Whenever there is a diary that tries to understand the differences in voting behavior as a generational issue I find myself jumping in with a comment: Count Me Out. I started writing this diary to a young(er) feminist Democrat in the Heart of Texas, who asked me if it wasn't a generational divide that separated women from voting for Obama and Clinton, what was it?
The truth is that I don’t know one woman of my age group who wants to vote for Hillary. It is not because we never respected her. In the 1990s when she first emerged on the national scene many of us thought that she would have made the better president. And it is clear from the intensity of womens response on the NARAL website the other day, some women felt that they owed her their loyalty. It was Hillary who fought for endangered legislation and even helped to protect the lives of doctors who worked in abortion clinics.
But that was then. And today is now.
The truth is the women’s movement was never a unified group. Understanding this helps to explain the divide between Clinton and Obama even among older, white women. Some women, like Betty Friedan, came to this as liberal reformers who were involved with the Democratic Party. Others were radical feminists who had been politicized by the Civil Rights movement. Still others became socialist feminists, drawing more upon the working class European tradition of feminists like Sheila Rowbotham in England. In fact if you were to pick up a reader for a class in Women's Studies in the ‘70s, articles would be divided into the following sections: liberal feminism/ radical feminism /socialist feminist.
Women came to this movement from many different political perspectives. Those of us who looked at women’s issues as part of a larger social justice movement, could never separate gender injustice from racial injustice and class injustice and so on. In the 1980s in sociology, my own field was transformed as women of color wrote seminal works critiquing the bias inherent in a white women’s movement, which excluded the experience of women of color.
Race, Class & Gender are almost mantras in sociology today as people write about the intersection of different forms of domination and resistance in our lives. No one talks about gender alone anymore, we recognized that gender (female AND male) intersects with other identities like race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability and so on.
So when I am thrown back to a time and place where women talk about women not voting for Hillary as a betrayal I am reminded of another day. A day where Hillary might have won if she ran for president. But not today.
Today we need a feminism that addresses the multiple challenges of women who are still struggling. While it is true that many generations of women have benefited from their elders, it is equally true that many more face enormous challenges.
2/3s of the women in the U.S. work in sex-segregated jobs and are paid far less and have much less power than the heirs to the women's movement of the 1970s. Low income single mothers still make up the fastest growing group of the poor in the U.S. Gender AND social class AND race AND ethnicity AND sexual orientation tell another women’s story--- a story that I don’t hear in the narrative that says you must vote for a woman like Clinton not a man like Obama.
Do these Clinton women speak to the many women who are facing challenges because of their social class and their racial ethnic background? Or will Barack Obama?
A feminism rooted in social justice movements, a feminism that attracts men as well as women, a feminism that understands the challenges of what it means to be an African American man in our society today running for president of the United States is a feminism that finds its voice in Barack Obama.