I see that the appalling woman who is currently governor of Arkansas is attacking women who don’t have biological children, specifically Vice President Kamala Harris. This follows on the equally appalling man who is the Republican nominee for vice president doing much the same.
They are part of the current “pronatalist” movement, which is white supremacist nonsense. There are plenty of babies and young people in the world; they’re just the “wrong” race and in the “wrong” countries.
I mean, there are eight billion people on the planet, which is more than enough. And before you moan about how the population is aging, you might want to look at South Africa or Nigeria, where the population is quite young. We’re not running out of people,.
Since I am a happily childless woman who has taken care of myself since I was grown, right wing proponents of women having more babies (which also means women having fewer rights and positions of power) get on my last nerve.
But what is making me most furious today are women like Arkansas Governor Sarah Sanders, Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, Alabama Senator Katie Britt, and Justice Amy Barrett. (I think I’ll avoid discussing the dog-murdering governor of South Dakota and the wild-eyed extremist women in the U.S. House.)
All these women have powerful jobs today because of feminism, and all of them are out to destroy the rights of women.
I mean, let’s get real: the Republicans wouldn’t be putting women in powerful positions if they didn’t need to cater to women’s votes. I guarantee you that if they succeed in implementing the wet dreams set out in Project 2025, you won’t see so many women — even right wing women — in positions of authority.
Once they start enforcing the Comstock Act, they’re going to go after the 19th Amendment.
As a feminist old enough to remember that the inclusion of women in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 coupled with second wave feminism gave me choices that my mother didn’t have, nothing makes me much madder than women who sell out other women for their personal gain.
These women got to get an education and a political career because of the efforts of people like me going back to the suffrage movement, and they’re using those things to harm people like me.
As I frequently point out, my law school class was ten percent women, and that was the largest number of women the University of Texas law school had ever admitted at the time.
These days women are about half the students in law school. Those women owe a lot of gratitude to the women who fought to be included and spent so much time struggling against a male-centric profession.
Instead, far too many of them are doing the same thing that white men have always done: pretending they got there on merit alone.
News Flash: No matter how smart and competent you are, you don’t get there on merit when the system is stacked against people like you.
Now I was raised by an angry feminist mother and a father influenced by his strong matriarchal grandmother. I had no brothers and my father sometimes wished he’d gone to law school. It was pretty much a foregone conclusion that I’d go to law school.
I often feel that the combination of a law degree and a black belt gave me a sense of power in the world that I wouldn’t have had without those things. (Maybe money would have helped, too, but since I didn’t come from money and have never been great at making a lot of it, I wouldn’t know.)
I would have gone to law school even without second wave feminism. Maybe I would even have taken up martial arts without it, given that I trained primarily in predominantly male dojo.
I might have been able to take care of myself on my own, but I would have spent my life constantly struggling for my place in the world instead of being at least marginally accepted. And without feminism the world wouldn’t have changed to one in which women have a place and some power.
I would have been an anomaly, an odd spinster, an object of fun. And women who didn’t push their way into male areas because their interests were different would be even more marginalized.
I probably would have been as angry as my mother but for feminism.
I still get angry, of course, and a lot of my anger is directed at those women I mentioned earlier, the ones who got all the benefits of feminism and proceeded to sell it out.
Those Republican women wouldn’t have gone to law school if the feminists before them hadn’t forced the doors open. They wouldn’t have found a home in politics if people like Shirley Chisholm and Ann Richards hadn’t pushed their way in.
They get to be exceptions because they’re willing to sell out the people that made their lives possible.
Time to throw them out of office while making sure the fascist felonious grifter and his running mate who doubles down on lies when exposed are thoroughly defeated.
This made me look up the origin of a phrase my mother used to use to describe people like these; “I’m okay, Jack, pull up the rope” (or ladder). In my head it’s the caption to a New Yorker cartoon where a guy is being pulled back on board a ship, ignoring all the other people who are still in the water behind him. But I may have imagined the cartoon.
Per Wikipedia, which knows all, “The phrase is believed to have originated among Royal Navy sailors; when a ladder was slung over the side of a ship, the last sailor to climb on board would say, “I’m all right Jack; pull up the ladder.” The latter half of the phrase, typically used as “pulling up the ladder behind oneself”, has been used to call out unfairness and hypocrisy on the part of those who are seen to have benefited from opportunities handed out to them, only to deny such opportunities to others.”
Maybe it comes from zero-sum thinking: I’ve got what I wanted–position, power, money, etc.–someone else getting what they want might take some of mine and we can’t have that. But I’m very familiar with the sort of woman who talks sisterhood until she gets what she wants, then sells out those behind her. It’s as if these women bought the trope about women sabotaging other women.
I’m not only a woman, I’m the mother of women. And the Governor of Arkansas and the vile Governor of South Dakota, and all the others you mention, make me madder than a wet hen. If you, having gotten what you wanted, make it harder for my daughters and all the other women and girls in this country to get what they need… well, I will put my shoulder to the task and throw you on the trash heap of history and walk away whistling
That’s a good metaphor for those women. I’d also suggest that they see themselves as “exceptions.” They think the men will always let them in the door because they’re “special.” And they don’t care about anybody else.
Glad to help you put them in the trash heap of history.
We have the same problem here. It’s been a bugbear of mine for decades. It used to be as clear as the women you discuss in your post who was talking advantage and hurting others, but now, it’s only sometimes clear. We’ve brushed aside most of the people who used to educate women about power and remind everyone of ethics and compassion, and so more callous behaviour is increasingly common. We used to mock Bronwyn Bishop for being the kind of woman who loved power above community, but now I’m not even certain most new kids in power understand that it’s possible to keep both on even keel.