Free Soil Party Blog

The introduction to the Free Soil Party home web site is

Free Soil is a different political party, not in any typical category. This is a party for equal opportunity and fair competition, for defending the endangered, linking ecology, free enterprise, civil liberties, independent thought, such things capitalism as practiced finds a nuisance. The economy is warped, its regulations riddled with loopholes. Free Soil proposes another definition of free enterprise, valuing resources taken for granted in proportion to their real value. Usual ways of doing business and politics cannot be sound or credible, except to those true believers the party faithful, as these articles demonstrate.

Those articles on the home site were mostly written before 2000. From the introduction to this party blog started in January 2007, About Aletha and This Blog

The party was revived by my circle of friends, aka consciousness raising group, in 1977, when we were teen feminist rebels. Its past was of interest as a party to abolish slavery. White women were also legally slaves in those days. Men generally have attached some sense of property to relationship partners. Marriage ceremonies traditionally have included the bride vowing to obey the groom. Some women still believe this is proper, duty of a wife. Some women, including myself, view women selling their sexuality to survive as sex slaves… Female sexuality is not property to be possessed by men, or rented out for male pleasure.

I also strongly believe other creatures get no respect from this culture where I live and am forced to participate as best I can. I am a thoroughgoing rebel and skeptic, unlikely to believe anything coming from conventional wisdom. My central issue is fair representation for women, but many issues also disturb my attention. I see many linkages others may deny. For them, they may be right, or they might just be in denial, hoping this mess the world is now coping with has nothing to do with how men see things…

I am no Marxist, though some may call me socialist because I think the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means something, like the purpose of government to secure? I am not easily categorized, skeptical of all isms and belief systems. I do not consider my views extreme or impractical. On the contrary. I do not hate men. My intimate partners have been male. I can recognize great variation among men as well as women. Men have had a few good ideas, but some really bad ones for me and other living things. One of the worst is getting the right to life mixed up with abortion…

I have encountered confusion about what is meant by comparing these forms of legal slavery, the powers of white slaveowners over slaves and husbands over wives. Was the wife of a brutal man better off than his slave, both subject to subordination, battering, or rape at his whim? I could cite the famous John Lennon song, Woman is the N*** of the World, as the best known expression of this analogy, which of course is imperfect and not meant to be stretched to perfection, or the absolute, or too far. There is a long history to this white male privilege. Why did women have to fight for another fifty years after Amendment 14 passed to get the vote? Plenty of laws regarding women’s rights might not have been necessary if the Republican Party had not sold women out after the Civil War, despite all the work feminists had done in the movement to abolish slavery. Section 2 of that amendment is as follows:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.

The specification of male was the betrayal of women that delayed female suffrage for fifty years. Republicans were mostly moderate antislavery Whigs, stealing the issue from the Free Soil Party, which was more like a true abolitionist party. The most famous feminist this author knows about who belonged to that party was Julia Ward Howe. Most of the feminists of that time were suspicious of politics, and most of the male public figures speaking out against slavery were suspicious of them, too radical, linking the forms of slavery. William Lloyd Garrison, notorious publisher of the Liberator, was one of the male radical abolitionists encouraging women to take an active part in the anti-slavery organizations. Women also formed female antislavery societies. Garrison published an impulsive letter from Angelina Grimke without her knowledge, creating a great sensation. Here is an overview of women in the antislavery movement.

That period of history was the best chance women had to gain constitutional recognition of basic rights until perhaps now, but it was not to be. The Republicans had not really promised anything to women or blacks. Lincoln was not an abolitionist or feminist. Even the Radical Republicans were much more interested in liberating black men than any women. However, they were well aware of feminist demands to be included in the removal of the white male monopoly on basic rights. They did not have to put male in the amendment. It was an intentional dismissal of that linkage between the forms of slavery. Sold out may not be technically accurate, because the Republican Party could have been expected to distance itself from radical ideas like rights of citizenship for women. Women’s Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment has a discussion of the history of how that amendment cheated women not just out of the right to vote. The intent was obvious to exclude women from full rights of citizenship. Women tried using the first section in a few cases, only to be rebuffed by the Supreme Court. According to its convoluted reasoning, women were citizens, but in a limited way. Susan B. Anthony and others tried to vote in 1872, but she got arrested and convicted. This is from page 4 of that article:

The Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, decided that the Fourteenth Amendment did prohibit such unequal treatment on the basis of sex — the first US Supreme Court decision to apply the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause to gender or sexual distinctions. Later cases have refined the application of the Fourteenth Amendment to sex discrimination, but it was more than 100 years after passage of the Fourteenth Amendment before it was applied to women’s rights.

One book covering this subject in depth is Century of Struggle, by Eleanor Flexner. Chapter 10, The Emergence of a Suffrage Movement, discusses the controversy over the language of the Fourteenth Amendment and its consequences for suffrage for women.

The new Free Soil is a feminist revolutionary party. Its ideas are radical, but that should not be confused with extreme, communist, dogmatic, leftist, violent, vindictive, impractical, confused, or utopian, though it seems some conflation often happens, both by those claiming radical and those distorting it to denounce it. Free Soil means radical as going to the root, the deeper the better one can see. Radical change means change at the root, basing philosophy on radically different fundamental principles. No mainstream party will offer that, though they talk about fundamental differences to make the most of their differences, paltry in significance as they may seem to outsiders. That all depends on perspective. Free Soil has practical solutions to every problem man has created, though some are impossible to solve quickly or completely, such as the wastes of nuclear science. The way reckless application of science is regulated is a scandal on every level, from nuclear science to orthodox medicine. None of it deserves blind faith, though in some areas science shines, where it has not been corrupted.

This corruption goes to the root, so it must be rooted out there. Science must respect the precautionary principle. That alone is a fundamental difference in principle between mainstream parties and others. Free Soil takes that to the root of the value system created by men who set out to define rights and wrongs, as well as the models of proper behavior and beliefs. Free Soil is based on a fundamentally different value system, where dominance and subordination are not valued, other words of power and meaning are reclaimed, to affirm life, liberty, balanced, meaningful partnership between people and Nature as well as women and men, actually solving problems like poverty and pollution, to make the best of this world, instead of the most profit for the few while the many suffer from misery, war, despair perpetuated by this system of conventional wisdom.

This is the 2008 campaign blog of the first Free Soil candidate for President, Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff for President Blog, who did not qualify for the ballot this year. What This Feminist Revolution Could Accomplish kicked off the second year of the party blog.

…It is not necessary or wise to foul our nest or resort to physical coercion against others, unless they initiate violence. No theory, system, or philosophy invented by man is free of corruption from the cultural rot of this order, based and dependent on fundamental imbalance between male and female, extended to all manner of hierarchy for its own sake.

On a level field, competition could be about quality instead of winning. Taxes could be mostly on luxuries. The hierarchical value system is thoroughly messed up, rigged beyond meaningful hope of reform or repair, headed for environmental collapse not so far off. Feminist revolution could supplant it top to bottom with philosophy that affirms life and balance, values people and other beings regardless of how they look, for their gifts, diversity, uniqueness, skills, effort, who they are by their own lights, their own sense of purpose and meaning.

It is about time to try out ideas of a feminist revolution. Women want our say, our chance to try out ideas, make everything from the economy to relationships work in ways that respect ideas from anyone according to the respect they are due, on merit.

As the scrolling text on the home page reads, Free Soil from role stereotyping; genetic and chemical assault; abuse of authority; …

This was also posted at Google Knol

This entry was posted by Aletha on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 7:08 am