to go out in the field and work which ever field they care to work in. What is not fair is for them to work under poor and deplorable conditions. The triangle factory was located in New York and took place in the 20th century. Most of the women who were working in the factory were young immigrant women, in their early 20s. What’s most unfortunate about the reality of working in triangle factory is the amount of hours each employee had to work. Not only that but the conditions of their work place would make anyone want to quit. Sadly, they couldn’t because they were poor and needed to make money to provide for their families. The kind of work these women were doing was making shirtwaist. They were doing this kind of work for so many hours a day. On March 25th 1911, a fire started. This fire would have been escapable only if these workers were provided with safe ways to remove themselves from the building. The only hose that was available wasn’t working at the time and the elevators were malfunctioned. Many of these workers had to jump out the window to their death to escape the fire.

The triangle factory fire saddens me because this could have been avoided. The amount of people working all at one time definitely did not allow them to easily escape. We should all be able to work in safe work conditions no matter what job it is we’re doing. This story is also very sensitive to me because most of these workers were immigrants. I understand how it feels to come from another country and have to work countless hours in order to buy food or maintain a roof over your head. It breaks my heart to know that these were the conditions they had to work in and what it resulted in.Taking a look into Mario’s post, it makes me comfortable to know that others feel the same way I do. There are factories in countries like India who still have employees working in unsafe conditions, long hours and no time for them to even eat.

It pretty much sickens me that we still have to fight for our rights and that we are all not considered equal. I understand that people were happy about Virginia becoming the 38th states to pass the ERA law but to me it’s sad that we live in the 21st century and still have fight for our rights. This has been an on going battle, we’ve come far but are still not where we need to be. I do respect the women who have consistently fought for our rights but it still saddens me that this bill is just now being passed. I hope that one day, we will no longer see sweat shops and we will see each other as equal because we are.