"White Women Who Enable Trump Do Not Deserve The Benefit Of Your Doubt"

[LisaM]

11. This is sexist.

Lost in all this is the fact that many white women are part of a larger pattern of emotional "abuse", if you want to call it that. I'm using it for lack of a better term. It has a lifelong effect on their behavior and their worldview.

In the small town I'm from, many women grew up in families that attended very strict and right-wing churches that were essentially small patriarchies. Others were raised on farms, or were in families where the fathers worked at GM or a car company, maybe on a late shift, and the values were very traditional. Some of the men were mean. One of my friends suffered physical abuse from her husband, and her minister advised her to stay in the marriage (she didn't, but she always held it against that church that the minister gave her that advice and it really soured her and pushed her into another unhappy marriage).

Women were pretty much, in both cases, pegged into traditional roles and, in the case of the churches, actively discriminated against. I grew up with girls who had to wear full length dresses just to go swimming, and I knew a girl who went to a small religious college where the coeds were actually made to do household chores for the boys in the same college (including their laundry).

It's very easy to pick on a group and say that they should know better. The reality is far, far more complicated.