I'm a Conservative Feminist

I just saw a headline "Meet the Cute Blond who Hates Feminists" on a major conservative news source. This is wrong on so many levels. 

I am a conservative female and I am a feminist. 

I was speaking on the radio recently and when I mentioned I was a feminist, the host was confused. A conservative? Who's feminist? How can that be? He asked me to explain myself.

This shows how much feminism has been rebranded and conscripted by the left. The original feminists merely expected and demanded equal rights, such as the right to vote and the right to work. They wanted to be truly seen as equal whenever possible. How many people know that there were many women in the 1800s who couldn't even read, because some men felt that reading would give a woman "brain fever"? Many fathers forbid their daughters to read. Reading was for men: Women were keepers of the home and hearth.

If you take a few moments to research the suffragettes, you learn of their true sufferings and struggle to merely get women the right to vote. Women were constantly persecuted with immunity by their husbands because they were seen as property. If you beat your wife, it was entirely your right to do so, unless it got out of hand. It wasn't until 1962 that spousal rape was defined. Until then, if a husband came home drunk and in a rage and decided to rape his wife, it was perfectly fine: She had asked for it by signing up for marriage in the first place. It wasn't until 1965 that it was made illegal to discriminate against women.

And yet, when Hillary ran for President in 2008, there were some conservative men who thought it was terribly funny to wear t-shirts that read "Hillary: Get into the kitchen and make me a sandwich." I greatly disliked Hillary, but I was terribly offended that these morons didn't try to take on her policies. They felt a simple "putting her in her place" was all that was needed. As I pointed out then, no one dared to produce tees that said "Obama: Get into those fields and pick me some cotton" but overt sexism was acceptable to many conservative men.

So back to the headline: Obviously it was written by a conservative male who likes "keeping the little woman in her place." It is simply oozing with patronization and sexism. And the "cute little blond" is the fool who is perpetuating this. 

Does she realize that if she lived in the 1800s she might never have been educated at all? Does she realize that until 1919 her views on politics would have been seen as ludicrous? These rights were not naturally given to us. They were not even handed to us by men. They were fought for, women were brutalized and died for these rights. They are not rights to be taken lightly.

I am proud to be be a feminist. I will take on that "cute little blond" any day.