Math for Girls Counts

Before they were great, great grandmothers, they stood 

in lines for singular equality, for one scale blind 

to gender, creed or color. But, their right 

to vote was delayed until 1920 – 144 years after

propertied White men, 51 years after Black men,

as if women were mere household amenities

used as conveniences.

The vote hoped to move the line closer 

to a public voice in fiscal and sexual values,  

but it took sixteen more years to change 

birth control info from obscene 

to legal mail (hidden in plain brown envelopes)

to head-of-the-household husbands,

a married man the only 

Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. 

Connecticut’s 1965 defeat freed the pill 

only for the sanctified wedded. I remember 

unmarried, pregnant girls, 

shamed and blamed for bad choices, 

while the boys were just being boys. 

The 1982 ERA defeat subtracted sixty years 

of female rights. One hundred years since suffrage,

fifteen states still have not ratified ERA,

now a dusty museum piece. 

Defeat meant I had no credit, no bank account, 

no property without my husband’s name, addressed as 

Mrs. John Doe, my first name unimportant,

a nondescript dustpan beneath spousal steps.

Reduced fraction of 1973’s Roe vs. Wade, reproductive rights 

are not in the corporate equation that controls

choice as newly-deemed religious bodies, 

a catch-22 where working women have zero say. 

Despite the centuries-old male monopoly, women have 

done the math – equal means equal, not less than.

© Patsy Asunción, 2017

"The Awakening" by Henry Mayer, 1915
Restoration copyright by Adam Cuerden
from Wikimedia Commons