John Conricode is right: Women’s suffrage should not be celebrated in a museum in Knoxville.
It should be shouted in the streets of every city.
He’s right that something as essential and progressive as − checks notes − women having the same rights as men doesn’t belong behind glass cases meant for cultural relics. It belongs in every classroom, every textbook, and every civic conversation, echoing as a reminder that this fundamental step toward a truer democracy only just happened in the same century I was born.
But I wouldn’t expect him to recognize that difference. His letter reads like a relic itself. A sermon from another age, which confuses prejudice for philosophy, calling it “nature.” To claim that women are too compassionate for politics is an admission of fear. It’s the unease of a man who feels threatened but, instead of embodying the “masculine man” he imagines himself to be and admitting he’s been wrong, retreats behind regurgitated, ignorant pseudoscience disguised as intellect.
The idea that women are “naturally” suited for domesticity is a social construction born from centuries of exclusion. Women didn’t choose to be confined to the home; they were denied access to education, labor, and power by a system that defined their worth through servitude. To then point to that confinement as evidence of “nature” is circular justification for inequality.
Our society has long mistaken design for destiny. Patriarchy built the system, called it “order,” and declared deviation from it “unnatural.” But human nature isn’t measured by obedience to outdated hierarchies. It shines in the struggle and victories of equity and equality; in our refusal to remain bound by hierarchies at all.
John’s narrow argument, built on logic of the very system that oppresses many, including women, collapses under the slightest scrutiny. His vision of civilization’s “survival” depends on preserving an illusion; one in which half the population exists to comfort the insecurities of the other.