Emmet does a libel on our ancestors; there are a number of societies that did in fact have legal protection for women and did in fact allow them to own property legally. There are even more that had such protections de facto even where it wasn't written down(The Roman Republic for instance was, according to legend, founded to avenge a woman's honor).

Furthermore in historical societies no one was really free in the modern sense; everyone was chained to the role their birth assigned them.

Not to excuse past injustices. Just to remind that exagerrating them is also an injustice.

The Obama campaign's tasteless cartoon reminded me of blogger Shelby Emmett's take on women like Sandra Fluke who want "free birth control" via Obamacare. Emmett argued that such women were the opposite of suffragists of the past.

Emmett explains this further below:

"See, there is this funny thing about “rights” I don’t think you understand Ms. Fluke, and maybe it is because you are a privileged white woman (and therefore as a white person you can’t honestly think you are a victim of anything, now can you?), but when women did not have legal “rights” we were literally the property of men. Our husbands could rape us and we had no legal cause of action; our inheritance was taken from us; our dreams denied, and our control over our own bodies was held in the hands of men. We had no choice if we got pregnant or not; “No” was not a communication tool to inform others that we did not want to have sex; and personal responsibility and accountability for our lives and our bodies was only something we could dream of and only hope for our daughters and granddaughters.

Now, sadly, it seems you see “personal responsibility” and “accountability” as an insult to women, as an attack to our “rights” and as some third century masculine ideology created to enslave us. Really?

Ms. Fluke sadly thinks more like all those evil men denying women our constitutional rights than the women she claims to represent and look up to. Men in this time thought women were too simple, too naïve, too incompetent to have control over their own money, their own destiny, and of course their own bodies—so men had to be responsible for our own welfare—we just weren’t capable of doing it on our own. This is what Ms. Fluke believes. She does not think women are capable of saying “no.” she does not think women are competent enough to plan for their own futures, make tough decisions, and have full autonomy over our bodies; and she definitely doesn’t think a woman has the brain power to plan her own reproductive destiny—she expects others (the taxpayer) to cover this for her (you know, us women thinking and planning may make us faint and all).

At this rate, Ms. Fluke will be the poster child as to why women shouldn’t be able to vote. I mean, if we can’t even keep our legs closed when we know money is tight, how can we be expected to use our brains to pick our leaders?"

http://moveonup.ning.com/profiles/blogs/my-response-to-ms-fluke-the-anti-feminist?xg_source=msg_mes_network

Thus, the "Lady Parts" cartoon is the logical result of Fluke and her ilk reinforcing the notion of women being helpless victims only concerned with their "reproductive rights."

And if an alien were as advanced in intelligence as we generally presume he would be, he'd shake his head at the earthling notion that one gender has some kind of special "right" to kill a baby.

If we travelled to another planet and found a "civilization" that was killing its young by the tens of millions, what would we think of them?