Crying tears of triumph and rage
Remember who paved the way for Clinton’s run
The polls weren’t the only places where Americans stood in line on Tuesday. At Susan B. Anthony’s grave, and the graves of other suffragists, men, women and children paid their respects to the ghosts of the women who made it possible to vote for a female presidential candidate.
“I’m With Her” is an echo of 2008’s “Yes We Can,” and not just in its metre. It has layers of meaning: one “her,” in this case, standing in for all. It’s inspiring in its promise of collective hard work. And it’s sad in its acknowledgment of how much work there is to do.
The “her” is so starkly, depressingly singular. The slogan only works because there is only one woman it could be, only one woman who’s ever been nominated for president by a major party. “I’m With Him” would be meaningless; hims on ballots are a dime a dozen.
So the tears in women’s eyes, as they put their stickers on tombstones and set their jaws, are tears not only of joy and triumph, but also of sadness, of justified rage.
It didn’t have to take this long. The notion that women are full human beings, with minds and interests of their own, is not new. Women were not discovered, any more than America was. They were there all along, and shouting for their freedom all along, but they have been, and are, actively oppressed, excluded and silenced.
During the French Revolution, the abolitionist and feminist Olympe de Gouges wrote that “the only limit to the exercise of the natural rights of woman is the perpetual tyranny that man opposes to it.” She was deemed not the right sort of revolutionary and died in the guillotine during the Terror.
When Abigail Adams tested her revolutionary husband’s commitment to Enlightenment principles, she said she “found it wanting.” In the new American code of laws, she asked John, could he and his male colleagues please “remember the ladies?” He mocked and patronized her in response, as smugly as any Twitter troll. He called her “saucy” and assured her that women were already rulers over their husbands anyway, so they didn’t need to exercise any political power.
The gap between men and women in the polls throughout this election suggests that old notion — that the male citizen represents the interests of his household — is simply wrong. Universal suffrage, in practice, has exposed the lie that white men hold neutral opinions and can be counted on to act as proxies for everyone else on behalf of the universal good.
Indeed, the other main argument against suffrage was that women would vote differently from men.
“We often hear the remark nowadays that women will get the vote if they try hard enough and persistently,” The New York Times whined in 1912, “and it is true that they will get it, and will play havoc with it for themselves and for society, if the men are not firm and wise enough and, it may as well be said, masculine enough to prevent them.”
There is no reason to believe that Abigail Adams was kidding when she warned John the ladies would “foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”
Foment a rebellion they did. Although the road to suffrage was not as violent for American women as for their British counterparts, women marched in the streets. Sometimes they dressed all in white, a colour that female politicians including Hillary Clinton have adopted on historic occasions since.
Some women wore white to the polls on Tuesday.
A century ago, in 1916, the tide changed, and both major political parties endorsed suffrage for women. In 1920 — within the lifetimes of some voters now — the U.S. Constitution was finally amended to guarantee it.
Suffrage and access to political office for all do matter, and not only symbolically. Other factors divide the electorate — especially education — but it is significant that the reaction of Trump trolls to the gender gap in the polls was “repeal the 19th!” How far back do these Americans want to roll the clock to make America great again? Before that 19th Amendment of 1920, that guaranteed women the vote? Before the 15th in 1870, which banned restrictions on race and colour?
Donald Trump’s campaign has made it hard to cheer for progress. The first female candidate’s opponent is a man with overtly racist policies who has bragged about sexually assaulting women.
Every woman knows a creep like Trump. Many female voters pegged him as not only dangerous for America in general, but dangerous for women in particular. Even in Canada, women have been sick at heart to watch a man like that get this far.
So many voters went grudgingly to the polls, sighing, “Well, it’s fine to have a woman on the ballot, but did it have to be this one?”
No, it didn’t have to be this one. It could have been any of the bright, hardworking women whose fathers wouldn’t pay for their educations, whose husbands disapproved of them speaking their minds or spending time away from their children. It could have been any of the women who were disenfranchised and outright barred from public office.
But it wasn’t, because they couldn’t. And now, a long century after the suffragists marched, their work is not yet nearly done.