
Photo from Sept. 21 Wilmington, NC rally by @AlejandraJMillo (CNN) on X/Twitter
I was shocked when I first saw their faces. How can any self-respecting woman support a known predator? There are many other reasons to dread Trump, but this is the factor that seems to me to be most important for women because so many of us have suffered sexual abuse, especially when we were too young to know how to resist.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the reasons why some women may vote for the felon, and it seems to me to be tied to our dependency on men—fathers, lovers, husbands. Although more women are economically independent now—we are still payed 84 cents for each dollar a man in a comparable position is paid—we are still often at the mercy of bosses who may fire us at any time for any reason. And emotionally we are often still tied to the men in our lives whom we love and who sometimes love us. If he is for Trump, it is an act of loyalty to join him regardless of the consequences. A fatal act of loyalty, it seems to me—but I can imagine the bitter arguments that would follow if a woman tried to take a stand for liberalism.
There have been many examples of our latent or expressed conservatism, operating on all levels as well as the political. During The Civil War, according to Drew Gilpin Faust’s Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War most women in the south supported the Confederacy in many ways. Some were employed in Confederate government bureaus, unthinkable earlier, among other tasks to sign the quickly devalued Confederate banknotes; especially fine signatures were sought for the larger denominations. Women reacted to Union soldiers invading their hometowns with open expressions of disdain. One woman in Georgia spat in the face of a Union soldier marching through her hometown in Georgia as part of General Sherman’s March to the Sea; the soldier didn’t touch her, but burned her house to the ground.
These women were the wives and, in many cases, later the widows of Confederate soldiers—or their mothers, sisters or daughters. Many had experienced slavery at close hand and knew, as Mary Chesnut a visitor from the north expressed in her Diary from Dixie, “The mulattos one sees in every family resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in every household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.” Impossible to be oblivious, but all too possible to remain silent.
Where does wifely, daughterly, sisterly loyalty stop? When the country is at stake?
Or will we ride the destructive force of contemporary conservatism until it invades our hometowns?
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