MY BADASS DINNER PARTY

BY CONNIE CRONLEY

Nobody has asked me that ubiquitous interview question, “If you could invite four people — living or dead — to a dinner party, who would they be?” ey were of the Victorian era, a time when some women were busting out of stereotypical gender roles, and they all happened to be of Irish descent. ey survived hardship and deprivation and didn’t have the vote, but these activists had a voice and they used it for reform crusades. e four guests at my buckle-up dinner party would be Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, Mary Elizabeth Lease, Kate Barnard and Margaret Sanger.

Looks like nobody is going to ask, so I’m volunteering my answer. March 8 is International Women’s Day, a day to honor women’s achievements and equality. In celebration, I would invite four women activists — all long dead.

In their ery lifetimes, they were some of the most in uential women in American history. Loved by the people but sometimes vili ed by the press, they were fearless trailblazers long before the word badass became popular vernacular. More than a century before a New York Times Opinion headline identi ed Nancy Pelosi as a badass, these women t the description.

Jones (1837-1930), a widow denounced as “the most dangerous woman in America,” was a labor activist, organizing union strikes and advocat- ing for an eight-hour work day and better wages. Arrested and jailed well into her mid-80s, she wore a long black dress, a tidy bonnet and could outswear any miner. Her motto was, “Pray for the dead and work like hell for the living.”

Lease (1850-1933), known as America’s rst woman politician, was a tall, queenly writer and orator from Kansas. In the crushing poverty of the 1890s, she rallied poor farmers against merciless railroads, gouging banks and corrupt politicians. “Wall Street owns the country,” she raged. With the Farmers’ Alliance she formed a third political party to ght corruption and injustice. Some of the press called her the prairie’s Joan of Arc while critics denounced her as “unwomanly” for her rabble-rousing speeches.

Barnard (1875-1930), petite social reformer praised as the Good Angel of Oklahoma, was the rst elected woman o cial in the state and a spellbinding orator who crusaded for public education, compassionate mental health care, reformed criminal justice, livable wages and safe working conditions for miners. Her failed campaign to restore swindled properties to Native orphans destroyed her state o ce, her health and her life.

Sanger (1879-1966), a visiting nurse working in New York’s squalid Lower East Side in the early 1900s, saw how repeated, unwanted pregnancies devastated the poor. Families with more children than they could a ord su ered starvation and pri- vation; women died from too many childbirths or abortions, often self-administered. ey begged her for help, and she devoted her life to sex education and birth control (a term she coined), which she promoted as a basic human right. She was maligned, prosecuted and arrested for her e orts.

What to serve at the dinner would be irrelevant because they would be more interested in causes than cuisine. Lease was a fervent prohibitionist, so no alcohol for her, but Jones might not say no to a good bottle of beer.

If I asked them: “What contemporary crusade issue would you tackle? Hunger, refugees, minimum wage, housing, environment, climate change?” eir silent, astonished glares would be the answer: Didn’t I realize their original issues are still pertinent?

I would cringe as they surveyed my cream-pu life. If I were more adventurous — a barrel racer, a jingle-dress dancer, a street busker singing Edith Piaf songs — I might feel worthy of their company. If I picketed and protested and marched and shouted speeches on the corner and was arrested for it, then I might feel quali ed to sit with my four dinner guests.

Sanger’s autobiography is dedicated to “all the pioneers of new and better worlds to come.” at’s why I’d squeeze in one more guest, Greta unberg, representing the young badass activists coming down the pike. TP