Women aren't united against Kavanaugh. That's a dangerous myth
Women aren’t a singular demographic. There are myriad differences between us – and ignoring that is harmful for our politics
After all was said and done in the Senate hearings for US supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, before the vote decided the fate of Roe v Wade and many other progressive agendas, my friends kept putting their faith in female senators. Yes, the Republicans control the Senate and this is Trump’s nominee, but they have six women serving as senators, and how could any woman not be moved by the testimony of Dr Christine Blasey Ford? How could the senators not feel a stronger solidarity with their gender than their party? Surely they will keep his appointment from happening.
My friends were not alone. In the lead-up to the vote, Vox.com was one of many outlets to breathlessly report on swing vote Maine Republican senator Susan Collins’s history of maverick behavior, calling her a “progressive icon”. “Collins cares deeply about women,” they reported a colleague saying. And when she inevitably chose to confirm Kavanaugh and vote in line with her Republican brethren, women expressed shock and disappointment. A New York Times op-ed called her a “gender traitor.” New York Magazine accused her of “betraying women”.
This vocal disappointment is a little surprising, as polls were saying all along that support for Kavanaugh was split among party – and not gender – lines. Even before the accusations surfaced, Democrats were positioning Kavanaugh as the “anti-woman” nominee because of his anti-choice record and association with Trump, despite him having the support of the majority of Republican women. The hearings about the sexual assault allegations did not cause a mass gender-based defection as most of the Republican women polled stayed steadfast in their support. Collins, and the other four Republican women senators who voted to confirm him, were probably doing what they thought the majority of their supporters – including their supporters – wanted them to do. And there’s no reason to think that might not be true.
In fact, the idea that women will somehow ultimately vote for what is best for women (as if there is a set of positions on specific issues that will improve the lives of all women) has proven false repeatedly, and yet the idea refuses to die. The rhetoric around Collins echoed the rhetoric around women voters after the revelation of Trump’s Access Hollywood video. Surely women could not vote for such a man. And yet he won 41% of women’s votes. Allegations of pederasty and predatory behavior with teenage girls did not prevent Roy Moore from receiving the majority of white women’s votes in the Alabama Senate election. And now #MeToo is actively being used in women’s campaign ads, with some candidates spending more time relaying their personal stories than their political positions, hoping that will capture votes.
Many women voters seem turned off by the idea of claiming victimhood through gender. One woman, explaining to New York Magazine why she voted for Trump even after the “grab them by the pussy” audio was released, said: “I like getting groped! ... When a guy gropes me, I get groping on them! I grope them back.” After Senator Al Franken was accused of harassment and was seemingly forced out of Congress by some of his women colleagues, female constituents were polled as supporting Franken in higher numbers than their male counterparts. The senator who led the charge against Franken, Democrat Kristen Gillibrand, has seen her approval ratings drop ever since.
We need to stop classifying political activity as 'bad for women, or 'good for women'
Believing, then, that women are a singular demographic, with shared experiences and shared interpretations of those experiences, shared values and priorities, and a shared vision for the world is becoming increasingly dangerous. Not all women were against Kavanaugh. That’s because not all women line up with the vision of how a certain segment of centrist-to-liberal women commentators want other women to be: progressive, idealistic, fair-minded. Not all women support abortion rights, or gay and trans rights, or believe that Black Lives Matter. A large number of Republican women want a pro-life, pro-Wall Street, pro-Christian white man on the supreme court. (Nor is this a problem merely with white women; women, like men, tend to vote in their personal interest, and what that is will vary due to a more complex array of factors than just gender or race. Class and marital status appear to matter just as much.)
We need to stop classifying political activity as “bad for women” or “good for women” and instead allow for the complexity of thought and belief in the conversation about policy and legislation. And we should stop trying to lump all women together when we mean a specific section of women, and stop speaking on behalf of women who clearly want nothing to do with us.
Gender is not an ideology, and it is arrogance to believe Republican women are simply deluded or brainwashed by men and incapable of thinking for themselves. And if we do want to persuade them to a less conservative position, calling them traitors or assuming we know what they are thinking, when we so clearly do not, will not help our cause. We live in increasingly partisan times, but that is not going to be overcome by blindly insisting all women belong on the same side.
Jessa Crispin is the author of Why I Am Not A Feminist
