Cristen Conger - Unladylike: A Field Guide to Smashing the Patriarchy and Claiming Your Space

unladylike: (adj.) 1) behaving in a manner that figuratively and/or literally flips off patriarchal subordination, silencing, and sexual double standards 2) foregoing discriminatory privileges while pursuing compassionate, thriving, self-defined lives 3) patriarchys go-to gender citation for doing womanhood wrong

patriarchy: (noun) men-on-top social hierarchy characterized by fragile masculinity, imposed maternity, and male sexual entitlement

smash the patriarchy: (verb) to flex unladylike persistence for the resistance

That racist reality of whites-only ladyhood also galvanized activist Ida B. Wells to pursue journalism full time, wielding the power of the pen and her voice to publicize the brutalities of lynchings and sexual violence perpetrated against African Americans in the Jim Crow South. In 1883, Wells had seated herself in a ladies train car since there wasnt a designated blacks-only car. But when the conductor noticed her, he attempted to physically remove her. Wells later recounted in her autobiography:

the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand. I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didnt try it again by himself. He went forward and got the baggageman and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out.

Afterward, Wells sued the railroad company and won. But when the railroad appealed the decision, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the previous ruling on account of Wells unladylike persistence. She lived up to the judges verdict, too, agitating against murderous white supremacy and traveling around the US organizing black women into clubs that could band together to create community and support networks.

By the 1900s, the industrial revolution, capitalism, and urbanism had remodeled the home as husbands moral refuge from the sinful world where they nobly toiled to provide for wives and childrenand pay for occasional brothel visits. Whatever disappointments or venereal diseases befell them, men could return home to a place where they always knew best. Ladies got a new, middle-class role model to match, a feminine foil to masculine lust. Idolized in popular ladymags like Godeys Ladys Book, the True Woman was expected to want for nothing more than to please and be pleasant, embodying the top-four most desirable traits that turned ordinary gals into wife material.

Piety: Assigning faith to the fairer sex offered ladies safe intellectual exercise through reading the Bible and gave them another male figure to obey when the man of the house was away. Religion is exactly what a woman needs, The Ladies Repository magazine advised readers circa 1860, for it gives her that dignity that best suits her dependence.

Purity: Listen up, ladies. Sex with anyone but husbands and desirous of anything beyond pleasing him and making babies is a one-way ticket to despair, destitution, insanity, and possibly death. Somasturbation? Nope. Keep your hands where we can see em.