Galentine's Day: A Call to Action!

February 8, 2025

In 2010, Parks and Recreation’s Leslie Knope (played by Amy Poehler) gathered her female friends for brunch the day before Valentines Day to celebrate their fellowship as being just as important as romantic love. A slightly sassy but decidedly joyous call to sisterhood and pride in who we are as women and as individuals.  

Let’s tap into that this February 13^th, friends. As a creative way to thank those standing up to the “shock and awe” coup being waged by a crude, demeaning, found-liable-for-sexual-abuse septuagenarian. His billionaire bro-buddy who bought his way into power, who’s been sued by eight former employees for sexual harassment, creating a workplace “bombarded with lewd sexual banter.” A vice president who denigrates childless women. And Project 2025’s crusade to ban abortions and limit contraception and protections against sex discrimination.  

Those of us who believe in women’s dignity and right to autonomy must link arms now, putting aside whatever disagreements we have on other issues, knowing we are stronger and far more effective in community. Because it’s not just Trump, Vance, Musk, or Project 2025. Or even the threatening election night gloat by white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes: “Your body, my choice.” Or rightwing TV personality Tucker Carlson comparing Trump’s return to the White House as an angry Daddy coming home to discipline a “bad little girl” with a “vigorous spanking.” It’s everyone they’re bringing with them—Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, for instance, another alleged adulterer who paid off a woman accusing him of sexual assault, seen drunk and inappropriate with women by multiple witnesses—and the trickle-down misogyny empowered by their example.  

Researching history for my books helps me better understand and deal with today. Take our expectation going into November 5^th that women would push back on MAGA’s patriarchal vision of women as child-bearing Madonnas, and no-exception abortion bans that are brutalizing and killing Americans. We didn’t foresee the contradiction of women splitting their ticket—passing pro-choice bills in seven states while still voting for the man whose sexist rhetoric and Supreme Court picks wrought those abortion bans. That while 53% of all American women would pick Kamala Harris—the same percentage of white women went for Trump, diluting the gender gap vote that could have defeated him.

Feminists made a similar mistake in the 1970s. Euphoric over the seemingly certain ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, they underestimated a STOP ERA suburban housewife juggernaut.   

In 1973, Phyllis Schlafly and her Stop-Taking-Our-Privileges coalition cleverly tapped into homemakers’ resentment of feminists they felt talked down to them and disparaged their chosen life role—their worry they would be replaced. She ridiculed and “otherized” feminists as noisy, unattractive troublemakers, unable to catch husbands. She stoked fear among homemakers that the ERA’s legitimizing/protecting working women would mean their husbands would no longer “be required” to be a family’s responsible breadwinners. One of the things feminists were fighting against, for instance, was the then accepted norm for businesses to fire female employees as soon as they married or were pregnant—cementing the belief a woman’s ultimate goal in America was to marry, have children, go home and stay there.

Schlafly claimed the ERA would deny wives the choice to be stay-at-home moms, that they’d be forced out into the workplace, required to produce 50% of a household’s income. That feminism’s call for choice and equal opportunity would destroy the American family.

Sound familiar?

J.D. Vance’s screed against “childless cat ladies” who “want to make the rest of the country miserable, too” eerily echoes Schlafly's about "sharp-tongued” unmarried women “sowing seeds of discontent." Same with Vance’s statement that women should remain in abusive marriages, no matter what, for the sake of children with Schlafly’s claim that rape was not possible in a marriage—that once a woman said, “I do,” she’d given universal consent.

In a Zoom call among 160,000 Kamala supporters, author Glennon Doyle urged women to “not turn on one another.” To not fall into the trap of defensive entrenchment, assuming women choosing to be something different meant they condemned our hopes or self-definition.

I repeat that plea today. Know that issues of equality and fairness transcended political partisanship in the ’70s women’s liberation movement. Because they worked together, those women were able to legislate and litigate tremendous improvements for our work life and autonomy despite comprising only 4% of attorneys and 3% of Congressmembers (16 of 535)—change like women being allowed to have credit cards on their own for the first time without the requirement of hubby or daddy co-signing.

I’m sure they’d have loved the concept of Galentine’s Day!   

Gloria Steinem, co-founder and longtime editor of Ms. magazine, endured countless personal attacks in her role as the country’s most visible “libber.” Things like being caricatured in a July 1973 Esquire as a jeans-wearing Miss America, crowned and holding roses “and still a royal pain in the ass.” That was nothing, of course, compared to the men’s tabloid that ran a centerfold drawing of a frontal nude Steinem with a series of penises running alongside and the headline of “Pin the Cock on the Feminist.”

 Steinem said: “Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke; that's their natural and first weapon.”

Don’t let them make you afraid.

There’s safety (and power!) in numbers. As Steinem said, when under attack, sisterhood was her shield. Join a group like Red, Wine, & Blue or The Seneca Project or the ERA Coalition.

In 1977, faced with growing anti-ERA and anti-choice forces, Jill Ruckelshaus—a moderate Republican—spoke to a gathering of the National Women’s Political Caucus, a coalition she co-founded with democrats like Steinem. An eloquent spokesperson for the NWPC’s bipartisan quest to groom women to run for office, Ruckelshaus urged what women have now learned the hard way post-Dobbs: that tweets, impassioned Oscar speeches, and cultural representation do not have the same power as holding legislative seats or voting.

It’s certainly better than 1973, but today women still fill only 28% of seats in Congress. And an alarming number of women voters just stayed home this past election and look what happened.

Ruckelshaus’ call—nearly 50 years go—for women to keep fighting for their rights despite setbacks rings loud and clear today: “Sisters, you are all here because you are committed to an idea that is much larger than ourselves or the length of our lifetimes…We want America to understand what it is to be raised female where we have met the government and it is not us. Somebody is making laws in this country that affects our legal rights, even our basic right to control our own bodies. And there are not enough of us among those somebodies.”

“Give me the sadder but wiser girl,” she quipped, who’d learned from defeat, regathered herself and her sisters, and fought on. She’d be fiercer and better armed.

On that note, I’ll pose a slightly cheeky Galentines idea:

The ERA was on its way, folks, adopted with resounding majority votes in Congress—84 to 8 in the Senate—and ratification by 30 out of the required 38 states after only a year. Until Schlafly’s followers flooded state houses, carrying baked goodies and handwritten Valentines: “To our breadwinners, from your bread-bakers. Please protect motherhood.” Suddenly, ratifications slowed. Then stopped—coming up just three states short by its imposed deadline (a time limit many believe is unconstitutional to begin with).

This February lets send a flood of Galentines of our own. To elected officials (local, state, federal) who support women’s equality. To women advocates on the front lines. Bet you they all could use knowing we have their backs. A rousing “Hey Galentine! We love our rights and you for protecting them.” Heck, maybe even send them some yummy bread.

Let it be our opening salvo. 

P.S.—A few years back, I made Galentine cards for my biographical novel about the youngest Schuyler Sister. Please use these as templates if you wish!