CNN reports that the Republican presidential candidate is expected to announce a female running mate. Who cares if we disagree on the issues, the woman thinks, it’s a woman candidate, and I will stand behind any woman who breaks into the good ole boys club.
This could be the woman making her high school aged kids’ lunches or the woman filling out FAFSA information for her 20-year-old daughter, and it might even be the woman on her way to her high powered firm job. But this isn’t any particular woman, this is Susie America, and she’s ready to take one for the team.
Our college-aged generation grew up with equal rights, Title IX, and the “men and women are equal rhetoric”- We didn’t have to fight for gender equality, sometimes we even forget it had to be fought. These factors make it so much easier for us to dismiss the thinking pattern described above. Voting based solely on our beliefs isn’t necessarily the case for older Americans.
What about older women who are “on the fence,” who remember the fight and have just one more in them? Or for the people for whom the issues are not enough to make a decision, who need something else to help them decide? In this U.S. presidential election, gender could be a deciding factor for many, specifically white independent women, according to a Gallup poll, released in late Aug.
A vote out of camaraderie is not a tribute to the rights women have fought so hard for, it is a sacrilege of them. |
While some claim that the female vice presidential pick of Sarah Palin by Sen. McCain was a political stunt to get votes, it seems that it hasn't achieved the boost it might have intended. Minorities and loyal party members are not only gender neutral in their votes but they’ve already made up their minds regardless of the vice presidential pick. So why's susceptible to this supposed stunt?
“It would appear that white independent women -who are currently split almost down the middle in terms of their candidate support -would be most susceptible to changing sides,” the Gallup report states.
A vote out of camaraderie is not a tribute to the rights women have fought so hard for, it is a sacrilege of them. Suffrage wasn’t the right to vote for women, it was the right to vote for anyone. And the message was that women were capable of thinking independently of factors such as gender.
We need to revive this message of independence for the women who don’t identify with the Republican ticket but will vote for it anyways, or to the Hillary supporters who feel disenfranchised from the Democratic Party because their woman didn’t make the ticket. A shared gender will not reconcile the beliefs of a pro-choice voter with a pro- life ticket just as a shared skin color or ethnicity is not going to reconcile the beliefs of a National Rifle Association member with a gun-control ticket.
“The idea of tokenism for tokenism gets really scary when we’re talking about someone who could lead the free world,” professor of political science Kristin Novotny says.
It's been 88 years since women have won suffrage, and yet some of them will consider voting based on the shared burden of a monthly menstrual cycle. We’ve reverted back to a century ago when expecting a woman to act so dependently was acceptable.
This expectation of women acting based on gender is not only unacceptable, it’s insulting, Novotny says.
“It’s offensive to me as a thinking person that I should just accept her as my vice presidential candidate because she and I have the same chromosomes,” Novotny says. “If anyone suggested out loud that Caucasians should support John McCain just because he’s Caucasian, what an incredible outcry that would be.”
The spirit of feminism is for women to feel, do, and think for themselves. |
To be a feminist is to exist independently of the societal constraints that come from the simple state of being a woman. It certainly does not mean to throw your beliefs by the wayside in the spirit of womanhood. To do so would be un-feminist, and in fact sexist.
The spirit of feminism is for women to feel, do, and think for themselves. Men and women alike should embrace this spirit in the next five weeks. And in that spirit, people in this college generation need to send the message that it is sexist and insulting to expect that women will vote based on their gender.
If not, Susan B. Anthony might just roll right out of her grave.
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