More Than A Magazine, A Movement
“For many years, I worked as a psychologist treating abusive men. Most of the men I treated had a patriarchal belief system and thought they were entitled to certain privileges because they were men. I especially worried about patriarchal men with narcissism and antisocial behavior, since they became aggressive quickly.
“President Trump reminds me of them.”
This fall, all eyes will be on the Senate.
“Women’s equality will be spelled out in the Constitution. And we will spell it E-R-A.”
This is the final installment in a six-part series examining the half-century fight to add women to the U.S. Constitution—and a game plan on where we go from here.
Part 6: Highlights of This Year in the Fight for the ERA
It is important to celebrate the gains in women’s representation in candidate pools and among nominees. But these data reveal that women remain underrepresented at each stage of the electoral process and across parties.
American women are currently still deprived of Constitutionally protected “equality of rights under the law”—and as recent poll has shown, voters of both genders are taking note of this absence.
Last November—when four female senators were still in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination—83 percent of Democratic voters said that they were “enthusiastic” about voting for a female candidate. However, only 33 percent of voters in either party said that they thought their neighbor would vote for a female candidate.
In early April, Wisconsin Republicans attempted to close abortion clinics in the interest of public safety and health—yet, days later, allowed in-person voting centers (with long lines of people not even five feet away from each other) to remain open. Seven people caught the coronavirus.
“This predates [COVID-19]. We know that for the last several years, we have seen legislature after legislature controlled by Republicans simply make voting harder. And they don’t make voting harder for everybody. They make voting harder for minority voters and young voters.”
“What I want to know is: Where are the women?” asked Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) before walking out on an all-male opening panel in a 2012 congressional hearing on contraception coverage in Obamacare. Fast forward to 2020—and Maloney’s question still resonates. President Trump announced his “Opening Our Country Council” last week—with 220 men and a paltry 20 women.
The path for Wisconsin voters was fraught by voter suppression, conservative organizations essentially lobbying the Wisconsin Supreme Court by letter (rather than the typical filing of briefs), and the failure of the United States Supreme Court to uphold civil liberties in a time of health crisis.
The coronavirus crisis is being used in order to further limit reproductive rights and bodily sovereignty in the United States. Reading Atwood’s novel through the lens of the novel coronavirus makes it feel like there’s no real novelty here.
