It is quite a scene. The rapid flight of high-profile, celebrity women to Barack Obama has been so breathless that Maria Shriver showed up in riding clothes, having just leapt off a horse to join the lineup. As Obama basked in the soft glow of collective female embrace, the image was very familiarly, well, old. All the soft hands on deck to make sure a savior rises. Male, of course.
We’re free to vote for anyone, since 1920. We’ve won something. But why am I seeing a very faded, retro picture when I look at these adoring women?
Is this the election where change will trump revolution? Possibly. But what about revolution? Well, who’s a revolutionary in this field? Both Clinton and Obama hold very similar positions on major issues. Life stories? Both attest to the dead weight that femaleness or blackness imposes on any aspiring citizen, still, in 21st century America. Both have thrown off much of these limitations, at cost, but also as benefit. Both can truly speak from the other side.
Part of my calculus in choosing a candidate is to select that person who, beyond leading this country, can also serve as a beacon to those around the world whose lot in life is so degraded that a walk down the street is a life-threatening event.
As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
Virginia Woolf
I view the Presidency as offering a template for the empowerment of discarded groups. That’s why the prospect of emboldening women with a female President of the U.S. is such a strong imperative for my support of Hillary Clinton.
This is the Taliban:
1- Complete ban on women's work outside the home, which also applies to female teachers, engineers and most professionals. Only a few female doctors and nurses are allowed to work in some hospitals in Kabul.
2- Complete ban on women's activity outside the home unless accompanied by a mahram (close male relative such as a father, brother or husband).
3- Ban on women dealing with male shopkeepers.
4- Ban on women being treated by male doctors.
5- Ban on women studying at schools, universities or any other educational institution. (Taliban have converted girls' schools into religious seminaries.)
6- Requirement that women wear a long veil (Burqa), which covers them from head to toe.
7- Whipping, beating and verbal abuse of women not clothed in accordance with Taliban rules, or of women unaccompanied by a mahram.
http://www.rawa.org/...
Hillary Clinton went to China in 1995 for the Fourth World Conference on Women. From her speech there:
If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights, once and for all.
It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls or when women and girls are sold into slavery or prostitution for human greed.
It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small when thousands of women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.
http://query.nytimes.com/...
The nexus between women’s lives and a violent world:
As long as discrimination and inequities remain so commonplace around the world -- as long as girls and women are valued less, red less, fed last, overworked, underpaid, not schooled and subjected to violence in and out of their homes -- the potential of the human family to create a peaceful, prosperous world will not be realized.
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/...
From the reporting of her appearance in Beijing:
Speaking more forcefully on human rights than any American dignitary has on Chinese soil, Hillary Rodham Clinton catalogued a devastating litany of abuse that has afflicted women around the world today and criticized China for seeking to limit free and open discussion of women's issues here.
http://query.nytimes.com/...
Hillary was involved in the establishment of the Office on Violence Against Women in the Department of Justice under Janet Reno.
http://www.ovw.usdoj.gov/
The rise of the hyper-masculine "dis"orders such as al-Qaeda represent deliberate declarations of war against women, among others. Foreign policy is now engaged with containment and eradication of whole movements who rely on a core hatred of women to wage their peculiar brand of war against modernity and its most distasteful emblem – free women.
Installing one more male President at this moment in time eliminates the opportunity to have a President who has lived in the female half of the world - watching the procession of male potentates, some evil, some tolerable, some inspiring. And watching a world in which the very notion of free femaleness is not a guarantee, not here, and certainly not there.
So I contemplate a female President who has advocated for women’s rights as human rights actually taking over our government. I imagine that Presidency as a living declaration that women are reclaiming their more than half the sky. I do not doubt for one minute that a woman leading the U.S. has world-wide psychic significance that cannot be easily quantified. Maybe its faraway significance is not our main concern. But the lot of women here and there is still joined, as violence, disdain and neglect account for much of the female experience in the public world. And in the private world of the family, too. Maybe that’s the power of the word "imagine." What can one see when the screen is blank? How does one imagine a female future?
So bin Laden and his ilk mean something different to women. Everywhere. We are directly confronted with regimes that are bent on destroying any semblance of female life as we understand it.
So I want the image of the U.S. to be truly revolutionary – female.
Yes, women can vote for anyone (since 1920). Great, and here’s to democracy. But I wonder if many women standing by their man have fully considered the loss of possibility that I describe here. As Robin Morgan said:
I’m voting for Hillary not because she’s a woman—but because I am.
http://www.womensmediacenter.com/...
So yes, this is identity politics. But when female identity is at stake, I offer no apologies.