Things aren't all bad.

I talk a lot about how things are shit, and quite frankly for a lot of us they are, things are shit for people in different ways and with varying levels of shittiness, but that doesn't make it less shitty.

I don't want anyone to think that I am a pessimist though, I really do think things trend towards better over the long term, and when I complain about the crap that happens today, it is more from the angle of "look how much more there is left to do" rather than "see how terrible things have gotten".

This isn't to take away from how terrible things may be mind you, just because things are better than they were doesn't mean they are ideal, and we should strive for ideal, the phrase "Perfect is the enemy of good" is actually not really applicable to social justice movements, be they for gender rights, racial rights, economic inequality, or labor rights. Perfect is the goal, just because we crawl towards that goal doesn't change it, nor does it change that we have come a long way.

I want to share an example with you in the form of a picture.

Pictured: Good times

This is a cartoon from 1908, during the battle for women's suffrage. It is a beautiful piece of work and depicts a bar full of exquisitely attired ladies hanging out and enjoying themselves, there is a free lunch as well as candy, and a live ticker of the fights, among other things. Also a pair of children for some reason, possibly being ignored or looked upon with disdain, which is the proper way to look upon children if you ask me.

The artist who created decided that this would be the best way to convince readers that giving women the vote is a bad idea.

I want to let that sit with you a minute, the scariest thing to those opposed to women's suffrage was apparently that women might have a good time in spaces of their own. And this was a perfectly reasonable opinion to hold at the time it seems as this style of opposition cartoon was fairly common and the themes almost always included women doing stuff without men.

Nowadays it is still pretty hard for women to do stuff without men, but the mindset that it is something alien and terrifying is not something we see all that often, and certainly not in the form of cartoons printed like the above and put out by respectable newspapers. Obviously legal protections for women have also increased since then, and by the laws we have a form of equality.

I am not really talking about the laws though, rather the culture surrounding them, because if you ask nearly any woman if they are treated equally to men they will laugh at you, actually they are more likely to laugh at you in their head, while giving a sober, noncommittal answer designed to avoid a confrontation.

The point is, things have changed to the point that if the comic were posted out of context, it would be difficult to impossible for someone of this generation to realize that it is anti-suffrage. We make progress, the goal is a long ways off, but we are crawling, it takes time to fight a patriarchy entrenched for millennia and backed by the majority of the world's major religions, doesn't mean it isn't worth doing.