Are people people? Or, are there two kinds of people? Men, then women?
Are there women who can’t see that their person, or personhood, is under siege in the 2012 presidential campaign? Any doubt of this was erased by Governor Romney’s choice of Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate. The GOP is gambling that women haven’t all caught on to what’s at stake for them, which is nothing short of their total autonomy and full equality as people.
Is their self-worth not yet complete and universal enough to make their majority in the voter population the sole guarantor of their rights as Americans? Will they find the unity to face down the male dominance of politics and economics, claim full and sole autonomy in their own affairs, and put our history on brand-new path of full equality? Or, will too many remain caught up, by their men, in the evangelical pretensions that men are preordained to rule, at home and in public, because God is a man? The Man. Don’t they know where all the deadly wars come from?
When candidate Paul Ryan calls Americans to “hard choices,” isn’t that the hard choice he wants from women: to go on accepting the lesser rights that allow men a say — the rights that for most of human history protected their “delicate nature,” as Victorians would say, by keeping them barefoot and pregnant.
So what does Paul Ryan know personally about hard choices? John Nichols has observed in The Nation, “Ryan is a class warrior, and nothing if not the champion of his class. A son of privilege, Ryan was raised in the warm embrace of wealth, and his family’s political connections earned him a ticket to Washington straight out of college.” By 28 he had been elected to the House seat he holds, and 14 years of seniority have made him chairman of the Budget Committee.
Nichols sees him as “a perfect metaphor for the circumstances that would prevail in a Romney-Ryan America.” With the personal wealth built in his House tenure — some $7.8 million — he chose in the middle of the recession to purchase the most desirable mansion in blue-collar Janesville, atop the hill that was once the home of the CEO of Parker Pen, whose plant and jobs are long gone.
As Budget Committee chair, he grabbed the national stage with a budget plan that he calls “Roadmap to America’s Future” that has been largely responsible for putting him on the GOP ticket. Romney has made it a centerpiece of the campaign. Advertised as the “hard choices” that would rein in federal deficits and the soaring national debt, it actually would do neither. It would shred the recession-strained safety nets, do nothing to arrest the spreading unemployment and poverty, yet would further lower taxes paid by the wealthy, and put the cost of hard choices mainly on the backs of the faltering middle class. The arithmetic would add trillions more to the national debt over the next decade. It’s a prescription for more lost jobs.
The Nation and Nichols have summed up Ryan and his mantra as the coupling of “crony capitalism, social conservative absolutism and cold-war militarism that defines elite modern conservatism.” They find him “dramatically more committed than Reagan ever was to the supply-side lie, to authoritarian assaults on civil liberties and a woman’s right to choose, and to an embrace of militarism over diplomacy.”
They further note that Ryan “would impose outrageous sacrifices on food stamp recipients and students seeking Pell Grants, while preserving an obscenely bloated Pentagon and eliminating even more taxes for billionaires. Ryan’s never been about ‘fiscal responsibility’ [but about] old-school redistribution of wealth . . . upward.” Food stamps largely support women and children. Pell Grants flow most heavily to women, who have found them vital to their upward mobility.
He counts on the election to be over before it shows that his plan is so brash that it masks the ignorance that drives it. And, to keep women in their place: your eggs belong to God, not to you; should one get fertilized, your personhood is then on hold for the sake of the embryo, regardless of your circumstances or your mental or physical health.
Women have counted too long and foolishly on men to allow them equality and equal protection under law. Could this be the election where they finally step forth and claim it for themselves? Why do they allow rights to be shaded differently for them than for men? Rights are truly rights only if they are as blind to gender as they are to color and faith. Men didn’t help them win the right to vote; that was a grinding 50-year ordeal.
What may be different now finds the men waiting and watching, not dragging their feet as they did with the right to vote. Women are no longer likely to vote as their husbands tell them to, as they were before World War II brought them so necessarily and dramatically into the general workforce outside the home and sprang them into fuller and irreversible independence. If their church stands in their way, they are free to stop supporting it, or go a new way.
Despite the increasingly intense push by evangelicals and rabid antifeminists to reverse Roe v. Wade and to keep women enslaved to their eggs, women have never had a plainer opportunity than in this election, and its renewed politicization of their persons, to assert their autonomy, to lock it in, and to leave no doubt that the Bill of Rights belongs as surely to them as to men.
It’s such a simple choice: a vote for still greater upward mobility, or another bow to the male ego and Ryan’s conspicuous chauvinism. Women should remember in the voting booth that they now are earning three out of every five college degrees, and closing in on equal pay. The meek recovery from the recession is putting them into jobs faster than men. Their majority in the voter population will ensure that these trends continue, if they unite.
In the process they must distance themselves from the men who are making football and NASCAR racing the national religions. Forget the cheap thrills. These exalted pursuits leave America with a dead hand in global economic competition.
If women unite, the America they build could do new and bigger things for the world. They could start by blunting the male appetite for wars, and scaling back the insane paranoia of the never-ending arms race and “the obscenely bloated Pentagon.” The mothers could demand that the savings be spent on the quality schools that would put us back in the global competition in math and science, and then push the homework that would make that investment work.
Frank Mensel — September 2012