Inhumanity of women

I spent my younger years concerned about racial inequality. I was passionately opposed to apartheid. I was well versed in the civil rights movement of the 60s in the US. I had no idea who Susan B. Anthony was. I had read Malcolm X's biography, Nelson Madella's, Martin Luther Kings. I had hosted events, talks, programs at my University for the rights of minorities.
I had no idea I was not considered a person by many of the men whose ideas I was trumpeting about.
I had no idea that none of them had been talking about me when they spoke of freedom.
I had no idea that had I been married to many of these "freedom fighters" many of them would not have supported my becoming a physician and a person of power and authority. I thought all of those years that when people spoke of freedom they meant freedom for all. But I now understand, they meant freedom for all men.
What a misuse of energy and investment.
I should have been fighting for freedom for women.
No one told me about Alice Paul in my history classes. No one went on about the 1919 revolutionary advancement in the right to vote for women. No. But I was made to watch movies about the sit ins in the south.
As a black woman, I was taught so much about how I had been discriminated against as an african american, but nothing about how I had been discriminated against as a woman.
Now in the setting of these political debates, my heart sinks.
I literally feel my skin falling to shreads about me.
I feel like I am in another century.
Men arguing about whether or not a woman should be able to choose to carry a child or not. So representative of their sense of entitlement and dominance over women, not as people but as property.
It is so utterly painful and inhumane, I can hardly stomach the thought that it is true.
I knew of the atrosities committed by people overseas, forcing women into invisibility, beating and raping them for sport and "right". But I did not know I would have to fight for basic human rights - the right to autonomy over ones body - here at home.
It simply drains my energy.
I am so appauled.

see this review on black women and feminism:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1395468?seq=1