Thou art the man
Joel C Wallenberg raises a concern and urges corporate action
Too long had wrongs and oppressions existed without an acknowledged wrongdoer and oppressor. It was not until the slaveholder was told “Thou art the man” that a healthful agitation was brought about. Woman is told that the fault is herself, in too willingly submitting to her inferior condition; but, like the slave, she is pressed down by laws in the making of which she has had no voice, and crushed by customs that have grown out of such laws.
Lucretia Mott said these words in her address to the Women’s Rights Convention held in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on 2-3 June 1852.
I see a gaping wound in our Society’s corporate upholding of the Peace Testimony: male violence against women. It is so intense and ever-present that women can find themselves in a near-war zone state of alert, even in our relatively safe corner of the world. The situation is created by the actions of so many men in our patriarchal societies that, to an approximation, all men are implicated, and we are all injured by violence we perpetrate or indirectly facilitate.
