Honoring Women

It being International Women's Day, I wanted to list some of the women I truly admire.

• Every woman in my family. They have stayed with me through thick and thin, many times when I didn't deserve it.

• Every woman ever cheated on, abused, or abandoned but did not use any of those as an excuse to give up.

• Every woman who honors her wedding vows.

• Hannah Arendt, the philosopher who so accurately captured the essence of evil as "banality," i.e., ignoring moral questions rather than even bothering to decide them incorrectly. The stereotypical example was the Nazi functionary who looked the other way and kept the trains running on time for fear of losing his livelihood.

• Ayn Rand, the philosopher whose worship of pure reason I believe is ultimately flawed, but who shook the world with the courage of her convictions.

• Jeannette Rankin, native Montanan and first woman in Congress. The real reason I admire her, though, is that she voted against both World Wars I and II. In the latter instance she was the only one in the entire Congress to do so, and that takes guts. If we had stayed out of World War I, World War II wouldn't have happened and millions of lives most likely would have been saved from fascism, Nazism, and socialism over the course of the twentieth century. And while World War II is trumpeted as the good war, it handed Eastern Europe to the USSR on a silver platter, and our involvement ultimately produced more death than would have occurred if we had minded our own business as George Washington counseled in his farewell address.

• Clara Barton, Florence Nightingale, and any other woman who wades through blood and guts trying to save lives.

• Antigone. She spoke truth to power and was willing to die for it.

I'm sure I'm forgetting many others worthy of praise, but these are all who come to mind at the moment.

EDIT:

Shame on me for not mentioning Phyllis Schlafly, who almost singlehandedly defeated the "Equal Rights Amendment" that would have empowered the federal government to attack any perceived inequalities between men and women. It was Kurt Vonnegut who envisioned such a horrific future in his short story Harrison Bergeron, a world where "Handicapper General" Diana Moon Glampers forced the beautiful to wear ugly masks; the intelligent to wear earpieces blasting loud noise; and the strong to wear bags of birdshot. When the protagonist rebelled, Diana used some of the shot on him to snuff him out. Thank you, Phyllis, for proving that sometimes a woman is the only sane person around.