USADaily -
For the first election in memory, some (usually younger) women are arguing that it simply doesn’t matter if a woman is elected president.
This new generation is proudly post-feminist, and they won’t be railroaded into voting for Hillary Clinton, they say, even if she is a woman.
But what they’re really saying, when you get beyond their frustration at Sanders having lost the nomination, is that it’s no longer historically or culturally important for a woman to finally break the glass ceiling of the presidency.
And they couldn’t be more wrong.
I didn’t grow up female, but I did grow up gay. And in many ways it’s similar. I didn’t grow up with any role models. The only gays you saw when I was a kid (pre-Internet) was the occasional murderer in a movie, or a drag queen embracing a leather guy in the Pride parade coverage of your local paper, TIME or Newsweek. That was it. There were no role models to aspire to when I was a kid.
Women had it better, to be sure. They at least had some role models who were “normal.” Their moms and grandmothers, for starters. But they didn’t have many role models in business — if they dared leave the mommy-track, they were relegated to jobs as secretaries and nurses, working for businessmen and always-male doctors.
And God forbid a woman ever won the American presidency. America has an oddly errant history in not yet having had a woman leader. Other similarly-situated countries broke that glass ceiling years ago. There’s Margaret Thatcher in England in the 1980s. Mary Robinson in Ireland in the 1990s. And Angela Merkel in Germany in the mid-2000s. (And let’s not forget Queen Elizabeth I, who ruled England all the way back in the 1400s.)
And it’s not just in the developed West that women led long ago. Golda Meir became prime minister of Israel in 1969. Isabel Perón led Argentina in the early 1970s. Benazir Bhutto led Pakistan in the late 1980s. And the current president of Brazil is Dilma Rousseff, a woman.
And let’s not forget Nefertiti and Cleopatra.
It’s embarrassing that America has never had a female leader. (Or until 8 years ago, a leader of color.) But it’s also a problem in terms of role models. Yes, women are more equal to men than ever before. But they’re not quite there yet. Women still earn only 79 cents for every dollar a man earns. And a woman’s right to choose has been under constant, withering attack since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973. But policy matters aside, what really concerns me is the lack of political role models at the pinnacle of power.
I just refuse to believe that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth were the only kids in America who suffered from a lack of role models. The fact that America still doesn’t have full equality in the corporate boardroom, or in the Oval Office, sends a subtle, or not so subtle, message to young girls and young boys that women are getting better every day, but they’re still not up to the big-boy tasks.
What’s particularly striking from those who claim the woman card just isn’t relevant, is how relevant they find other cards in the deck. These same “who needs a woman in the White House?” liberals don’t like it when African-Americans or LGBT-Americans are ignored on television (the recently complaints against MSNBC over race come to mind). And they definitely understand the need to have more people of color — and perhaps finally an openly-gay justice? — on the Supreme Court. But when it comes to women in the White House, suddenly diversity is passé.
It was a big deal when we elected an African-American to the presidency eight years ago. Which makes me wonder whether part of the current problem is women themselves.
Why do so many young female Sanders supporters feel that it’s no big deal if a woman wins the presidency? In LGBT circles, the phrase “self-loathing” comes to mind. It’s the notion that you’ve been oppressed for so long, and have so internalized your “lesser” status, that you not only accept your subjugation as normal, you almost embrace it.
It’s also possible that young women simply think they’ve won, and have moved on to the next battle. But they haven’t won. They’re still not earning what men earn in the workplace. And their reproductive rights have been whittled back significantly for over forty years.
But perhaps the strongest evidence that women still have a way to go is the fact that the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who regularly spouts off against women and minorities, has yet to pay a price for any of it.
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