Is America REALLY ready for a female President or is that a pipe dream? Many women have sought the nomination for President from their party (Democrat & Republican) - and a few actually ran for President in recent years - and they all lost.
Could a conservative woman ever run and hope to win the US Presidency in today’s America? Can women be trusted to protect and defend America? My life experience says NO - unless women are willing to deal honestly and openly with each other and together confront many difficult topics that have shaped, divided and defined American girls and women over the past 75 years.
Research shows that 80 percent of young people in swing states say a woman could be President, compared to only 31 percent some 50 years ago. So, that appears to show a huge change in acceptance. Yet, in this so-called age of modern feminism, MeToo and a “global sisterhood empowered by social media” - women seem to be going backward instead of forward. Why would that be?
My perception is that women are their own worst enemies - and that includes me. I can only speak from my own life experience. I'm going to tell you my story, warts and all, in the hopes that it might truthfully help answer the question and give young people something to reflect on.
Why would I do that? Because being authentic with each other is my definition of friendship - and I consider you my friends:
“Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.”
Many of you know that I am an alcoholic and bulimic in recovery with 30 years of sobriety. That is a key part of my life story but I’m not going to delve into that much in this article. You can read my story here or listen to it here if you like. But, I do believe that I am the result of the way I reacted to what happened to me as a child.
I am a Christian and I believe in God and I believe that He saved me from my sinful self for some purpose. My beliefs have shaped my worldview and my faith has grown over the years - BUT it has wavered from time to time and has not always been so solid.
What is my gift? What is my purpose? I don’t know - maybe to serve as a messenger or a warning to others?
I’m not one of those people who says: “I don’t really have any issues but I’d love to hear about yours and your failings.” I know lots of people like that. One of my favorite pastors once said: “If you are arrogant and think you’re not a sinner, spend an hour with me and I’ll prove you wrong.” Hear hear. We are all sinners.
I’m here to tell you what I learned from my mistakes.
Let me begin by saying that my views about women, in leadership roles in society, have changed over the years. I’m not talking about women in “church leadership” roles - which is not the topic of this article and not one that I am qualified to debate.
I’m talking about the role of women in “leading society” and their fitness for the ultimate leadership role of President of the United States.
I have studied the Bible well enough to know that God used women in significant ways. Women in the Bible were revered for their own capabilities and didn’t need a man to have a relationship with God or to hear from Him. God spoke directly to them because He saw their value and worth, often sharing noteworthy doctrinal truths with women. While the men often scattered, it was the women who stayed close to Jesus and it was this commitment that offered them the opportunity to be part of history.
Another common theme in the Bible is that God encourages us to support one another and lift up one another. Here is a compilation of verses about that I like:
“Therefore encourage one another and build one another up. Each of you has received a gift. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others. Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: In prophecy, in serving, in teaching, in encouraging, in giving, in leading, in administrating, in showing mercy. There are different kinds of gifts and there are different ministries and different activities, but it is the same God who produces all of them in everyone.”
So, operating from that framework, the Bible taught me that we all have gifts, we should encourage others to develop and use their gifts, we should recognize them and value them and we should use our gifts to serve God and others. Pretty simple, right? I don’t think anyone could disagree with me on that.
So, how did that play out in my life as a girl and a woman? That’s a hard topic for many to discuss, but I’m going to try.
When I was around 3 years old there was a lot of death in my family. My mom’s dad died, her brother died and her best friend lost her child to cancer. I don’t remember the deaths but I remember the horrible feeling of loss all around me.
When I was 4 years old, my mother decided that I should get my IQ tested so I could start kindergarten a year early. Why? Because my brother was only 10 months younger than me and she didn’t want us to be in the same kindergarten class. She told me that I was “bossy” - I took that as a compliment by the way - and would often talk for my brother or do tasks for him (and he appeared to be just fine with that) and it was causing him to not learn to do things for himself. Makes sense.
That’s me in the lower left corner of the picture with the banjo with my aunt, uncle and cousins. I was tiny but I was not afraid of anything back then.
I did well in school, was responsible and always sat in the front of the class - because I couldn’t hear very well - and was often teacher’s pet - the one they put in charge of things. I liked that. I never found school very challenging and I would go home and read the encyclopedia or spend time with my neighbor who was a science teacher and he would teach me things. I loved that.
It wasn’t until I was about 40 years old that I found a letter that my Grandmother wrote for her fraternal organization when I was 4 years old that said: “My granddaughter, Peggy, has a genius IQ and tested higher than all 600 other children. I’m very proud of her.”
According to GROK, that would make me “exceptionally gifted” but I certainly didn’t feel that way as a child at all.
My grandmother never told me I was gifted - nor did my parents. My teachers knew and they didn’t tell me either. Why didn’t anyone tell me or encourage me to use my gift? Was it because I was a girl and it wasn’t considered important? I don’t know.
When I was in grade school, JFK, MLK & RFK were assassinated and we spent lots of time hiding in the school basement or under our desks to shield ourselves from “impending” nuclear war. Again, I don’t remember the details but I remember feeling loss and uncertainty.
My mom started working full-time at the beauty shop down the block when I was about 7 years old (she didn’t drive) and my dad worked 2-3 jobs and worked late and had our only car so neither one was home when we got home from school.
In the beginning, my Mom hired a woman named Gladys to take care of us after school until my mom got home from work. I didn’t like Gladys - she was a big woman & smelled bad and she was always playing with my mom’s lipstick. I remember asking her to sit on me all the time - lol - not sure why but I think I was hoping she might break some of my bones and get herself fired. I don’t think Gladys lasted very long and eventually my mom did decide that I was old enough and responsible enough to take care of the house and my brother and sister until she got home from work. I was happy with that. I liked to be in charge - even at 9 years old. And, apparently, I had no problem throwing Gladys under the bus!
Lou, my mom’s friend who owned the beauty shop down the block, took in pregnant teenagers for the summer - which I thought was a good thing to do. Back then, pregnant teenagers were shamed and often expelled from school or ostracized by friends and family. I remember one girl named Brooke that I connected with at Lou’s house one summer - while my mom worked at Lou’s shop. She taught me how to play Canasta and we played for hours on end. She never talked about what was going to happen to herself or her baby - in fact she hardly talked at all - but she literally gnawed the nails right off her fingers from anxiety - they were bloody and raw. I can still see her doing that. I will never forget. I didn’t want to end up that way.
In junior high, I did NOT consider myself an attractive teenager - but I started to mature and met a boy named Tom in my geometry class when I was in 10th grade and we fell madly in love and were going to get married after high school. His parents wanted him to be a Catholic Priest but he wanted to get married and have children and live happily ever after so he was going to go to community college. He was a nice boy.
All my friends were making plans to go to college. I wanted to be a medical researcher but our family had little money so if I wanted to go to college I needed to work and pay for it myself unless I could get a scholarship - and my grades weren’t that good.
I would do things like get 100% on some random physics test just to beat which ever boy was considered the smartest kid in the class. “I’ll show them,” I remember thinking to myself.
I had a male Trigonometry teacher and a male Calculus teacher tell me that women didn’t really need to know math and they weren’t very good with “spatial” concepts anyway - when I asked them questions about how something worked. I didn’t like that so I shocked those teachers and aced their tests at 100% just to prove them wrong. My math aptitude was at the 99th percentile.
I had a fabulous Biology teacher, Mr. Danielson, who always encouraged me to try new things but he died before I could tell him how important he was to me. But, for the most part, I was bored and looking for a way out of it all.
So, I got a job at an advertising agency nearby - the day after high school - and told my parents I was moving out with a girlfriend (named Violet, who had a car) to a studio apartment that was one block from the agency so I could walk to work.
Long story short, my dad didn’t want me anywhere near Violet or her family - he was right - but I left anyway with nothing but the clothes on my back. I was 17, defiant and free, but secretly scared to death. So I immersed myself into my work.
I loved the freedom of working and learning new things. This is me at 17 at my first job in advertising wearing the first outfit I bought with my own money - using an early system called Telmar. I walked and took the bus (two transfers) to the mall to buy it.
Telmar offered the first “computer analysis” of a media schedule. We entered data into an acoustic data coupler which allowed the data to then be transmitted to Telmar’s computers through phone lines using a Teletype. The thing was HUGE and noisy.
Look how happy I was! I started this job as a secretary and quickly advanced to a research assistant and assistant media buyer and also did much of the leg work for new account executives - who were all male.
My boss was a woman named Marla and she was tough and extremely bright and hard working and self-made. She was a “career woman” with no children, and married later in life. You’d think because Marla was a woman that she would encourage my growth and support my advancement, right? Hmm, to a point, but when push came to shove, she supported a man over me. What happened?
I had been there for almost 3 years and a position opened up in her media department for a Senior Buyer (which was considered a stepping stone to be an Account Executive.) The current male Senior Buyer, Fred, was being promoted to an Account Executive and I had basically been doing his work for the past couple of years to enable his move.
I asked Marla if I could apply for Fred’s job because I had basically been doing his job for the past two years anyway (and he agreed) but she said, and I will never forget her words: “This is a man’s world and they will never accept you in that position. You certainly can do the job but that’s not the point. The sooner you understand your role in life, the easier it will be. I’m going to promote Chip from the mailroom who just graduated from college and you can train him in.”
I was shocked. I thought at least Marla would go to bat for me. Instead she was going to give my job to Chip the mail clerk with no experience and I was supposed to train him! I was 20 years old.
So, what did I do? I contacted a friend who was going to law school and she agreed that this was discrimination. She helped me write a letter to the two male owners of the agency, Ralph & Roger. I told them what Marla had said to me and I told them I was going to sue them if they didn’t give me the job. I remember I was shaking as I typed it out. What happened?
The owners, Ralph & Roger, acknowledged that Marla was wrong and forced her to give me the job. She was not happy with me at all. What did my female boss do? She made my life miserable by removing all my authority and she wouldn’t even speak to me for months. So, I quit and went to another agency for more money and a better job. My “research” skills were in high demand.
BUT, six months later, I got a call from Ralph & Roger and they wanted to meet with me. They said - don’t worry - it’s good. So I met with them and they offered me a job running the WHOLE MEDIA DEPARTMENT in their Colorado office. It was a much higher salary but in another city and state. Remember, I was 20 years old.
I said, “Why would you do this? I threatened to sue you.” They replied, “Because that took guts and we admired you for standing up for yourself. That told us that we could trust you to stand up for our company.”
I turned down the job because I wanted to get married instead because I thought that would fix me - that’s the next part of my story - but that was the moment when I realized that women do not always stand up for other women - when men will.
I thought it was an isolated incident but I quickly learned it was quite mainstream.
In 2010, Kelly Valen, a lawyer and Minnesota native who once was raped, did research on women and wrote a book called The Twisted Sisterhood. It revealed that almost 85% of the 3,000-plus women who took part in her survey frequently felt "currents of meanness and negativity emanating from other females” and suffered serious, life-altering knocks at the hands of other women. This was obviously long before Trump came on the scene to be blamed by women for all things!
KELLY VALEN: “Girls can be mean to other girls, but it is adult women who vie to destroy each other. These secret, social battles are waged, in many cases, by the very same women singing the praises of girl power, feminism, and female friendship in their lives. Women say the primary threat to their emotional security radiates from fellow females. There is a distinct undercurrent of meanness and negativity plaguing our gender.”
I found that out the hard way - that women can hurt me much more than men ever could. I was still living with Violet and that’s when my life took a turn to the dark side. Up until that point I had never really medicated myself with anything. I had something to prove but I chose the wrong way to prove it. I would learn that my father was right - Violet and her family were bad news. What happened?
Violet and I would go to her parents’ cabin many weekends just to get away. We’d drink diet Tab and Fresca, and play gin and sing Diana Ross songs and just have fun. One night I woke up and Violet’s father was trying to pull down my pants while I was sleeping. I was sleeping on my stomach and I was confused and disgusted and told him to get away from me.
After he left, I told Violet what happened and she said that I must have made it up - that her father would never do something like that. I was furious and hurt that she didn’t believe me - so much that we didn’t talk for years - until one day I found out that she had married a man just like her father - who was a pervert caught window peeping - and THEN she FINALLY admitted to me that her father had abused her and her sister as well.
So, for years Violet was so afraid to admit the truth about her father that she lied to my face and shamed me for telling the truth. Yet, now, she wanted me to HELP her deal with her own abusive husband. You can’t make this stuff up.
I could write-off the disgusting behavior of her father - what I couldn’t accept was my female friend, who once called me a sister, not being there for me.
History tells us that women once supported other women out of necessity and survival. Women used to be there for other women. What changed?
IMHO, widespread abortion coupled with modern feminism and the need for two-earner households created a more competitive, hostile and counter-productive dynamic between women. We are competing with each other for available resources and the end result isn’t kind or pretty. Let’s examine the facts.
According to GROK AI:
Approximately 38.2 million girls were born in America between 1955 and 1975 - which I will call the pre-Roe abortion period. That’s about 1.9 million girls born per year.
Approximately 20.9 million first abortions were performed in the U.S. between 1975 and 1995 - in the post-Roe abortion period. This doesn’t include 2nd or 3rd abortions by the same person - which are quite a few.
That means at least 55% of women born pre-Roe had their first abortion post-Roe.
That’s a BIG number. Basically, more than half my generation of women aborted their first child after Roe vs Wade was signed into law. That has to mess with your head, ladies!
Furthermore, during the period between 1975 and 2009, at least 49.1 million abortions were performed on 29.5 million UNIQUE women. That’s an average of 1.7 abortions per woman. We can argue about WHY women did this and HOW it impacted two generations but the numbers speak for themselves.
Why did I pick these periods to analyze? Peak childbearing years for women are defined by biology - when fertility is highest and pregnancy risks are lowest. This range is generally ages 20 to 34, with a sweet spot around the mid-20s.
The peak years for abortions in the United States were in the late 1980s to early 1990s, after Roe vs Wade, with the highest number recorded around 1990 at 1.6 million per year.
So, at the peak, 1.9 million girls were born per year in America and 1.6 million babies were aborted each year.
What do these numbers tell us about the REAL impact of abortion on women COMPARED to what the polls tell us women say publicly about abortion?
In 1980, when abortions were peaking in America, and roughly 55% of women were getting them for virtually any reason, only 23% said abortions should be legal under any circumstance. That tells me that women were afraid to say what they really thought about abortion and many were getting one in secret.
Also, over 85% of women polled in 1980 said they were Christian (which to me implies pro-life) but 55% were getting abortions. Again, the numbers don’t lie.
In other words, the numbers prove that women have historically NOT been honest about abortions - even with each other. If we can’t be honest with each other and with ourselves - how can we expect men to be honest? If we can’t be honest - how can we expect to lead others? If we can’t be there for each other, and protect each other, how can we convince voters that we will be there for them?
Even those who thought that they were pro-life were secretly having abortions. The numbers confirm that.
How do I know that for sure? Because I was one of them. I am as guilty as sin. And I know lots of other women just like me.
I had an abortion as a young woman when I was married. I got married when I was 21 years old while I was anorexic and bulimic - a behavior I kept hidden from the public and from my husband. I think I got married because I thought it would fix me and I had tried everything else so why not marriage.
I had broken up with my high school boyfriend, Tom - who wanted a family and a traditional home - and found someone else who liked the things that I did - or thought I did. I didn’t want to ruin Tom’s life and I didn’t want to be trapped. I never really had a desire for children - I never thought I had much of a mother instinct and wasn’t one to go crazy over babies like other women seemed to - but I didn’t use contraception - so, frankly, I don’t know what I really wanted.
Maybe I thought if I got pregnant, I would change my mind. Maybe I thought if I got pregnant, I could stop binging and purging. Maybe I thought being a mother would fix me. Who knows?
My husband and I bought a house and had mortgage payments and car payments and we both worked full-time and not long after we were married, I got pregnant. I told my husband right away and we both quickly agreed to abort the child. I wasn’t sure how I would react when I found out I was pregnant, but I immediately decided to abort. Keeping it didn’t even occur to me.
I was 10 weeks pregnant & I told myself that the “fetus” was just a clump of cells at that point so it was fine. The experience was gross and I knew it was wrong - but I did it anyway. I didn’t want to be a mother - not then, and I told myself then - not ever.
I tried to put it out of my mind until years later I went with a friend to an exhibit called Body Worlds that features preserved bodies of actual miscarried unborn children.
At 10 weeks, my unborn baby would have been about the size of a strawberry and fully formed. I couldn’t stop weeping at the exhibit. I begged my son (yes, I think it was a boy) for forgiveness and I begged God for forgiveness.
I never ever thought I would feel remorse over what I did all those years later but God had other plans. God gave me the gift of child bearing and I spit in His face. I know that now and I can never take it back.
A few years ago, at a low point in my life, I met a young Pastor who taught me much, helped strengthen my faith and bring me back to Jesus - and I later realized that the Pastor was born around the same time that my son would have been born if I didn’t murder him. I don’t know if this was God’s way of giving me a second chance, but I thanked him anyway. I was baptized and born again.
Just a few days ago, there was a young woman about 25 at my yoga class, on the mat next to me, wearing a big sweatshirt. I could tell she was just a few months pregnant. She was just glowing and filled with joy for her child - it broke my heart. I started weeping and I went out to my car and sobbed: “God, forgive me. I’m so sorry. What can I do to make this right?”
I think that’s one of the reasons I’m writing to you now. I have more to tell you about my life experience as it relates to my gender but that will have to wait for another day. This is the first chapter of my story. I expect another ten chapters to follow. If you have had similar experiences and would like to tell me your story, reply to this newsletter or send me an email at tierneyrealnewsnetwork@substack.com. Thank you. Peg
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