Flowers: Women should be celebrated on merit, not their gender
I HAVE BEEN TOLD by otherwise intelligent, alert, accomplished women that I must vote for Hillary Clinton. Some have said it's because failing to cast my vote for Bill's charming better half will be a de facto "plus one" for Team Trump. While I doubt that is the case, and polls seem to bear me out, it's a fairly respectable argument: Hillary minus me minus many other women equals Donald.
I HAVE BEEN TOLD by otherwise intelligent, alert, accomplished women that I must vote for Hillary Clinton. Some have said it's because failing to cast my vote for Bill's charming better half will be a de facto "plus one" for Team Trump. While I doubt that is the case, and polls seem to bear me out, it's a fairly respectable argument: Hillary minus me minus many other women equals Donald.
But there are also the sisters who tell me I must vote for Hillary because she is a woman, and I am a woman, and It Is Time. They often say this with a strange gleam in their eyes, which makes me feel as if I am about to be sucked up into the skies as a part of some feminist rapture. They are the true believers, zealots who look upon Hillary as the prophet foretold in the Old Testament, otherwise known as Ms. Magazine, which we still consult for its ancient wisdom about egalitarian pronouns and the best way to wear aviator glasses (if you can still find them).
Three and a half decades ago, when I graduated from Bryn Mawr College, Ronald Reagan was in office. This suited me just fine, but, of course, you can imagine that at a place where female students sucked feminist milk from the teat of Athena, there was that bright hope that one day a woman would kick that cranky, old actor's butt out of D.C. Still waiting. Tick, tock.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the revolution. Some women started realizing that didn't need symbolism to achieve fulfillment. Yes, it was lovely when Sandra Day O'Connor made her way onto the U.S. Supreme Court, but she didn't help me pass the bar any faster. Yes, it was magnificent to watch Sally Ride ascend to the stars, but it didn't have the same transcendental impact as that One Step For Man. Yes, Madeleine Albright, she of the "special place in hell for women who don't help each other," became secretary of state and, before that, ambassador to the United Nations, but she botched the job six ways from Sunday, so that wasn't exactly one for the win column.
So, yes, we had our symbolic moments, and they were nice, but it didn't really do anything but give us a few more pictures to put on that Women's History Month calendar. While these tokens were being celebrated, other women were going out, getting jobs, running companies, marrying, refusing to marry, having children, refusing to have children, winning Oscars, commanding multimillion-dollar salaries, slipping into poverty, dying of AIDS, dying of breast cancer, winning Nobel Peace prizes, bringing home the bacon, frying it up in a pan, and spritzing on Enjoli to keep you feeling like a man.
In other words, the photo-ops with the "firsts" did very little to change the condition of the American woman, which has improved dramatically since our grandmothers and great-grandmothers were given the right to vote.
But some women out there just don't get it, and many of them belong to anachronistic groups such as Emily's List and the National Organization for Women. Not that these institutions support all women. If you oppose abortion rights, you might as well have a penis, as far as they are concerned. I think that's because women who are shallow enough to believe in the value of symbols have a stunning lack of cerebral suppleness: Their brains became ossified in 1973 when Roe v. Wade was decided, and they can't conceive (pun intended) of any woman who believes in the sanctity of unborn human life.
Still, a certain type of woman finds comfort in these organizations, which, far from promoting women's empowerment through education and equality of opportunity, teach them to complain about the patriarchy. That is a classic ploy, and it used to work rather nicely, but has lost a good bit of its effectiveness. The reason it's lost any significant sway with intelligent women is that so few of them are victims of that patriarchy any longer.
People such as my fellow Pennsylvanian Kathleen Kane, possibly the worst attorney general in the history of the commonwealth, have tried to raise that old shibboleth from its grave, but when your failure is attributable to your own absolute mediocrity, as opposed to the machinations of some wrinkled, old fellow in the capital, there won't be much of a resurrection.
And then we have another woman, again from our fair commonwealth, trying to wrest a Senate seat from Pat Toomey. Katie McGinty, or, as I like to call her, "Katie from the 'Hood," has attempted to position herself as some symbolic heroine for all young women in the Keystone State. Never before, the mythology goes, has a woman been elected to the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania. It Is Time (that pesky rapture again).
Except, most of us out here by the banks of the Schuylkill or the Allegheny or the Susquehanna are yawning. Sorry, Katie, but we saw the mess made by your sorority sister Kathy Kane, and we're not really interested in your plumbing. We want to know how qualified you are. And what you'll do to create jobs. And how you'll make up for that loss of seniority if we don't return a respected man (sorry, but men are people, too) such as Toomey to Washington.
Which brings me back to Hillary. Most of the women who are so eager to see her in office are my age or older. They think this is our last real chance to see ovaries in the Oval Office. Younger women don't really care. They grew up in an era when pretty much anything was possible. And they have time. They care about substance, not symbols. They might, in fact, vote for Hillary, who knows.
But Year of the Woman? That's so 1973.
Christine Flowers is a lawyer.
@flowerlady61