I'm just SO TIRED

[llmart]

41. I have nothing more I can add to this thread except a huge K&R!

I'm 73. I became a feminist when I was 16. I started reading everything I could about feminism. I've tried to think about what it was that made a teenager be so drawn to the "second wave" as it was referred to. I subscribed to Ms. from its first issue. It may have been my oldest sister's influence or the fact that my mother's life looked so unappealing to me (abusive husband, too many kids, poverty and the resultant depression she experienced), or just the basic notion that what I saw for girls and women was the unfairness of it all.

Yes, we're all tired and it feels like we want to quit and give up or turn it over to the younger women, but I'm retired and as my one sister says to me all the time, "What the hell else do we have to do with our time at this stage?" So, I'll fight until my dying day to rid ourselves of these damned men who want to control us in every way! I may be beyond my childbearing years, hell, even my own daughter is beyond her childbearing years, but I have one grandchild and one only and she's a girl and I'll be goddamned if she's going to have to fight this same battle when she's grown!!!

I got the loveliest Mother's Day gift from my son - a donation for a substantial amount made in my name to Planned Parenthood. If I've done nothing else in my life, I am so proud that I raised a feminist son. Today I will match that amount from my own savings. We older women may not be able to do what we did when we were younger, but some of us have more money now than we did in our younger days, so if we can at the very least donate to Democratic candidates across the nation - especially pro-choice women - then that's what we should do.