I called my mother just before 11 o’clock Election night. I didn’t know the final outcome of the presidential election. But I saw the close races in Michigan and North Carolina and knew things were bad for Democrats and feminists. My mother, Beatrice Braun, is both. She’s 88. She served in the original lawyers’ network that became the NOW Legal Defense Fund. The state law legalizing abortion in New York was written in my parents’ living room – three years before Roe v. Wade. We only spoke briefly because she found it all just too upsetting.
My mother simply couldn’t believe Americans would elect a candidate with Trump’s record toward women. African American women and other nonwhites voted lopsidedly for Hilary Clinton. But a majority of white women did not. And in Vermont, Former Governor Madeleine Kunin was unable to pass the baton to a woman successor.
As a Gender Studies scholar, I know that women are not a unified bloc. Women’s issues are a diverse list, not a simple catechism. Feminism itself is a two-hundred-year-old debate.
And sexism is complicated: it’s not a matter of chromosomes or even attitudes: When we speak of “bias,” or “misogyny,” meaning hatred of women, we miss the point. Sexism resides in power. Different women suffer more or less from a sexist system. Some may even seem to benefit: when powerful men judge women by their looks, those considered beautiful may be flattered. If you’ve never been harassed, you might doubt we need tougher laws to protect people who have been.
Sexism is deeply embedded in the social structures that shape media and beliefs, so it’s very hard to free ourselves from sexism – especially the kind that sets the bar higher for women and makes us uncomfortable when women are openly and aggressively ambitious – politically or otherwise.
A recent study found sexist patterns in college students’ course evaluations: for every single academic field studied, students used the words “brilliant” and “very smart” to describe male professors more often than female ones.
So you can take it from this feminist gender studies professor that sexism did indeed play a role in Election 2016.
After all, I may not be considered “brilliant.” But I am my mother’s daughter.
