[sunnykerr]

I think the risk was bigger, too, back then.

Especially for women.

If you didn't play by society's rules, there wasn't much of a happily ever after for you.

And we know that because women did rebel back then, too.

Actually, now that I think about it, I'm sure some of them got away with it.

But they would have been the exception to the rule.

[There You'll Be]

True. The risk was incredibly huge.

One I wouldn't have taken, because it's my nature to play follow the leader.

I was just saying some of them did get away with it.

If not, we'd still be living that way now.

It only takes a few to change things from the way they've always been.

That's what I meant.

[sunnykerr]

Didn't you just say that "Even if, like me, people feel they have to "rebel" against the world. "?

Don't get me wrong, you're allowed to have contradictions.

I'd be pretty hypocritical if I started saying you weren't allowed.

I just don't know how a person reconciles being someone whose nature is to follow the leader while feeling they have to rebel against the world.

Mind you, more power to you.

It's good to be many things.

I think there's more freedom in that.

Some did get away with it, you're right.

But I think we're living differently because of more than that.

The suffragette movement had a lot to do with that.

Rich women always had more leeway, even if they also had expectations put on them.

But I think it took poorer women fighting for freedom to really change things.

[There You'll Be]

Because I follow the leader until the pressure gets too much.

Then I rebel.

It's a two part process for me.

I didn't mean the rich women changed things-if that's what I said, sorry for the confusion there.

I think all women in that time, any time, changed things for us, and still do.

[sunnykerr]

A two-part process makes total sense.

And even if it hadn't, you're allowed contradictions.

We all have them, me included.

You didn't say that rich women changed things.

But you did say, to paraphrase, that women getting away with breaking social rules "back then" is how things changed.

And I was just observing that, "back then", women who got away with breaking the rules were rich women.

And that I think it took poorer women fighting (and certainly not getting away with breaking the rules) to change things.

[There You'll Be]

I think we both agree, it's the poor women who made the changes come about, by changing things themselves.

And changing some of their ways.

[sunnykerr]

Yup.

Huzzah for regular women.

[There You'll Be]

[sunnykerr]

On that note, have you ever heard of Anne Hutchinson?

Long story short, she was one of the original Pilgrims who landed in... Boston or Cambridge or one of those original towns.

Anyway, she had 15 children and was a midwife and she got to leading people in their religious beliefs.

And the men in charge couldn't have that.

They put her on trial as a heretic and she just kept dominating them in argument after argument over religious doctrine.

They eventually tricked her into saying something heterical and so she got booted out and went to live out her days... in Rhode Island, I think.

Anyway, that's when the men of her original town decided they needed a proper school where men would be thought the Bible, but also how to argue, so that never again would lawmen be dominated by a woman like that.

And that's how Harvard University was founded.

And, among her descendants, are FDR and the Bush and Romney families.

[There You'll Be]

Geez, those descendants are incredibly conservative, so they obviously didn't learn anything from her.

Or anything that I've seen that's obvious.

Thanks for telling me about that.

I mean the whole story.

It's great history, and I'm glad to know it.

[There You'll Be]

Geez, those descendants are incredibly conservative, so they obviously didn't learn anything from her.

Or anything that I've seen that's obvious.

Thanks for telling me about that.

I mean the whole story.

It's great history, and I'm glad to know it.

[sunnykerr]

FDR wasn't that conservative, was he?

So there's hope.

What's especially funny to me is when you contrast how important education, of men but also of women, was important back then.

Because the only reason Anne Hutchinson could do what she did is that she was educated.

Meanwhile, we know how anti-intellectual the GOP has become.

So her descendants are all "who cares what science says, what feels right to you?" when their ancestors were all "get an education, get it now."

[There You'll Be]

No, he wasn't.

You're right-I guess I thought she learned by what she saw and experienced the world to be.

So it's great that she was educated, and that you thought of that.

I really hadn't. It just didn't occur to me.

She had to be educated to do what she did, you are right about that.

And it is a huge difference between the people before her and then after her.

[sunnykerr]

I blame Reagan a lot.

It's that speech he gave when it was proven that his government had sold weapons to Iran to fund right-wing militias in Latin America...

He'd been denying it for months and months.

"The United States does not do that."

And, when he was faced with tangible proof that his government had done just that, his response was, "In my heart, I never lied to you, even though the evidence says otherwise."

In other words, facts don't matter.

[There You'll Be]

Facts don't matter for any of them.

Other than Obama, and for all I know, him as well.