is this the end of the era?

Personally, I hope it's the beginning of a resurgence toward equality of rights under the law.

When rights in the new country were being formulated and debated, Abigail Adams admonished her husband to "remember the ladies" and not place unlimited power into the hands of their spouses, to which John Adams replied "...we know better than to repeal our masculine systems." (from Alice S. Rossi's The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir, New York: Columbia University Press, 1973. Abigail Adam's Letter, dated March 31, 1776) 

For far too long, women have been given short shrift in the social arena... lower wages, higher insurance rates, fewer rights, despite gaining the right to vote in the early 20th century. The march for the right to vote was long, and ratification of the 19th Amendment came only after a prolonged fight to deny women this semblance of equality.

Fast forward to 2012 as we see the rights of women to control their lives and their bodies debated in a number of state legislatures, and in some cases, rolled back to times when men controlled all aspects of women's lives. In Virginia, (I'm constantly embarrassed to admit this is my home state) we've seen debate on what constitutes "personhood" in the case of an unborn child and what "rights" should be conferred on "unborn children" and whether they should enjoy all the rights and privileges as those "living" persons/residents/citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia. If left to the legislative body, the answer is yes, these unborn children will have all the rights as those fully-formed human beings currently walking the face of earth.

We've seen candidates for the highest office in this country question whether women are even capable of making decisions that will affect their health and well-being (please note some of the comments by  arch conservative catholic, Rick Santorum).

The real tragedy is, there are women who support these Neanderthal ideas... without fully contemplating what this will mean for women coming behind them. They have only a vague idea what torture transpired during the era leading up to suffrage and buy into the idea that women are already equal in this country.