Words from a Teen Advocate
“I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.” So said Abigail Adams, in a letter she dated March 31st, 1776. “Remember,” she warned her husband, that “all men would be tyrants if they could.” and, “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
While John Adams unequivocally failed on this count in the Continental Congress, he managed slightly more success for women’s rights in the constitution of Massachusetts. However, it wasn’t until August of 1920, more than 144 years after her famous letter, that those promises came true, and the women of America — or, at the very least, the white women of America — were granted the right to vote, as citizenship was affirmed for more than 26 million of our sisters.
Today, more than a hundred years after the 19th amendment and almost two and a half centuries after Abigail Adam threatened rebellion, the fight for equality, for true, intersectional equality, continues.
As a young woman in 2020, I am painfully aware of this inequality that still faces us. My friends and I attend rallies and read the news. In GirlGov Chester County, the youth activism program run by the CCFWG, we read legislation and plan to get the bills we believe in passed. I have worked on state house and state senate campaigns, knowing the change closest to home will help us most. I am, I hope, a part of the future of this fight.
I am a young woman, a young activist, and an unwavering feminist.
But I am also an artist.
I write between classes and draw before meetings. I was a proud member of my middle school’s mural arts club, and now am a proud member of my high school’s National Art Honors Society.
Art is a necessity — a necessity of both history and of change. And as a student of both, I recognize, as I’m sure all of us here today do, that the past and the future are clearly linked, in visual language most of all. In front of us here is a visual representation of our history and the changes it has wrought. A representation of growth and power drawn in bold color and line.
And with art such as this, art that displays our histories, and our progresses, so clearly, I cannot help but believe that the future ahead of us is a colorful, intersectional, and bright one.
My name is Althea Mae Hutchinson. And I am here today to ask you to remember the ladies.
