“The Infuriating History of White Women Voting Against Women’s Rights”
“As the exit polls plainly show, the majority of white women don’t consider themselves sisters with the non-white, class-separated, LGBTQ female voters; instead, many of these women identify more closely with white men. In an article in the Nation, Joan Walsh argues that Clinton’s loss can come down a multitude of reasons: that she didn’t paint herself as the “economic change agent” that white working-class women wanted, that she was too “dreamy” and not “punchy” enough, and that ultimately, many white women either hold racist views or tacitly support them.
Clinging to the idea of gender as a discrete, unifying factor actively erases other — often far more salient — social realities. “The truth is that there is a gender gap,” Seltzer writes in Sex as a Political Variable. “Women do differ from men in their views on the issues and in their voting behavior…[but] focusing narrowly on the gender gap and being obsessed with differences between women and men can obscure the deeper divisions within the US electorate that the gender gap reflects.””
These two paragraphs are the most useful part of this article.
They pushed me to this sudden realization about how conflicted white female feminists must be — they have the lure and comfort of their whiteness as a means of shoring up the privileges taken away by their femaleness. It’s a subconscious thing to cling to a lifeboat, to make sure that it remains inflated.
