Apparently, Nancy Pelosi is being visited by spirits in the middle of the night. No, not the kind that take her on tours of her own life, weaving melancholy tales of her childhood out of her memories, and showing her Margaret Atwood-style futures where poor women are forced to bear the children of rich women in a dystopic paradise built on what the long-theocracy-conquered shell of San Francisco.
Nope. She’s being visited by the spirits of every feminist ever, who routinely tell her that they are so glad she’s alive, because if any historical figure in the women’s movement could have envisioned the exact kind of female leader they viewed as their direct successor, it would totally be Nancy Pelosi.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) told a recent gathering of the Women’s Political Committee that the spirits of suffragists Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Alice Paul spoke to her at the White House…
“My chair was getting crowded in,” said Pelosi. “I swear this happened, never happened before, it never happened since.”
“My chair was getting crowded in and I couldn’t figure out what it was, it was like this,” she said.
“And then I realized Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Alice Paul, Sojourner Truth, you name it, they were all in that chair, they were,” said Pelosi. “More than I named and I could hear them say: ‘At last we have a seat at the table.’ And then they were gone.”
I’d call bullsh*t on this, except even Nancy knows it’s bullsh*t. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were the mothers of the suffragette movement, were both ardent anti-abortionists, and spoke out loudly against the eugenics theories that were being bandied about in the smoke-filled parties of the pre-stock market crash-coasts, and which would eventually give birth (pun intended) to Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood project, which basically tried to eradicate black people through sterilization.
Buuuuuuut, whatever. In the Fairmont hotel in San Francisco, I heard high-heeled footsteps that didn’t belong to any feet I could see go across a bathroom floor, so maybe it’s a West Coast thing. And maybe she’s not completely wrong, just uncomfortable translating the ramblings of ghost women. Maybe what she was actually hearing was “at least we have a seat at the table,” as in, some day a competent woman will hold this, but until then, we have to make do with whatever this is.
