Right after the Civil War ended in 1865, enslaved Africans were granted, not just their freedom, but their full rights as America citizens. For a brief, all too brief, period, they made immense progress as they were finally allowed to vote, to run for, and be elected into, public office. And they did. Until Samuel Tilden was elected and Rutherford Hayes was inaugurated in 1877. The Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction and withdrew the federal troops from the South, and with them went the full freedom and the civil rights of African Americans.
Women in America, although they were granted the vote by men in 1920, did not achieve full equality for another fifty years, until 1973, when the Supreme Court recognized their right to control their own bodies in Roe v. Wade. For without bodily autonomy, there is no true freedom. Sadly, that freedom lasted only until the Hyde Amendment passed in 1977 and restricted the right to bodily autonomy to those who could afford it.
Since then, in state by state, we have seen our rights restricted as one after another barrier has been placed between women and a legal medical procedure that is safer than childbirth. Every attempt has been made to not only deprive us of easy access to medical procedures, but to even deny us access to professional reproductive health care.
When those who felt that electing a reality star to the most demanding job in the world was a good thing, it was women who were out on the streets of DC the day after his inauguration in much larger numbers than those who attended the day before. In what was the largest single day demonstration that the nation had ever seen, women took their anger to the streets in cities and towns across the country.
I have said it before, beware the anger of women, they can change the world.