Photo by Chanan Bos, CleanTechnica.

The Empowerment Of Women

November 3, 20242 months ago Steve Hanley 0 Comments

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On June 24, 2022, the so-called US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Six of the members of the court, five of whom are adherents of a radical segment of the Catholic church, decided that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that said women should have access to reproductive health care, including abortion in appropriate circumstances, was wrong. The issue should be left to the individual states, the court said.

And boy, howdy, did the states rush to implement the court’s suggestion! States controlled by Republican majorities raced to outdo each other by imposing Draconian measures to punish pregnant women and their health care providers who dared to perform abortion procedures. Some states considered measures that would track the menstrual cycles of their female citizens and follow them if they journeyed to other states in search of reproductive health care.

In fact, the Dobbs decision may have been correct. Roe v. Wade was a tortured decision by the Supreme Court, as it was constituted at the time to provide protection for women when abortion was not politically popular. Congress was in no mood to address the issue, and so the court stepped into the political vacuum and did what it thought was the equitable thing. But doing the right thing left the door wide open for reactionaries to scream long and loud about activist judges. We are not supposed to notice that the current Supreme Court has been more activist than any in the history of the nation. Do as we say, not as we do is the modus operandi of radical conservatives. In other words, they are all a quivering mass of hypocrites.

The gates of history turn on tiny hinges, my high school history teacher liked to say. The Dobbs decision, once loudly proclaimed as a marvelous victory for conservatism, may turn out to be the tiny hinge on which the 2024 presidential election turns. In a moment reminiscent of a famous scene from the original Star Wars movie, the cheers of 2022 may turn into tears in 2024.

Heather Cox Richardson reminded her readers on November 2, 2024, that in the Dobbs decision, Justice Samuel Alito suggested that women could change state laws if they saw fit, writing that “women are not without electoral or political power.” Indeed, since the Dobbs decision, every time abortion rights have been on the ballot, voters have approved them, although right wing state legislators have worked feverishly to prevent their wishes from taking effect. “In this moment, though, it is clear that women have electoral and political power over more than abortion rights,” Richardson wrote.

The 1980 election was the first one in which the proportion of eligible female voters who turned out to vote was higher than the proportion of eligible men. It was also the first one in which there was a tracked partisan gender gap, with a higher proportion of women than men favoring the Democrats. That partisan gap now is the highest it has ever been.

The fear that women can, if they choose to, overthrow the patriarchal mythology of cowboy individualism that shaped the modern MAGA Republican Party is likely behind the calls of certain right wing influencers and evangelical leaders to stop women from voting. “For sure, it is behind the right wing freakout over the video voiced by actor Julia Roberts that reassures women that they do not have to tell their husbands how they voted,” Richardson wrote. In fact, since the Dobbs decision, the political momentum has been swinging to the Democratic Party and its pro-women policies.

Women & Marlboro Man Syndrome

The right wing version of the American cowboy was always a myth, Richardson noted. Nothing mattered more for success in the American West than the kinship networks and community support that provided money, labor, and access to trade outlets. When the economic patterns of the American West replicated those of the industrializing East after the Civil War, success during the heyday of the cowboy depended on access to lots of capital, giving rise to western barons and then to popular political movements to regulate businesses and give more power to the people. Far from being the home-bound wives of myth, women were central to western life, just as they have always been to American society.

America Gothic — Public domain. Art Institute of Chicago, Friends of American Art Collection

Just look at the couple in American Gothic. Does the woman in that painting look subservient to the man to you? To my eye, she looks like an equal partner, sharing the burdens and benefits of a rural lifestyle with her husband. Women helped build sod homes on the prairie and split rails for fences. They fixed wagons and tended animals, all while birthing and nurturing children. Does that sound like taking a back seat to men to you?

The factor that depowered women the most was the relocation of rural men to the cities after the Civil War. Suddenly, men were the bread winners and women were relegated to domestic chores, for which they received no compensation. In pre-Roe v. Wade America, a common snide remark between men was that a woman’s place was chained to the kitchen stove with just enough slack to reach the bedroom. That Neanderthalic view exploded at Woodstock, New York, in August of 1969, a display of female power unshackled from male stereotypes that shocked polite society. That nascent ferment of liberty may have played a part in the Roe v. Wade decision four years later.

Women Lead The Polls

In Flagstaff, Arizona, recently, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz told a crowd of supporters, “I kind of have a feeling that women all across this country, from every walk of life, from either party, are going to send a loud and clear message to Donald Trump next Tuesday, November 5, whether he likes it or not.” That feeling may be justified by the statistics from early polling. Early voting in Pennsylvania showed that women sent in 56% of the early ballots, compared to 43% for men. Seniors, who remember a time before Roe v. Wade, also showed a significant split. Although the parties had similar numbers of registrants, nearly 59% of those over 65 voting early were Democrats.

That pattern holds across all the battleground states. Women taking advantage of early voting outnumber men by about 10 points. While those numbers are certainly not definitive, the enthusiasm of women voting early was notable. A poll for the Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa conducted by the highly respected Selzer & Co. polling firm from October 28 to 31 showed Kamala Harris leading Trump in Iowa 47% to 44% among likely voters. Iowa! While Trump wins the votes of men in Iowa by 52% to 38% and of Evangelicals by 73% to 20%, women, particularly older women, are driving the shift to favor Harris in a previously Republican-dominated state.

Independent women back Harris by a 28 point margin, while senior women support her by a margin of more than 2 to 1. Overall, women back Harris by a margin of about 20 points: 56% to 36%. Seniors as a group, including men as well as women, are also strongly in Harris’s camp, by 55% to 36%.

The Empowerment Of Women

More than 20 years ago, during the first term of George W. Bush, I attended a public forum at the Kennedy Library in Boston. One of the guests was Harry Belafonte, a longtime activist for equality for all people. I got to ask him a question at the conclusion of the forum. Did he see any hope for an American society that seemed to be spinning out control, I asked. This was when Dick Cheney, John Poindexter, and Donald Rumsfeld were trying everything they could think of to implement the Plan For A New American Century that conservatives had cooked up while waiting for Bill Clinton’s second term to expire. PNAC is what got us into the Iraq War at a cost of more than $3 trillion, over 100,000 dead, and more than a million Iraqis turned into refugees. Belafonte paused for a moment, then said, “Yes. The key to America’s future is the empowerment of women.”

America is on the verge of electing its first woman president, which could mark the beginning of that empowerment, and not a moment too soon. As it is, the right wing of American politics has become a cesspit of toxic masculinity that rejects equal rights for women, which is like trying to drive a car with two flat tires. There is a large and growing list of challenges facing America. Turning the country into a real-life version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is not the way to address those challenges effectively.

It is time for women to exert their political power and say no to the dystopian male-dominated scenario promoted by Donald Trump and Elon Musk. The time to make women full partners in the American Experiment is at hand. You can make sure we seize the moment and march forward, shoulder to shoulder, into a future filled with promise by casting your vote for sanity, not extremism, on November 5.