right choice, wrong reason
by Karen Sosa
Published: January 28, 2008
France was one of the last European nations to grant women the right to vote, not doing so until 1944. One of the more interesting reasons for this was that suffrage was not one of the goals of French women in campaigning for gender equality. Why? Because they feared that women would bring religion into politics. They didn’t trust women to vote responsibly. And neither do I.
I am sick and tired of hearing pundits assume that, “Women are going to come out for Hillary.” “Can women save Hillary in New Hampshire?” Chris Matthews asked over and over again. How charmingly retro to boil down one of the most important elections in American history to a battle of the sexes.
But I can’t be too mad at Chris Matthews; after all, he’s right!
Women ARE coming out for Hillary. For starters, Hillary courts it, for which I cannot blame her. She made that very soft-spoken, last-ditch-effort commercial in Iowa wherein she spoke to me, softly, one-on-one, as women do. She let me know that she “cares.”
Please. I’m voting for the Executive Officer of the United States of American not the “National Mommy.” Speaking of Mom, Latino women in Nevada, whom Hillary strongly carried, loved the image of Hillary as a nurturing mother hitting the campaign trail with her daughter. But the “piece de resistance,” in my opinion, was an interview with Maya Angelou on NPR. Though I did not hear the interview, the preview featured Ms. Angelou - whom up to now I considered a respectable person - enumerating the reasons she supported Hillary Clinton. It went something like this: “She’s a mother. A daughter. A wife… ”
My head exploded.
It’s not just women being ignorant, though. Yes, last Saturday in South Carolina, black people turned out in droves to exercise their right to vote for a black candidate. Woo hoo! Obama carried every age group among black voters. John Edwards and Hillary carried every age group among non-black voters except the 18-29s, who are making a whole lot of fuss right now but are going to be way too hungover on election day to vote. These voting results may as well be straight out of the 1950s. Better yet, how about the 1890s?
I could be totally misreading the situation, of course. Maybe everyone went home, did their research, took MSNBC’s little quiz to determine which candidate best represented their views and voted intelligently. And it just happened to be straight down race lines. To some extent, that may have been true among white voters - they were closely split between Hillary, John and Barack, with no candidate receiving more than 42% of any white age group outside the 18-29s. Among black voters, however, Obama won by huge margins - 77%, 79%, even up to 82% among 30-44 year olds.
When the lines are drawn as sharply as they were in South Carolina, race makes an unwelcome return to the political ring, not in an incidental or minor role, but as a central motivating force - as the deciding factor. What, then, happened to judging based NOT on the color of one’s skin but on the content of one’s character?
My point is this: Voting for a candidate because they are a woman or because they are black is every inch as ignorant as not voting for a candidate because they are a woman or because they are black. This primary season is a disheartening reminder that sometimes race and sex-based divisions in a society are actually promoted by those you would expect to be the first to recognize the danger in such thinking.
But hey, what do I know? I’m just a woman living in a man’s world, right? The truth is I should be cooking dinner and darning some socks, not thinking. Such is the feminine burden. Hillary would understand.
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