Women’s History Month

We are closing in on Crossover Day, the day on which every bill must have crossed to the other chamber to ensure it continues on the path to the governor’s desk. We have been working diligently on a wide range of issues, and I think the word of the session is “balance.”

How do we balance a budget with a looming structural deficit while ensuring we don’t experience gaps in essential services on which our Maryland constituents count? How do we balance protecting our investments in advancing mental health care and developmental disabilities with the uncertainty on future federal match funding? How do we balance our investments in education and green energy with the day-to-day realities of inflation and rising cost of living? And how do we balance protecting our rights at the state level as they are under attack at the federal level?

As we enter Women’s History Month, that last question is front of mind in my daily work. While I’ve been in office, we’ve seen the end of a nearly 50-year precedent on privacy and bodily autonomy. We’ve also seen state legislatures further restricting women’s hard-earned rights such as financial autonomy, pay equity, voting, child custody, access to contraception, and even the right to travel freely without a guardian.

It's easy to forget how recently many of the rights that were “won” were already law and were repealed. For instance, did you know that women had the vote in the early days of the American Revolution? Until the creation of our new nation, we were governed by English Common Law, which determined voting rights by property rights, which meant that women lost the right to vote when they married and any rights and property they owned transferred to their spouse.

On March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John, “…in the new code of laws, which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.” On July 2, 1776, the New Jersey Constitution passed. It contained the gender-neutral pronoun “they” and no racial categories in its election law.

Yet it would be another 150 years before the promise of women’s suffrage would become reality and another 50 years before women of color who had fought shoulder to shoulder with their white sisters would be able to exercise that right.

Today, we are seeing a rash of laws at both the state and federal levels to restrict the rights of women and other marginalized groups, but this is nothing new. Laws that target individual rights to privacy, autonomy, access to voting, and access to health care are daily making their way through legislatures across the country, often targeting the latest moral panic.

It is against this backdrop that I have introduced a resolution 350 years in the making. While Maryland was still a colony under British rule, we were also a religious sanctuary. During the 17th and 18th centuries, witch trials were a common occurrence across Europe and New England, and they often attacked women who were healers, midwives, unmarried property owners, undesirables or even just outspoken. The Witchcraft Act of 1604 was passed through a process much like that of today. It was considered, debated and passed by an all-male parliament, and though it was not used exclusively against women, they were the large majority of victims of the law, which provided for accusation, prosecution, and upon conviction, sentence — which was always death.

Three years after Maryland’s founding, the Maryland General Assembly in 1635 adopted the Witchcraft Act of 1604. The Maryland judiciary, fearing violence due to false accusations, had a high standard and though there are a number of defamation cases in the court records, only seven people, six women and one man, were formally tried as witches.

So why bring this resolution now, to exonerate people long dead? Because 350 years ago in 1674, one person, John Cowman, the only man accused, tried, and sentenced to death for witchcraft, was given a reprieve by this same body, the Maryland General Assembly, which will be considering this legislation.

Rebecca Fowler, whose descendants still reside in Maryland, was not so lucky as the General Assembly was out of session and she was executed in 1685. It is believed that she suffered her fate because the courts had recently experienced an embarrassment and needed to be “tough on crime.”

Tough on crime, laws targeting individuals who challenge the status quo, pronouns, equality. You can draw a line of demarcation from today all the way back to the founding of our state and our nation.

The 30th session of the Maryland General Assembly established the precedent but never extended it to the women who were wronged. This year, this Women’s History Month, the 447th session, we can make good on that promise of a lifetime ago.