I’ve been eating up the Democratic National Convention broadcast like popcorn. It’s true. Political content (and news about the news!) has eclipsed my usual music and book consumption over the past couple of weeks. Last night, as we watched the last minutes of Obama’s speech, I marveled at the fact that I was listening to so many speakers. The convention wasn’t unlike a music festival in many ways, only the content was inverted: Headliners walked out to clips of songs1; during roll call, a DJ cued up specific songs to announce each state, and the few songs that were performed live have served more as punctuation.
And like any music festival, I’ve tended to be more interested in hearing certain acts than others. At the DNC, those acts have mostly been the supporting acts rather than the headliners (with all respect to Joe Biden and Barack Obama). And in most cases, those supporting speakers have been women. And the women — notably Jasmine Crockett, Hadley Duvall, Hillary Clinton and Michele Obama — have delivered.
So much is at stake in this election — climate, justice, education, taxes and more — but front and center in my heart and mind are what’s at stake regarding reproductive freedom, and ultimately, women’s rights. No doubt, this is why I feel so galvanized by both the moment and Kamala Harris’s historic, and so timely, candidacy.
When I was trying to convey how important it was to vote to one of my nieces lately, I reminded her of how fortunate we were to have grown up with both reproductive and financial choices. How oral contraceptives weren’t widely available until well into her grandmother, my mom’s adulthood. How that generation was pretty much trapped if they were in an abusive marriage until 1969, how they didn’t get access to abortion until 1973, and couldn’t even get their own credit card until 1974. It’s been easy (especially as a white, middle class Californians) thus far, to forget that these seemingly basic freedoms are hard-won privileges. So when Hillary Clinton (who walked out to ‘Brave’ by Sara Bareilles) and Michele Obama (who walked out to Stevie Wonder’s ‘Sir Duke’) invoked their own mothers — the times they lived in and the efforts they made for their own daughters — in their speeches, I got chills.
“You know, my mother Dorothy was born right here in Chicago before women had the right to vote. That changed 104 years ago yesterday. Think about it: Tennessee became the final state to ratify the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. The state legislature was deadlocked until one lawmaker’s mother, a widow who read three newspapers a day, sent a letter—a letter to her son. “No more delays,” she wrote. “Give us the vote.” And since that day, every generation has carried the torch forward.”2 — Hilary Clinton
Hilary’s speech acknowledged the influence of not only her own mother, but the long line of women whose groundbreaking efforts have led us to this moment — Shirley Chisholm and Geraldine Ferraro3 — and she quoted lines from several songs in the Broadway musical Suffs4 , about the suffragettes who fought for the right to vote, in her speech. All of those women broke ground and helped build the stairs for women like Clinton and AOC and now Harris to work on busting through the remaining ceilings that keep women and minorities marginalized in both obvious and insidious ways.
How easy it would have been for Clinton to throw up her hands in 2016 and retire to some tropical island. Instead, here she was, encouraging us to keep going:
“Together, we’ve put a lot of cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling. And tonight, tonight’s so close to breaking through once and for all.
I want to tell you what I see through all those cracks and why it matters for each and every one of us. What do I see? I see freedom. I see the freedom to make our own decisions about our health, our lives, our loves, our families.”
How many women have beat, are still beating, against that glass with anger, frustration and fury?
Again I thought of my mom’s anger (one of the abiding memories of my mom is seeing her vacuum so vigorously that she put dents in the furniture!) which I didn’t fully understand until I began to recognize it, at times, in myself…and her determination. In the years after the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was enacted she got her own credit, she found a job outside the house, and, soon after, she left. That left me wanting for the kind of moms Clinton and Obama described, but it’s easy now to understand the choices she made once she actually had choices.
I so understand why so many women are talking about mothers and mothering on the DNC stage. Mothers and mothering were central to Michelle Obama’s speech and she drew the line connecting the lives of all of our mothers and now that much more clearly:
The last time I was here in my hometown was to memorialize my mother, the woman who showed me the meaning of hard work and humility and decency. The woman who set my moral compass high and showed me the power of my own voice. Folks, I still feel her loss so profoundly. I wasn’t even sure if I’d be steady enough to stand before you tonight, but my heart compelled me to be here because of the sense of duty that I feel to honor her memory and to remind us all not to squander the sacrifices our elders made to give us a better future….
My girl, Kamala Harris, is more than ready for this moment. She is one of the most qualified people ever to seek the office of the presidency. And she is one of the most dignified—a tribute to her mother, to my mother, and to your mother too. The embodiment of the stories we tell ourselves about this country. Her story is your story. It’s my story. It’s the story of the vast majority of Americans trying to build a better life.” — Michelle Obama5
Am I fired up and determined, slightly furious and inspired anew? You know it. I even bought a T-shirt (which conveniently arrived in the mail on Monday).