The ladies of New Orleans before Gen. Butler’s Proclamation; After Gen. Butler’s Proclamation. Illus. in: Harper’s Weekly, 1862 July 12, p. 448. Library of Congress.
Early yesterday evening as I was watching the election coverage, I saw it on the screen: the solid South, the mass of red states in the Southeast that told me too clearly who our next president is going to be.
The South has never relinquished its hold on national politics due to generations of electoral maneuvering, begun in slavery times when the states that would become the confederacy were allowed to claim 2/3 of a vote for each of their slaves, who were—of course—disenfranchised.
Now a deadly combination of nostalgia for “the good old days” before this nation had been forced to consider its many injustices, not only slavery but the death and destruction brought to Native Americans by Manifest Destiny, and that nameless fear of the Other, defined simply as people who don’t look like me and so have no right to be here, has propelled us into another reign of tyranny.
We have become more like those Central and South American countries periodically ruled by tyrants, the “mano dura” that some of their inhabitants have come to believe will solve the intricacies of modern life—that love of the strong man (or the apparent strong man) that caused U.S. tourists in Italy shortly before World War Two to esteem Mussolini because now the trains ran on time.
In fact, the one essential attribute of the male leader we elect is not strength but a certain member, the size of which our incoming president constantly celebrates.
Before this last election, we women did not fight enough, with exceptions, displaying a passivity that reminds me of notions about female nature that came to the fore in the South before, during and after the Civil War. The doctrine of the Lady proscribed any public role; it was seen most clearly in General Butler’s order, after the Union occupation of New Orleans, that “ladies” who went on insulting and spitting on Union soldiers would be treated as “women of the street,” that is prostitutes pursuing their trade. The South was outraged, calling the Union general “Beast Butler,” but the order worked: no “lady” could bear the suggestion that she was not one and so the spitting and insulting stopped. We are still being called “lovely” and “sweet” and few are willing to sacrifice that epithet through direct action.
Many crucial matters of national importance hinged on this election. One of importance to many women was the question of choice, long since distorted into pro-abortion, although I’ve never met a woman who is pro-abortion. The crucial issue here is our bodily autonomy which depends on our freedom to choose. Because this has become a state issue, and because the Democratic party was less than forceful in its support of choice, and because we women who want to be seen, or to see ourselves, as “ladies” abjure confrontation, this issue was not important enough to bring us out into the street and perhaps to influence the outcome of the election.
So I return with gratitude to my home state, New Mexico, which—because of two decades of hard work—is now reliably blue. We re-elected our three Democratic Representatives in Washington and our two Democratic Senators. Since we don’t count on the national political scene with only five members of Congress and only a little more than two million in population, half Spanish-speaking, spread across our enormous desert and mountain lands, we are spared the attention of both national political parties except for a farcical visit by one who still owes the state almost half a million dollars from his visit four years ago. Among other things, Mr. Trump doesn’t pay his debts.
That’s not an issue for his supporters. As General Robert E. Lee complained when he reluctantly took charge of the Confederate Army in 1862, many of his soldiers really didn’t want to take responsibility, work or obey orders. That was the role of their slaves. Not paying one’s debts might be considered an aspect of Southern gentility, for, after all, who can be bothered?
Now the sheer weight of the mass of Southern states, and of the border states like Kentucky which President Lincoln managed to keep neutral, nobody in that region has to try too hard to control the national election.
And we ladies certainly don’t want to sweat.
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