I was in the car watching cows saunter over a pasture, and dry leaves blow over the road, and the pale clouds fade into gold. I was letting the radio news wash over me but I wasn't really listening to it, until all of a sudden I heard a small news clip about Botswana, where, as of this week, it is now legal to will your property to a woman. 

For some reason, this was the straw that broke my camel's heart; and why it wasn't the story of that brave child in Afghanistan whom the Taliban decided to shoot merely because she said she wanted to go to school; or why it wasn't the recorded telephone message from Senator Todd "Mr. Legitimate Rape" Akin asking me to contribute to his reelection campaign; or why it wasn't one of a thousand other anecdotes of stupidity, cruelty, and arrogance: that I can't tell you. All I can say is that this Botswana story plucked the scab off the festering sore I share with half the people on this planet, a wound that higher-toned circles refer to as gender oppression but that most women around the world know as "just the way things are."

And even here in "enlightened" America, girls and women are routinely beaten and murdered, or trained to be afraid to speak out, or led to believe that they can't take charge of their destinies. But none of this is news to any one of you who reads this letter. And the very fact that none of this is news is intolerable to me today.

I was
the girl of the chain letter,
the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes,
the one of the telephone bills,
the wrinkled photo and the lost connections,
the one who kept saying--
Listen! Listen!
We must never! We must never!
and all those things . . .

[from "Love Song" by Anne Sexton (April 19, 1963)]