There has always been a certain group of people within this country, and throughout the world, who because of their status as poor people have historically suffered in silence.
America claims to be a country where all of its citizens are supposed to be treated equally, no matter what their sex, race, religion, or sexual orientation is. This we know is a bold-faced lie, but a lie that is very seldom acknowledged by the powers that be.
We know that this lie is real, and it is rooted in the very fabric that this country is made on. The people who were honest about this were the people who wrote the U.S. Constitution and all the other papers that they wrote after they stole this country from its indigenous peoples.
In these papers, only property holders/owners-or in other words rich white men-were truly considered equals in this country. Everyone else, including the Mothers, Wives, Daughters, and all other female members of their families were considered the property of these rich white men. Just as much property as any slave!
They could be disposed of or dealt with in any way that this group of people/men wanted. Women and children of the poor especially have suffered in silence, and have always been treated as unequals in this society. This truth was why the women's suffrage movement was first started.
Throughout the years women-including a certain group of women who were born into a life of privilege-found out that just because they were not males, females could not live a full life, a complete life, free of certain barriers that were forced upon them just because of the nature of their sex. These women fought for human rights, then civil rights, then equal rights. This fight that was first started in the 1800s is still being waged today in one form or another within this country and throughout the world.
Women as a whole have no doubt "come a long way" in their fight for true equality. Yes, there has been much progress since the 1800s, but that can be said for all minority groups who have fought for their birthrights, or for what we as human beings are entitled to just by being born, but were denied by a certain group of people for one reason or another.
Even today, certain women still can't get equal pay for equal work. They are told what they can do, or can't do, with their own bodies. They are denied access to good health care, and still treated as property by their boyfriends and husbands. They are still denied certain positions within their church and society, just because they are females. They are the most exploited people in this world, and are still victims of prostitution, domestic violence, rape, and all the other ills of this man's world.
The sad thing about this truth is that these negative things also impact the children of these women, which in turn affects us all.
There is still no equal rights amendment to the Constitution, nor has the glass ceiling been totally broken. There is still sexual harassment taking place at work and school, "but progress has been made by them for them."
Somewhere along the line while all of this historical progress was taking place another group of men, a certain kind of men, decided that women as a whole, just like all other minorities in this country, had gone too far in their demands for equality. So these men decided behind closed doors somewhere to do to women exactly what had been done to all others who fought for equal rights, especially poor women. They decided that if women truly wanted equal rights and to be treated as an equal part of this society, then there would be no better place to start this treatment of true equality than with the criminal justice system.
Women, like all other minorities have always been subjected to the system, whether it has been the mental hospitals that once ran rampant throughout this country or some sort of prison, even the church sponsored kind of prison. But this was always left up to the man of the family. The head of the household, the property holder/owner. Women have always been subjected to the penalty of death as well, but this like the other decisions was left up to their men, or the church, but not the government as a whole. Men were taught to "handle their affairs" at home so the government could run the country and not waste valuable time dealing with such matters.
But this mindset changed once women started fighting the government for their rights and their equality. Once this took place, slowly but surely women began not only to take the government to court and win, but also to take control of their own lives, money, property, children, and all the real life decision-making matters that "men used to control."
So the government-which, after all, has women's best interest at heart because these men always know what is best for their women and their females-decided to step in and fill the void that was left when the courts said it was no longer legal for men, the husbands, boyfriends, fathers of women, to domestically punish them at home, or church. That they could no longer legally kill, murder, and dispose of their property at home like they historically had done.
In filling this void these men who went behind closed doors decided that it was about time to give women, or at least a certain group of women, exactly what they have been asking for, but not exactly how they wanted it.
They decided to give women the death penalty, and they decided to build more prisons to house women. These realities are proven in the numbers of new prisons built "just for women and the numbers of women who are imprisoned within these prisons, which includes the numbers of women who are now on death row throughout this country."
Every state, just about, that has a death row, has women on it. Yet we very seldom if ever hear about these women until it is their time to "be treated equally and be put to death legally"!
This society doesn't acknowledge this fact, and because they don't, these women, just like their foremothers, "suffer in silence"!
While most of the attention concerning death row inmates focuses on men, let us not forget that women are also subjected to this crime against humanity. While the focus is on men on death row, the states are quietly sending more and more poor women to death row. These poor women, just like the poor men on death row, come from all races, and include lesbians and any other group of people that this "Judeo-Christian society deems as worthless, useless, and expendable"!
We people who are working to end the death penalty in this country must not forget about the women on death row, and we must now include them in our struggle because if we don't include them, who will?
In Struggle
From Death Row
At San Quentin Prison
Kevin Cooper