Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and If Women Ruled the World “We have heard and seen this movie time and time again: protect the man, let the woman be damaged goods for life.“ I learned nothing about women’s history—"herstory”—growing up, in spite of being an excellent student due to the push of my mother. Indeed, my ma was the first leader and teacher I ever met, expecting me to excel, to be somebody, in spite of her own limited education. Similarly, I saw my aunts, Catherine and Birdie, single mothers of only children too, create miracles from nothing; and there was our matriarch, my grandmother Lottie, who could not read or write, yet was our family’s spiritual anchor, from her shotgun house in the Low Country of South Carolina. All I got in the foundational years of my education was Betsy Ross allegedly sewing the first American flag; a scratch mention of the nurse Florence Nightingale; and some vague rendering of Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf, with no context of what her disabilities meant nor her importance to generations. Only one woman writer was referenced, in passing: Emily Dickinson. Otherwise there were no women in any of my studies—not in literature, or science, or math, or history. It was an erasure of half of America’s and the world’s population, as we men and boys were centered in every way. So, like many boys to men, I came of age not only totally ignorant about women and girls, but also easily swayed to the sexist notions that women and girls were only to be mother-like figures or, worse, sexual objects to be used and then discarded. When I think back, it meant, as a boy, seeing and hearing grown men lust for the figures of pre-teen and teenage girls in my community. It meant us boys being encouraged to grab or touch girls’ bodies without permission. It meant, when I got to college, everything from domestic violence to rape culture was evident, atrocities that persist to this day.As I have written in my memoir and stated in several lectures on manhood since the 1990s, I was not immune to this destructive behavior. I have publicly apologized for my disrespect and stupidity on a number of occasions, to very specific women, to the entire group in general. Because it wasn’t until post-college that I began to take seriously the voices of women, like bell hooks, Gloria Steinem, Sonia Sanchez, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde. To say it was game-changing would be a gross understatement. Learning their herstory, even when it made me mightily uncomfortable as a man, also forced me to rethink how I viewed my mother, my aunts, my grandmother, every woman and girl I had known. Through the years this re-education also made me rethink America, the entire planet. Like, why are there, and why have there been, so many wars in so many places? Why was there slavery, colonization, or oppression in any form? Why is there the perpetual erosion of our environment, and things like poverty, famine, homelessness and hatred and division? It began to dawn on me long ago that men rule the world, and have for centuries; that the multiple ways most of us have been socialized to define manhood—through violence, through domination, through ego and senseless competition—are the very reasons why we have had and have so many troubles on this earth. We men have messed up America, and the world, long enough. What would America and the world look and feel like if women like Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Goodall, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, Yuri Kochiyama, Grace Lee Boggs, Jane Elliott, V , Nobuko Miyamoto, or my wife, my mother, my aunts, my grandmother had a chance to say this is the America and world we want? I think of this as the sorrowful Jeffrey Epstein saga continues to play out, with no resolution in sight. It is clear that lots of powerful and influential men did inexplicable harm to a number of women and girls, and those men remain unpunished because of the male privilege us men and boys have, simply because we are men and boys. I think of the infamous Diddy trial a year ago: the amount of vitriol leveled against his ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura, on social media, on the streets, everywhere. It is little wonder she has mostly disappeared following the brutal attacks she had to endure just for telling her story.I think of this with the new revelations about the late farm workers icon Cesar Chavez, what he savagely did to Dolores Huerta, his co-leader, to other women, to underage girls. Ms. Huerta is 95 and held on to these tragic secrets for 60 years to protect, well, a man, at the expense of her own well-being. We have heard and seen this movie time and time again: protect the man, let the woman be damaged goods for life. So I imagine if women ruled America, if women ruled the world, what that would feel like, what it would look like? Would there be bombings and wars across time and space like no big deal? Would there be countless mass shootings? Would there be constant sexual harassment and domestic violence and rape and grooming and manipulating? Would there be perpetual meanness and the absence of kindness toward each other as human beings? Or would there be more empathy, more compassion and, dare I say it, more love, more peace, in America and across the globe? I can only wonder, but clearly what we’ve had for so long has done great injury and continues to do so. I think of women like Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados. Brilliant, strong, visionary, a far different approach to governing as that nation’s first woman leader. And I think of America, where I was born and raised, and how we are celebrating, perhaps prematurely, 250 years of this social experiment, but still cannot find it within ourselves to elect a woman as a president. Kevin Powell is a Grammy-nominated poet, humanitarian, filmmaker, public speaker, frequent contributor toA Poem for Evangeline, And Other Songs . Kevin lives in New York City. You can find him on social media platforms by typing"poet kevin powell