The Year of the Woman Voter

Sometimes it’s good to start with a simple syllogism: whoever will be our next president turns on which candidate captures the “independent” vote. A considerable portion of those independents, still procrastinating their final attachment to a potential occupant of the Oval office, are women. Ergo, one of the most ideologically divisive and politically important elections in American history rests in the hands of women. On these grounds, women can at least lay claim to the year, if not the whole of this generation.

Both parties have obviously noted the rising significance of the female voter and have breathlessly channeled their communicative energies in their direction. These efforts reveal much about each party’s perception of women, the sum total of their estimation of women’s needs and longings. It is striking, given the power they wield, that women have largely been courted with gilded condescension, sycophantic appeals that degrade more than empower. Both campaigns seem to acknowledge the great influence women possess this election year and neither seems to think they deserve it.

President Obama and the Democrats have clearly decided that women narrowly vote on “women’s issues” which ostensibly reduce to safe sex and the range of options in response to the wages of unsafe sex. On the basis of their platform, one would conclude that the prototypical American woman is insatiably promiscuous, obsessively preoccupied with access to contraception, and presumably not very good at using it.

They’re also some dangerous combination of credulous and grotesquely misinformed. Obama has insisted at both debates that Romney intends to deny them access to contraception and that he insists on rolling back their rights to abortion. While Romney is surely a pro-choice candidate, as more than half the women in America are, there is no reason to believe he has the inclination ( or will have the constitutional power) to accomplish the national criminalization of abortion. Also, his position on contraception has not been to ban it-no policy he endorses will have any appreciable impact on access to contraception, which today is as cheap as it is ubiquitous. He merely wants those who protest it on religious grounds to be able to conscientiously object to funding it. Given Obama’s schoolmarmish emphasis within his signature health care legislation on leaving questions regarding who gets or doesn’t get what medical good or service to a panel of unelected experts, it’s odd that he objects so strenuously to women being told what to do with their bodies. In this context, odd means comically hypocritical.

But this is, unfortunately, the perverse legacy of the so called sexual revolution, which ultimately postulated that the height of femininity was the option to freely avoid being feminine: instead of the cumbersome burden of motherhood, the screaming shackle that is a child, or the parochial bondage that is marriage, women can get jobs. Wait…one day there will be jobs again, and women can have them. And when that day eventually arrives they will, thanks to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, make the same as their male counterparts. But since the primary reason for the wage disparity is child bearing and rearing and the time away from work this requires, this elusive equality actually demands they stop being mothers.

Yes, at the heart of liberal feminism today is a committed hostility to motherhood and marriage, or what Betty Friedan called a “waste of human self” and a “comfortable concentration camp”. There are good reasons why more than 75% of women refuse to identity themselves as feminists-they prefer to think of themselves as simply women and all that traditionally (not to mention biologically) entails, rather than the torch bearers of some shrill political ideology.

Mitt Romney, and conservatives alike, often play right into this corseting diminishment of women by accepting the terms of the debate as set by Democrats: what was truly offensive about Romney’s otherwise innocuous “binders full of women” comment was the patronizing view that women need his special attention to find employment, the whole lot of them office damsels in professional distress.

What would count as an honest appeal to women? Well, since women make 85% of health care decisions in the home, one could focus on the many ways in which ObamaCare will limit their options, raise their costs, degrade the quality of their care, and subject the procurement of any medical good and service to a dizzying and time consuming bureaucratic maze.

Also, Romney’s health care reforms encourage families to find suitable and affordable insurance plans not tied to their employment, making it easier for women who stay home and take care of their kids to find coverage. Women are also particularly interested in the solvency of Medicare and the personal economic damage done by estate taxation since they typically outlive their husbands.

And as far as wage disparity goes, Romney could emphasize that Obama’s higher marginal income tax rates weighs upon women heavily since so many of them are second earners and have their salaries taxed at their husband’s higher rate. This means they makes less than their mate but get taxed just as heavily, an oddly regressive system.

Biden was right to point out that middle class families have been “buried” the last four years, pummeled by the nation’s economic torpor. Women have not been immune to the catastrophe that has been Obama’s stewardship of our stillborn recovery-they have lost jobs, seen their husbands lose jobs, seen their families suffer from the loss of income and the accretion of household debt. It does not constitute a blinkered denial of their womanhood to appeal to their pocketbooks; however, it is a willful effacement of their womanhood to assume that their concerns reduce to reproductive rights. The party that speaks to women as women, and all that entails, will likely win the White House next month. This is their year.

Category: Election 2012, Featured