The silent war on women is louder than ever. Only this time, the footnotes are the battlefield—and the eraser is called tradition.

By Tasha Monroe from Simply Edyn & Co. | The Commons Dispatch

Some stories are so familiar, they stop sounding like stories at all. They become wallpaper. Atmosphere. A quiet hum beneath daily life. I recently watched Wicked Little Letters, a film set in prim-and-punitive 1920s England, reawakens the noise. It reminds us that women’s rage, independence, and even wit have long been labeled profanity—by men who controlled the pulpit, the police station, and the printing press.

The film’s premise? A woman is criminalized for crude anonymous letters—but what’s really on trial is her audacity to exist outside the mold. Sound familiar?

Because it should.

When Vice President Kamala Harris said, “We’re not going back,” during the 2024 election season, it was more than a political rallying cry—it was a declaration of historical resistance. It came in response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and a cascade of reactionary policies designed to control women’s bodies and autonomy. But underneath her words was something else: a tectonic shift that the patriarchy recognized, panicked over, and moved aggressively to suppress.

Women—especially women of color—are outpacing men in education, entrepreneurship, and community leadership. The data shows it. The streets feel it. And the reaction is not just fear. It's backlash. Historically, every time women rise, patriarchal systems claw back twice as hard. After suffrage came McCarthyism. After the women’s liberation movement came Reaganomics and moral panic. After Black women helped deliver Georgia’s electoral miracle, the voter suppression bills came like clockwork.

Patriarchy doesn’t just fear loss of control—it fears being made irrelevant. And nothing threatens it more than a woman not asking permission.

Let’s stop pretending this is about God. Or decency. Or the children.

The same pulpits that once forbade women from reading scripture now sanction men to write policy controlling our bodies, our rights, our futures. Religion has always been a convenient cloak for control. And when it’s paired with nationalism, the result is a theology of power—not faith.

And here’s the deeper cut: some women defend it. Some Black women too. But that doesn’t make them foolish—it makes them human. Survival under patriarchy can look like submission, especially when the system rewards your obedience with crumbs of false safety. We’ve all been taught—some more violently than others—that being "good" earns protection. But protection that demands your silence is still a cage. And cages, no matter how gold-plated or spiritually justified, are not sanctuaries.

The thing is—it’s not just America. The fingerprints of patriarchy are global. In East Asia, Confucian traditions codified female subservience for centuries, with daughters raised to be silent and sacrificial. In the Middle East, draconian laws justified under religious extremism strip women of autonomy—from driving to voting to choosing their clothing. In Europe, conservative parties rise on platforms that idealize motherhood while cutting social supports for women. Across the continent of Africa, colonial legacies fused with tribal patriarchy have left women at the mercy of both imported and indigenous male supremacy. In South America, femicide rates rise while governments debate whether women should even have access to contraception.

And in each of these regions, a pattern repeats:

• The male power structure defines leadership as inherently masculine.
• Women, queer communities, the disabled, and the poor are ranked as dependents—never deciders.
• Power is always expanding, always hungry, and always cloaked in language that sounds like protection but operates as domination.

This isn’t cultural. It’s structural. The system doesn’t need men to be monsters—just to stay in place and say nothing when it benefits them.

There’s a reason the stories of women—especially Black, Indigenous, queer, poor, disabled women—don’t get preserved. It’s not just oversight. It’s design.

History, as we’re taught it, is not a record. It’s a curation. And those who curate have long been white, male, and invested in narratives that center conquest, logic, and hierarchy as progress. But what if those are the very qualities that have prevented humanity from evolving into its fullest potential?

I don’t believe, historically, that we’ve ever truly operated at an optimal level as a species. How could we, when we’ve suppressed the wisdom, labor, emotional intelligence, and strategic brilliance of half the population—or more?

Patriarchy isn’t just abusive. It’s inefficient.

Whether it’s in a 1920s courtroom or a 2020s Senate hearing, the pattern holds. Women speak—and are immediately reframed. Too emotional. Too aggressive. Too ambitious. Too sexual. Too loud.

As a Black woman, I’ve felt how quickly my volume becomes a threat. How quickly my intelligence becomes arrogance. How my pain becomes negotiable. And yet I know this isn’t unique to me—this is the architecture of gendered oppression, with race-coded walls.

It’s why women’s testimonies are doubted. Why our expertise is questioned. Why our leadership is rare, and our rage so often criminalized. Because the moment a woman begins to narrate her own life, the patriarchy loses its favorite weapon: control of the story.

This isn’t just for the women marching or writing essays like this one. This is for the women sitting in Bible study, the ones at the PTA meeting, the ones who don’t consider themselves political, the ones who were raised to believe obedience equals worth. Because I see you too.

Sisterhood isn’t sameness. It’s solidarity in the face of a shared theft.

We may have arrived at this reckoning from different roads, but the fork we now stand at asks the same question of us all: Do you believe that your freedom is real if it’s rooted in someone else’s subjugation?

If not, then we have common cause.

What makes erasure so dangerous is its subtlety. It’s not just burning books or deleting archives. It’s policies that remove gender studies from curriculums. It’s firing women from executive positions under the guise of “restructuring.” It’s removing DEI officers while claiming to promote “equality.”

We are living in an era of deliberate forgetting—the targeted undoing of hard-won spaces for historically excluded voices. Anti-DEI sentiment isn’t just backlash—it’s reconstruction. A rebranding of white, male mediocrity as the default benchmark again.

And it’s working—boards are going whiter, newsroom mastheads more male, film sets less queer, book deals scarcer for writers of color. Why? Because the truth is this:

Power hates memory that isn’t flattering.

And when women—especially those not white, straight, or rich—start writing their own stories, the historical gatekeepers panic. They don’t just fight you—they erase you.

We Were Never the Problem—We Were the Untapped Solution

I believe the natural state of humanity is collaborative, creative, and inherently diverse. The patriarchy—especially in its Western, capitalist, Christian-nationalist form—has done a disservice to everyone, not just women. Look around: war, inequality, famine, disease, environmental collapse... This isn’t proof of strength. It’s proof of a flawed model.

A model that prizes power over wisdom. Hoarding over harmony. Violence over vulnerability.

What if we finally allowed the most skilled, wise, emotionally intelligent, adaptable, and creative among us to lead—regardless of gender, race, or sexuality? What if we stopped mistaking domination for destiny?

That, to me, is not a utopia. That is possible. And the first step is telling the truth, even when the truth makes people uncomfortable. Especially when it does.

Here’s the thing about women—about Black women especially—we’ve always been writing. The world just preferred we whisper. But now, the letters are no longer anonymous. They’re no longer polite. They’re no longer asking for permission.

They’re declarations.

And no matter how hard they try to ban the books, rewrite the scripts, or drown out our voices with noise—they can’t unring this bell. The ink is dry. The reckoning is live. And we are not just part of history now.

We are not the footnotes.  We are also the authors.