thehagandthestag:

ilikesallydonovan:

sixth-light:

halalbarbie:

do you ever sit and think about your female ancestors and like how many of them endured forced marriages, sexual abuse, physical violence and complete deprivation of education and autonomy and suffered silently for literally centuries. going through pregnancies and child birth without modern medicine, having multiple children and watching most of them die before the age of five because that was just the way of life back then? and ultimately you are a product of their pain? i think about them a lot and then i think about how many women continue to share their reality in this current year 

We were talking to my father-in-law about family history once and he told us a story about how his grandmother (IIRC) hadn’t had a year of birth put on her gravestone “because she was only fourteen when she had her first kid!” like it was a funny and slightly naughty story. 

Cue me, my wife, and my mother-in-law all staring at him like Jesus Christ, dude, think that through. 

Had I been born, say, 70 years earlier, I would have been married off to some man I’d have met maybe two or three times before marriage and who would have been chosen for me on grounds of ‘how can we get potential rights to that farm if all men of that family die’. Apparently this would have been more of an arranged marriage than a forced marriage but I wonder how many women got their will when they said ‘I don’t want to marry him’ or how many even knew that you could say no.

My great grandmother died giving birth to my grandmother. My great-great grandmother, just when she thought she was done raising kids, had to become a mother all over again to raise my grandmother.
My mom had birth complications with my older sister, and probably would have died were it not for modern medicine, meaning I wouldn’t even be here at all.
The women in my family have literally risked or lost their lives for their children. And then we take our fathers’ last names. Sometimes I want to change my surname to Tinker or Kelly to honor my strong female ancestors.