Opinion: Why are women always picking up after men?
Independent women raised me, they taught me how to be confident in my voice and earn my spot in career, education, life, etc. My mom taught me, as her mom did, that a man’s company isn’t going to get you places, and you should never rely on a man to get your work or school done. When I came to college, it put a lot of things into perspective. I am currently minoring in ethnic studies, a department now being targeted by the current presidential administration.
Taking these ethnic studies classes, I’ve anti-colonial women’s movements, the Chicano Movement, the Black Panther Party movement, and many more movements and changes in history that have been rewritten from a white settler perspective. Most importantly, I’ve seen women overlooked in their missions and movements throughout history, and this is most likely because a male figure is more inclined to be listened to by the public. I’d like to focus on Dolores Huerta, an American labor leader and feminist activist, and what it means to me to be a woman living in a man’s world.
Huerta is a well-known labor activist of the 20th century, as well as a leader of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement. In 1995, Huerta started her career in activism. She co-founded the Stockton chapter of the Community Service Organization (CSO), in which she helped lead voter registration drives and fought for economic improvements for the Hispanic community. Through her work in the CSO, Huerta met Cesar Chávez, and they co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), a precursor of the United Farm Workers’ Union (UFW), which had formed three years later where Huerta served as the vice president until 1999.
Huerta was also known as Chávez’s sidekick. She was a lead organizer in the 1965 Delano Grape Strike. She faced violence and sexism from both the growers and political allies and even from her organization. I still get surprised reading about the sexism and discrimination she faced within the NFWA while she was advocating for these people. You would think you don’t want to hate someone who is advocating for your right to exist without discrimination. In 1993, after the death of Chávez, the president seat in UFW was open. Huerta had the experience, but no one voted for her to be the new UFW president because she was a woman.
What gets me is that we do need women in civic life. More women need to run for office and be in political positions. Women are needed at the table when decisions are made so they will be made right. The argument that women are too emotional to be in leading positions is boring; get a new excuse. Who was in the big seat when wars started? Who was allowed to make the decisions? I’ll remind you that women were only granted the right to vote in 1920. 100 years is not a long time ago.
I think some men are too scared they’re not needed; they’re not the standard anymore. Women can do it better themselves. Looking at the world from a contemporary perspective, women are working and fighting so hard because when will it be that a man doesn’t have the final say on rights regarding our body, our medicine, and our healthcare? They’ve been in power too long, and we (women) have been picking up the mess for too long.
