The Trump/Project 2025 regime’s war in Iran and fabricated emergencies at home are overshadowing some long-running issues that we can’t afford to ignore.
Big Tech is barreling ahead with data centers that, like the concentration camps on the feds’ drawing board, no one wants in their backyard. Artificial intelligence keeps creating new problems. Climate change isn’t going away. Censorship is on the rise. Donald Trump is hell-bent on rigging the November election and making voting harder.
Health insurance is far less affordable, and the federal government is squandering billions of dollars on gratuitous warfare, Gestapo-like secret police and even concentration camps (including two in my part of Pennsylvania).
Amid all that, it’s easy to overlook what Trump and his Project 2025ers plan for just over half of the U.S. population. Their mission, which they’re branding a return to traditional values, is to limit women to supporting, even subservient roles.
That’s why I was happy to participate last weekend in a local antidote – a panel discussion on women’s leadership. About 50 people, mostly women but also some men, turned out in Coaldale for the International Women’s Day event sponsored by the Eastern Schuylkill Democrats, the Schuylkill County Democratic Women’s League and the county Democratic Committee.
Although women have proven themselves in just about every endeavor, we’re underrepresented in leadership positions – and the 2016 and 2024 elections showed that an incompetent man can still defeat a highly qualified woman.
“I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about women not belonging in politics and not making smart decisions,” said my fellow panelist Elena Reiss, Lehigh University’s designated representative to the UN. But statistics show that when women are involved in negotiating a peace agreement, it’s 35% more likely to last 15 years or longer, she added.
Kristin Bartholomew, a senior vice president of nutritional supplement company Force Factor, said many women mistakenly think that hard work alone will lead to success.
“The people who advance are not always the most talented people in the room,” she said. “They’re the ones whose talent is known … And if we’ve internalized the idea that advocating for ourselves makes us look bad, that’s something we need to actively unlearn.”
As a boomer, I was taught from childhood that nice girls and women were demure, while boys could get away with being loud and mischievous. And it didn’t escape me that men did more interesting things and got far more respect than women. Even TV commercials featured authoritative male voices telling women what to buy.
I wasn’t eager to grow up and become a lesser being. Fortunately, the women’s movement gained steam as I came of age, so I was able to live life on my own terms. But even now, I must fight my inclination to give more credence to men’s words than women’s.
Unfortunately, that sexist programming didn’t end at my generation.
Keynote speaker Keir Bradford-Grey, who leads Marrone Law Firm’s civil rights litigation department, said her three children, now young adults, had the same middle- and high-school teachers but were treated differently.
“Watching my daughters suppress what they know, what they feel, what they want, and watching my son just say, ‘The sky’s the limit,’ often breaks my heart,” she said. “And it breaks my heart because I understand it’s not about what’s in them; it’s about what sometimes society has told them, not through words, but through actions.”
From grade school-level insults at any woman who crosses him to anti-“woke” executive orders that essentially legalize sexism, Trump has put American misogyny on steroids.
Meanwhile, male supremacists and trad wife influencers are polluting the internet with messages about the joys of submitting to a dominant man and bearing lots of children for him. Forget bodily autonomy. It may be her body, but it’s his choice.
Influencers, you’re more than a tad presumptuous to try to school people you’ve never met about what makes them happy. And you’re dead wrong to assume that all women are alike.
“I always prodded my girls to be more bold because they were more likely to be shut down,” Bradford-Grey told me.
We certainly need this prodding now, not only for our self-fulfillment but also to let girls and young women know what they, too, are capable of.
“If people can’t see it, they can’t be it,” Bradford-Grey said.
And then we all lose.
Canary note: Opinions expressed in any Op-Ed column appearing on this site are the views of the writer and are not necessarily the opinions of Coal Region Canary.
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