Answering this question could be a whole essay in and of itself.
Ill try to keep it succinct, but I am an Appalachian foothills hillbilly, born and bred, so that’s often a hard task for me. I’ll do my best.
Going back to the pioneering days of America, settlers were often spread out by miles. Families spent most of their time building homesteads and family farms, growing and preserving food and supplies to survive the winter. Families mostly kept to themselves because they could not spare the time for travel to “town" often and were isolated from their neighbors much of the time. As you can imagine, alongside food preservation, making sure the family stayed warm during inclimant winter weather was a huge consideration. For women, this meant making and repairing enough warm clothing, coats, undergarments and blankets.
Women of the time also had need to socialize with other women absent men, and to discuss community development issues and combine resources and labor to make sure families survived. There’s a curiously warped idea around “rugged American individuality” that is highly inaccurate. In reality, people were deeply dependent on their neighbors and their community to make it.
Quilting bees were part of that private and local social safety net. Women in a quilting bee would gather at the house of a member every so often, rotating hosts, and work on making a quilt and/or other textile projects. These quilts were often given as wedding gifts, welcoming gifts (to doctors, pastors, or traveling tradesmen like cobblers they wanted to visit again), to the elderly and the needy, or to a family who had suffered a loss from fire or whatever. While there, they would socialize, make sure everyone’s families were okay, discuss building out the community (like volunteering their husbands to build a chapel/schoolhouse), talk about how to get a teacher for their kids, or a doctor, or a pastor, etc. They provided supportive care and encouragement to pregnant women and women with other reproductive issues, such as they could. They protected each other.
Other such endeavors, like barn raisings and wheat threshings, were also very important to early communities for survival, community growth, and community cohesion. Basically, any time there was a large or time consuming project to be done there was some sort of to-do built up around it to combine efforts and sort of ‘kill multiple birds with one stone’.
Quilting bees were popular in rural America up until the late 60s and 70s when women began entering the workforce and family farms were swallowed by Big Agriculture.
There has been a resurgence of interest in textile arts and quilt making in recent years. With that interest, quilting bees are making a comeback. Now however, they are a hobby club and often digital. They aren’t the very important part of early community success and social cohesion and collaboration they once were.
Jeez! See what I mean? I’m going to make myself stop there. I could go on, but that should give you a good idea of quilting bees and their function and history.
As for the rest of your comment, you too make some excellent points. I agree somewhat about the problems with social media and in particular their algorithms being problematic. That said, it’s on the people who use these tools to not be passive users. You can engineer your experience rather than have it engineered for you. There is a search function, you can use it to find opposite opinion pieces. You can block authors who misrepresent or lie and tailor your feeds so you don’t get thrust into rabbit holes of insanity. You can flag trolls. You can make the philosophical choice to read broad opinions on an issue and validate what you read BEFORE you form your own opinion rather than looking for things that validate what you think is or want to be true. No amount of algorithm change or venue change will EVER correct intellectual indolence.
As a newer technology, we also need time to learn to use it without harm. We can’t do that if we don’t practice using it enough to figure out where and how to make improvements.
Changes in law and education requirements need to be made at the federal level. Like mask mandates, it’s something that will be politicized by tribes and then weaponized because the core of the issue is tied to whether or not you truly believe in equality and whether or not you want to live in a truly egalitarian society, legally, socially, and religiously. Or whether or not you want those things ONLY for people who agree with you and screw everyone else. I think you can agree that religion will be a hangup. The dominant Abrahamic faiths all consider women as subservient and belonging to men and so they set the stage for abuse, what is considered abuse, and denial of equal opportunities across all levels of society, not to mention denial of justice or recourse against abuse. Further, Congress is too gridlocked in partisanship to be of much use to anyone other than their donors and themselves and it’s been that way for years so I won’t hold my breath there.
Then there is the consideration that while it’s not perfect, social media what we have. It actually reminds me of quilting bees in that regard. There is power in reading personal accounts for women. It teaches manipulation techniques so others don’t fall for them. It warns of dangerous men who would harm you. It prevents isolation around the issue. It parses out the nuance around different degrees of sexual misconduct so that women can better define their own self agency, something we still struggle with as a group and that society as a whole is continually bombards us with things that work to strip it from us. As long as sex sells, that will be the case.
You could argue that it’s too broad and unfair to certain men because of their public life. I would counter that argument with the fact that because these men live a public life where they are touring or widely travel (I’m thinking of men like Marilyn Manson, R. Kelley, or Weinstein here) they have a national hunting ground that the local youth pastor, frat boi, or funny uncle does not. They also have the advantage of being able to hide behind notoriety, a public persona vs a private one, jurisdictional issues, and industry that validates and protects them. Clearly, broader warnings are required, otherwise, how would women ever know? Considering how many women Bill Cosby was able to exploit and abuse over years, it’s obvious that they don’t and can’t. Our best defense is still word of mouth type warnings and experiential stories. If social media had been around and developed like it is today during his prime predatory years, Cosby’s victim count would likely have been a lot less.
People will form their own opinions but for me, the benefit to women given the rising levels of abuse, the failure of state to provide safe space and clear guidelines for what constitutes abuse and a path for restitution and restoration, and the collective disinterest of men far outweigh their discomfort, world view, embarrassment, or whatever.
Don’t forget, a lot of men learn these manipulation and abuse techniques from each other via the internet too. Interesting how there is very little out there by men about how not to be a rapist or abuser compared to how much is out there along the lines of how and where to acquire date rape drugs, how to get away with rape, and how to keep a bitch in line. Why should you men be the only ones who are 'armed’?
On the whole, men have made it abundantly clear they don’t give a rat’s ass about women other than what women provide to them. They’ve sent very clear signals they’re unwilling to engage to make changes for our safety and ability to thrive in the society we all share though they are perfectly content to benefit from our unpaid or underpaid contributions and profit from our exploitation and pain. The gaslighting, whataboutisms, and refusals to prioritize or even listen pretty much guarantee a continuation of decline. We women need a way to protect ourselves if you men refuse to deal with yourselves and your violence. Our only other options are to accept it (fat chance), remove ourselves to our own towns and societies sans men (a common fantasy that could be made a reality), tag violent men so ostracism can work it’s magic (Spartan women — truly inspirational) or start carrying poisoned jabs obscured in jewelry to eliminate problematic men ourselves (Guilia Tofana really might have been on to something there; wonder how popular that subreddit would be?)
One thing’s for sure, we can’t continue on like this. Something’s going to have to shift.
It’s also true that there are things around this issue that women by and large need to get their heads out of their asses about too. I’m hopeful that that what follows #MeToo will address these things and be more focused toward establishing and securing self agency, education about how to handle situations when they arise, and refocusing our lives without the primary consideration being the acceptance and validation of men and chasing after warped interpretations of romantic love. We need space to talk about it amongst ourselves, reflect about it, and draft a plan to take us from here to there. Again, social media is what we have available.
