Katherine Spoke

and so it begins

Katherine paused, took a breath and begun. "I should have been a trophy wife, it would have been easier. When I was young I really believed that pursing a meaningful life and career would be easy. I came of age after the women's movement, after the Pill, after Mary Tyler Moore took on the world. I could not imagine a life spent worrying about how much I weighed, whether my nails were the right colour, or subordinating my desires and opinions to those of my husband. That seemed impossible"

Katherine's speech was already resonating with the older part of the crown, those that had lived in the brief window of time where women believed they were almost equal. You could see them, eyes focused, rapt with attention. Those that had lived when women could work and own property. Those who could choose with whom and when to have children. But for the rest of us, it was hard to know what point she was trying to make. How could the founder of the movement be saying this, where is she going with this? Surely, she cannot be recommending complicity; not when we are so close.

"But what has been impossible is watching my children give away that freedom, the trading one bit at a time, of truths, of empathy, of caring, the trading of spirit for stuff. For they all had to have the ultimate kitchens, backyards with furniture and playthings, gardens of colour to replace the colours of humanity that used to make the wold fascinating and worth living. I would be willing to wear nail polish to have avoided that feeling of betrayal."

Ok, now this sounds like Katherine. Thank god. If we are to launch this campaign now, we can't have doubters. It has taken too long to get this point. And if we don't do something now, soon there will be no one left who can teach us the things we need to know.

"We are now relying on the next generation and the generation after that. As we have learned it will take more than marches and more than secret lunch conversation among the complicit wishing it were different somehow. As we have learned, we can not rely on war or violence or any of man's revolutionary tacticts."

Good, she is finally announcing the campaign leaders; it couldn't be soon enough,  it has been hard spending our whole adult life cloistered. Hearing about the world but not being part of it. And it has been even harder for my daughters to have been raised as hidden but forced to join society among the complicit. For it is my daughter's generation who has been raised to wear the nail polish and attend the parties and decorate the kitchens and the gardens for the men that won them in the lottery with the hope that we would find the means. Thank goodness there were enough women educated in science during Katherine's generation and that enough women in the next generation hoarded supplies and that the Cloistered could learn and teach and develop the ultimate solution in secret.

"The campaign leaders will be calling your names to their teams and will be providing you with the list of the hidden who will distribute the solution. Our scientists have carefully calculated the exact population density of man required to support evolution and to sustain the matriarchy that must come to be."