Pissed Off Women: The Legacy of the Bitches Who Came Before
Polite gets you killed. Bitch gets you results
There are a lot of things you can say about women.
But you can’t call us weak.
I know, I know; the Manosphere and the entire right-wing side of politics these days like to pretend that women are the fairer sex, and that going back to the 1950s housewife lifestyle is what we secretly all want.
What women really want is to be locked away in the kitchen slaving over our precious appliances, making food from scratch and scrubbing grout on our hands and knees so Betty down the road doesn’t judge us at the next garden party.
We definitely don’t want the rights, freedoms and autonomy we’ve spent centuries bleeding for.
Some men — not all, but some — only feel good about themselves when they feel superior to somebody else. Women, more often than not, catch the brunt of it.
That’s patriarchy for you. The only person with any value is a ‘real man,’ and if you don’t live up to that you’re worthless. Women are a couple of holes and a baby factory, and our hands exist to serve. That’s what these guys think.
Some of them swear we’re happier that way, and feminism secretly makes us miserable, lonely old spinsters who die sad with a pile of cats.
But let me ask you something. Do you know anything about history?
‘Cause if you do, boy, you know that’s bullshit.
Every little bit of progress we have is earned. Men didn’t ‘give’ us our rights, we fucking fought for them. Literally. Women hit the streets all around the world with bats, knives, our bare fists, and protest signs held like clubs — every right we have was bought with the blood of our mothers and their mothers before them.
Y’all think we’re weak, soft, sweet-hearted girls. But that’s only because you haven’t seen us pissed off.
Do you know when women first got the right to vote in the U.S.? In Canada? Britain?
Do you know when we were given the legal right to have our own bank accounts or open our own credit without the signature of a husband or a male relative?
Do you know when marital rape was first made illegal?
Take a minute and look those things up. Go on down a little historical rabbit hole with me — I promise you, you’ll be shocked at how recent some of those dates actually are.
As a hint, I’ll tell you that my mother — born in 1971 — was 12 years old when marital rape became a crime in Canada where we were both born.
In the United States, it wasn’t a crime country-wide until the year she was pregnant with me, in 1993. I was born in March of 1994.
I am 32 years old. When I was born, my country didn’t even have a committee to ensure fair and equal pay between men and women without having to file official complaints. We didn’t get that basic protection until 2001, when I was just a 7-year-old child.
We still don’t have perfect parity between genders in terms of pay. The pay gap still exists, as does a culture of expecting women to manage and tend to the home.
Even while working a full time job, equal in hours to a male partner — assuming she has one. We still do the majority of the household chores and general upkeep.
And no, mowing the lawn and cleaning the gutters and fixing the car don’t count for this. I’m talking about the thousands of little things you do every single day to keep a home tidy and livable.
Cooking, washing dishes, vacuuming, scrubbing toilets, picking up toys, making grocery lists, getting the mail, checking the to-do list, making school lunches and planning family activities — the shit your average mom does on the daily that Dad seems to ‘forget.’
Not throwing shade at all dads and husbands, here. Just the ones who can’t be assed to show up.
The guy who says he can’t figure out a diaper or how the laundry machine works, and his wife just ‘does it better.’
The fact is, our culture still has gendered expectations for men and women that keep us locked into certain roles. Especially now, as the Christian right-wing and the online Manosphere conspire to construct a fictional, highly romanticized image of the ideal woman from the past.
A past where we served without complaint, where we were happy to be domestic servants and obedient wives. A past where women were perfectly content to be led by our men and never once thought we deserved more.
A past that never existed.
Women fought for our autonomy.
I’m not being hyperbolic; we literally fought. The Suffragettes weren’t just politely requesting that women be given the right to vote, they straight-up publicly stated that violence was the only way to win.
They planted bombs, they lit buildings on fire, they broke windows and vandalized properties.
They killed people.
In return they were tortured. Raped. Beaten in the streets. Murdered. But the thing is, those things were already happening to women every day; it was nothing new. The only thing that changed were the public reasons for the attacks.
Before, it was ‘well she shouldn’t have dressed like that.’
When the Suffragettes hit the scene, it became ‘she needs to know her place.’
The thing is, in the end, they won. Women got the vote, and we write our ballots with red ink to this day.
And that’s just the English Suffragettes. Think about the Stonewall Riot that kicked off our modern-day Pride Month celebrations and LGBTQ+ activism. The protest movement that followed was started by transgender women who were sick and tired of being repeatedly sexually abused by the police and treated as less-than.
Transwomen are our sisters, and we’ve fought side by side in our quest for equal treatment from the beginning. Not all women are straight and cis, but we’re all women. We all face gendered violence and discrimination.
The battle for women’s rights is, like all activism, an intersectional one. We’re queer, we’re straight, we’re white and brown and Black, we’re able-bodied and neurodivergent and disabled. We’re any and all ages, from the smallest little girl to the most wizened matron.
Every time we’ve fought for our rights, we have done so with passion and fury. We haven’t always gotten it right, of course — white women often excluded women of colour in the battle for the vote, for example — but we fought.
And now, we’re angrier than ever.
A rapist and child predator leads the largest, most powerful nation on Earth. Men who controlled a twisted, degrading ring of traffickers who abused women and children for their own sick pleasure are still holding positions of extreme wealth and power all over the world.
We see the impact they’ve had on our culture, the internalized misogyny we grew up with, and how the hateful disparaging views of women that they preach are finding a foothold in young men now.
“Your body my choice” and all that.
We see it, and we’re fucking done.
Our mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and all of the women who came before us — cis, trans, white and able-bodied or otherwise — have been down this road before.
Now it’s our turn, and we have learned from their example.
We don’t need protecting, boys. You do. Because if there’s one thing we’ve all learned by now it’s that being polite is bullshit.
Polite gets you killed.
Bitch gets you results.
Solidarity wins.
I'm almost 70 years old. It's so frustrating to see that my granddaughter's generation are going to have to fight, all over again, for the basic human rights that my generation already fought for and won. They're fighting against a fascist movement that is organized, violent and led by the wealthiest men in the world.
I shouldn't have to be a "bitch" to be able to walk safely down the street at night, to be paid fairly and have equal access to jobs, education and healthcare and to be treated with respect. But here we are, again. Isn't it really the men who are being bitches?
That title alone. “Pissed Off Women: The Legacy of the Bitches Who Came Before” — this is the kind of lineage women don’t get taught in school. We’re handed the sanitized version: the polite suffragette, the reasonable activist. The ones who screamed and refused and made everything uncomfortable for everyone get quietly written out. What does the piece argue about how we carry that forward?