I was prepared to give the War on Women a rest until my husband asked me at breakfast if I’d caught Gloria Steinem’s interview with Chris Matthews before the presidential debate. The man knows my propensity to rant about rights. By the way, we consider ranting a positive and passionate form of self-expression in our family. A man with three opinionated daughters and a granddaughter, he’s all for women’s rights.   He found the recorded Gloria Steinem segment for me. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/49509696#49509696

As with any subject having to do with women, Gloria, who isn’t a big ranter, provided a wise, calm and new take on what is at risk in this election. To oppose fair pay and reproductive rights is not just a war on women, she said. It is a war on the country and specifically on the economy.

Turn it around, give women equal pay and it would be the “biggest economic stimulus this country could possibly have,” she said. She came up with some pretty big numbers that would be added to the average woman’s paycheck if all things were more equitable.  Altogether it would bring $200 billion more into the economy.

And how would a woman who is suddenly bringing home as much as a man for the same job using the same skills and having the same education spend her money?  She smiled her sly, Gloria grin and said it would likely not go to China.

No, it would be going down the street into the local economy. Providing family maintenance items like school shoes and groceries and getting a nice haircut.

It was a simple and brilliant point. Women’s rights don’t stop with women. Women share. A working class woman is not going to take that long-awaited fair paycheck and fly off to the Cayman Islands. Maybe she’ll buy rain boots.

And then there’s that other essential guarantee that women need to help boost the economy.

“The biggest indicator of whether a woman can work or not, be educated or not, be healthy or not is reproductive control,” said Gloria. “And that is an economic issue.”

Bingo, again.

So, maybe it’s not your style to get all in a sweat over women’s rights being dragged back to the 1950s. Take a more selfish stance, then.

Think of what more women making more money would mean to your business. More families taking the kids out for frozen yogurt. More businesswomen bringing their pantsuits into your dry cleaners.

It is folly, as Gloria said, to think “that economic issues only apply to white guys.”

Nor are reproductive issues solely a woman’s issue.  A doctor friend of mine named Kathy wonders why men are keeping so quiet in the war on women.  Most men are no more interested in unwanted pregnancy than women, she points out.   They too want an uncomplicated sex life, whether in a committed relationship or not. Men surely would be adversely impacted by tampering with women’s reproductive rights.

“Where are the men in this?” Kathy asks. “Why aren’t they sticking up for the women they love?”

Gloria Steinem called Mitt Romney the candidate “most destructive to equality” that she’s ever seen. Asked why women today would vote for someone who has said he would get rid of abortion and obstruct birth control and give property rights to a fertilized egg, Gloria is as flummoxed as a lot of us.

She told Chris Matthews, Republican women say to her, “Oh, he’d never do that.”

Hmm. And which Mitt Romney would that be?

We haven’t heard any specific mention of the War on Women in the debates so far, but make no mistake it continues to be the elephant in the living room, the bedroom and the exam room.

This election offers a pretty clear choice, if you’re looking for someone consistently loyal to women. Women, being 51 percent of the population,  54 percent of the voting public. Bigger than a binder-ful.

Oh sure, the election will dramatically affect men, too, but as individuals, not the entire gender. Generally speaking, the male sex will be status quo. The female sex?  Ah… could be in big trouble.

Here’s the deal that Republicans offer women. Vote for them and  they’ll come up with a way (not sure how) to get America working again and fix the deficit (ask them how later). But they want women’s bodies back.

It’s surprising, shocking really, how women’s rights became a big factor in the election.  With so many pressing concerns, you would have thought we’d be fully concentrating on moving America forward.  But, nope. There are people bent on going backwards. And they will make their mark with women.

It is not men the ultra right obsesses over.

Nobody is lurking inside men’s health clinics to spy on a man’s exam. No one is thinking up ways to turn a legal urological procedure into something that is shameful, embarrassing, unnecessary and invasive. Or saying vasectomies should be illegal.

No one is saying an employer should get to grill male workers about why they want birth control.  No one is fantasizing about what happens to a man’s body during a “legitimate rape.” No radio bully condemns sexually active male college students. Guys having sex? Well, boys will be boys. And the women? Simply sluts.

Of course the Republicans make war on women.

Republicans fought against the Lilly Ledbetter Act to protect women workers from wage discrimination. Republicans stood against extending the Violence Toward Women Act.

Republicans support person-hood amendments that would turn a woman into a felon if she couldn’t prove her miscarriage happened naturally.

Yet, they toy with us. Mitt Romney has been for choice, against choice and then, kind of, maybe, for.    Paul Ryan, who’s voted 60 times against reproductive rights,  mocks the War on Women. Lately he’s been saying he’d allow abortion in certain cases.

Haven’t women learned not to trust a man who won’t commit?

Romney and Ryan have played fast and loose with women, backing some of the wackiest and most punishing notions concerning abortion and birth control. They hope we will forget.

The Romney campaign this week said that equal pay and choice are “small things” and not important to voters.  Real women, the GOP claims, don’t worry about women’s rights. Women care about jobs. Women care about going to war in Iran. Of course, we worry about the economy and Iran getting the bomb. But does that mean we have to give up our freedom?

The extremist religious and retro right and their candidates  would turn us back to an America where our daughters and nieces and granddaughters have fewer rights than we women have now.

They don’t  want to mess with men.   They are not threatening a man’s choice. Or plotting what their Supreme Court  might do to men.

They just want to take away a little bit of freedom from women, shave off just a little equality.

And were they to once taste victory, what thinking woman can imagine them not asking for a little more? And what thinking man wants that?

She wore sensible shoes, a crisp white blazer and a smile that said, “Sit up, you in the back row. I’m talking to you.”  It was Sister Simone Campbell, one of the famed “Nuns on the Bus,” stopping by in Charlotte last week.  The only nun to address the Democratic convention but far from the only sister in the room.

Who would dare to continue to make war on women after seeing who they’re messing with? Mindful, smart, gutsy, gorgeous, make-you-cry, make-you-laugh women, make you wish you had one those “uterus” buttons they were passing out on the streets in Charlotte.

Sister Simone said, “I am my sister’s keeper. I am my brother’s keeper” an appropriate  gender-balanced sentiment in a world that sometimes forgets we’re supposedly equal. She won a rousing Hosanna when she said that part of being pro-life means making sure no more people die from lack of health care. And warned of “politics masquerading as values.”

Another backbone woman was Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, who cut through the Republican fog machine over the definition of rape by simply declaring, “Rape is rape.”

In the war on women, our best fighting tools are our words and solidarity. Noting the continued battle for equal pay, a baffled Elizabeth Warren told the Democrats, it’s “hard to believe that we’re still having to say these things in 2012.”

Warren, the consumer rights Amazon, took on Mitt Romney’s notion that corporations are people. No, said Warren, looking like the smartest member of a book club.

“People have hearts. They have kids. They get jobs. They get sick. They cry. They dance. They live. They love and they die. And that matters.”

I sat watching the Democratic convention with a clicker and a notebook, stopping to scribble quotes and take down names of women I want on my side.

There was the gracious Sandra Fluke who ironically found her voice when some political thugs tried to shut her up. There are “two profoundly different futures that await women in this country,” she said, including one “where access to birth control is controlled by people who never use it.”

There was Gabby Giffords leaning on her friend Debbie Wasserman Schultz to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. And Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood, summoning her late mother Ann Richard’s wit,  comparing anti-women efforts by the right to waking up “in a bad episode of Mad Men.”

Lilly Ledbetter, in her biscuits-and-gravy voice, explained how a gender pay gap of 77 cents to a dollar is no penny ante difference to working women. “Maybe 23 cents doesn’t sound like a lot to someone with a Swiss bank account, Cayman Island Investments and an IRA worth tens of millions of dollars.”

Democratic women pushed their party to not shy from women’s issues but to come right out and talk about abortion, rape, birth control, health care and marriage equality and to remember the ideals of helping out each other.

Here were straight talking, no apologies heroines of our time.

Michele Obama reminded all women that our fore-mothers had been dragged to jail for seeking the vote. And she reminded all who enjoy relative comfort, “If any family in this country struggles then we cannot be content with our good fortune.”

Benita Veliz made history as the first illegal immigrant to address a national political convention. Armed with a double college major and the Dream Act, she now has plenty to give “my economy and my country.”

One of my favorites, Cuban American journalist Cristina Saralegui, said we have to do more than protest.

“Don’t boo, vote” will surely show up on some blue T-shirt. And then she repeated the  Obama campaign message of “Forward” but she said it in Spanish — “pa’lante,” which sounds even more urgent.