1971. I was 19 years old and still caught between wanting to embrace the new women's liberation movement and also wanting desperately to be loved. So I chose to be dependent on a boy/man who smirked at my going to a women's lib meeting at my university. I never went again.
But that song kept ringing in my years through the years. And there were lyrics that I repeated to myself when I was told that I couldn't do certain things. When I was promised things--by men--and then disappointed. Lyrics such as "You can bend but never break me, for it only serves to make me, more determined to achieve my final goal." And, later, the more poignant, "Yes I've paid the price, but look how much I've gained."
Meanwhile, on the public stage I saw women making steps forward and steps back. In Canada, we had Kim Campbell as our first female Prime Minister for five months in 1993. In Canada you can become the Prime Minister by taking the helm of the governing party but then have your party lose the majority in an election that is held only a few months later. Thus she actually isn't the shortest-serving PM so one can't really say it was because of her gender. She remains the only female Prime Minister Canada has had.
In the UK there was Maggie Thatcher but people (including Maggie herself) wouldn't have said she was emblematic of a feminist victory. Maggie surrounded herself with men and she and the 49-day wonder Liz Truss (who does hold the UK record for shortest time in the PM's seat) wouldn't have wanted to be looked at as feminist torch bearers. Theresa May, the other female Prime Minister, who served for three years as UK Prime Minister was lauded by The Guardian (a non-conservative UK newspaper) for encouraging more women to run for political office and for not putting up with any old boy rubbish. But she never had to face Trump, the most blatantly misogynistic and racist bully the US political scene has spawned who actually made it to becoming president and may actually be president again. Yes, those of you in the political know might remember misogynists and/or racists who have been US presidents but Trump is the whole package in a way that will go down in US history for it happening at a time when there are more women and people of color in the US House than ever before. It shouldn't be tolerated let alone encouraged. We should be better than that.
Which brings me to Kamala Harris and last night's debate. Whether you like her politics or not, whether you believe that Marley or Thomasina would be in danger of winding up on some illegal alien's dinner table if she were elected, you have to give her credit for turning in a debate performance that said that, at last, the kind of woman that Reddy sang about back in 1971, has arrived.
When she explained, in humane terms, what radical abortion laws can do, you knew she was speaking from the heart. Because only women really know what the abortion debate is about, on both sides. When she said that, as a California prosecutor, she had never asked a witness "Are you Republican or are you Democrat?" she was using the kind of logic that so many women use. Women are famous for being the more charitable gender, the more caring gender, and that charity and that gender has extended for decades to people regardless of race, religion, or political party persuasion. When she laughed off the insults it wasn't because she was weak, it was because they were schoolyard bully lies. And she'd heard them all before.
Go ahead, watch the debate. It's safe to do so now. I know many of us were afraid to, afraid that bully Trump would try to annihilate her and come off looking like the strongman he did with Hillary Clinton. Yes, Hillary "won" those debates intellectually but she didn't score the knockout blows that Kamala did last night. I really hope that women across the US--and I think it's time that, at least for this election, we don our womanhood capes and stand toe to toe--will see that this is the kind of woman we need for our first female President. She's going to make us proud.
Comments
Post a Comment