The Woman Card -- How Feminism and Antifeminism Created Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump

[ancianita]

All of America's women should revisit this important political history our lifetimes.

Trump says, of Clinton, “The only card she has is the woman card.” ... The ... starkness of the contrast between the candidates obscures the historical realignment hinted at in their own biographies: she used to be a Republican and he used to be a Democrat.

This election isn’t a battle between the sexes. But it is a battle between the parties, each hoping to win the votes of women without losing the votes of men. It’s also marked by the sweeping changes to American politics caused by women’s entry into public life. Long before women could vote, they carried into the parties a political style they had perfected first as abolitionists and then as prohibitionists: the moral crusade. No election has been the same since.

The Republican Party that is expected to nominate Trump was built by housewives and transformed by their political style, which men then made their own...

Republican women established Kitchen Cabinets, appointing a female equivalent to every member of Eisenhower’s cabinet; their job was to share “political recipes on G.O.P. accomplishments with the housewives of the nation,” by sending monthly bulletins on “What’s Cooking in Washington.” One member of the Kitchen Cabinet was Phyllis Schlafly...

In the summer of 1968, Trump graduated from Wharton, where ... he spent most of his time reading the listings of foreclosures...Rodham, a twenty-year-old Capitol Hill intern, attended the Republican National Convention in Miami as a supporter of the antiwar candidate, Nelson Rockefeller. For the first time since 1940, the G.O.P. dropped from its platform its endorsement of equal rights. Rodham went home...drove downtown to watch the riots outside the Democratic National Convention. One month too young to vote, she’d supported the antiwar Democrat, Eugene McCarthy...

In 1980, Republican feminists knew they’d lost when Reagan won the nomination; even so moderate a Republican as George Romney called supporters of the E.R.A. “moral perverts,” and the platform committee urged a constitutional ban on abortion. Tanya Melich, a Republican feminist, began talking about a “Republican War against Women,” a charge Democrats happily made their own. Mary Crisp, a longtime R.N.C. co-chair, was forced out, and declared of the party of Lincoln and of Anthony, “We are reversing our position and are about to bury the rights of over a hundred million American women under a heap of platitudes.”

Buried they remain.

It's been a thrill to have my consciousness raised about a time I've lived through, and so cogently, beautifully retold here by Jill Lapore. I'm more committed than ever to validating and culminating these women's long suffering efforts with President Hillary Rodham Clinton.





http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/27/hillary-clinton-and-the-history-of-women-in-american-politics