Look to the Past for "Hard Times"

People have endured horrible things that they had no say in. So can we.

I submitted an article today to an academic journal that I’ve been working on for the past few months. It’s about Irish women who emigrated to Mexican Texas and the opportunities they had under Mexican law, which means equitable and just property ownership rights, not something these women could get in the United States or in Ireland. In practicality, that meant that they could own land, even if they were married or widowed. They could own livestock and other property. They could sell or leave it in a will to anyone, including their daughters.

It’s both hard and easy to believe that women weren’t allowed to do this where English Common Law prevailed. Hard in that, well, it’s unfair and wrong. And easy in that there is a segment of our population who would like to put women back into this place (coverture) where women’s entire lives are lived under the subservience of some man: a father, brother, husband, uncle—as long as he was (is) male and she had (has) no rights of her own, it didn’t (doesn’t) much matter.

Here's how the article begins:

“On a sweltering day in May 1834, the Hart family stepped ashore at Copano Bay, Texas. Thomas and Elizabeth, along with their two young daughters, had endured a harrowing journey that began in the early spring of 1834 when they traveled from Wexford, Ireland, to Liverpool, England, and then on a crowded ship across the Atlantic to New Orleans, finally arriving in Texas by schooner, almost four months after they had begun their journey from Ireland. Along this perilous route, the family survived two cholera outbreaks, the death of a child, and a shipwreck. But for Elizabeth Hart, this was only the beginning of her struggles. Her husband Thomas did not survive the first day in Texas, succumbing to the cholera that had taken a majority of the passengers who were on the schooner from New Orleans, leaving his widow with two children and the harsh realities of the frontier of Mexican Texas to endure alone. As she buried her husband on that sandy beach, Hart could not have foreseen the remarkable journey that still lay ahead of her.”

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I post this because things feel pretty “historic.” Sometimes we don’t know when we are living through historic moments but sometimes, it’s clear. We’ve been living those moments a lot since 2016, none more than the last two weeks.

Change is always hard but especially when we can’t see where it’s going and it’s all out of our control.

Elizabeth Hart knew that and felt all the stress and anxiety that accompanies it. And yet, she endured and eventually prospered (spoiler alert). Knowing about women like this and times like this brings me comfort. Others have endured really hard things and no matter what is coming, I can, too. We can do this together.