Put a woman in charge
“Women’s suffrage, is a long story of hard work and heartache…” the new Seneca Project election ad starts. A friend sent it to me yesterday and I got chills watching the parade of groundbreaking women it depicts.
It’s been thrilling, empowering and terrifying to cheer on, and support, how and where I can, Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign these past three months. Throughout, I’ve thought so much of the women in my family, the progress they made and where they got stuck as well as my own path. Neither of my parents went to a four-year-college. My dad, a WWII vet, was content with his land-surveyor job. In his view, he’d made it. We may have straddled the working/middle class line, but we lived in a particularly beautiful rural area, our house was paid off, and we were white. Huge advantages I see now.
My mom didn’t necessarily see it that way. The daughter of Croatian immigrants who was born in a house in San Francisco’s Mission District, she was a city-girl living in the country. She was often described as exotic and she was frequently asked that loaded question “Where are you from?” or received unsolicited comments about her olive skin.
A lot of my memory of her from my youth is of mom’s anger, frustration, and constant figuring out how to budget for groceries for her family of six on my dad’s salary. Even in rural Santa Cruz County, she lived at a busy intersection of classism, sexism, and immigrant oppression (she was also Catholic, a whole other layer).
My dad was mild-mannered but locked into his own white male privilege and internalized sexism. He was mystified by my mother’s unhappiness. He just did not get it.
After women were granted the right to get a credit card in the mid-1970s, after no-fault divorce was legalized, after her youngest children were in their teens, she left. I was both glad for her and devastated (as was my dad). It took me a while to fully understand her decision, but now I have such compassion.
So I have such hope when Harris says “while I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last,” and dread at understanding how challenging the fact of her candidacy (and competency! and confidence!) is to those who are mired in the patriarchal status quo.
Liberation, personal and global, is a big complicated process on every level, and this election has made it clearer than ever how far we’ve come …and how far we have to go. Which is why, I tell myself anyhow, we have to have courage, we have to keep talking and listening and showing up as fully as we can, at the polls, and to and for one another.
On Tuesday, I walked down to the farmer’s market, a bright, blue ‘Kamala’ pin affixed to my vest, passing by both yards with “Cats for Kamala” signs and one fence with a T&%p sign. I’ve played benefit shows and get-out-the-vote mobilizations and written postcards and texted friends and family and voted early, and have signed up to Play for the Vote. Is it, will it, be enough? I don’t know.
At the market, more than one person glanced at my pin… and didn’t say anything. But as I was paying for my bunches of kale and head of cauliflower, I noticed the Latina saleswoman was wearing an unflashy Harris/Walz hat and I nodded. Then I stopped for a coffee and the barista asked me about my pin. I explained how I was so excited to have voted. I inquired as to whether they’d voted yet. “I gotta get on that,” they said and I was able to explain the benefits of voting early, both for themselves and the count. Little actions, small ripples. Hope.
