Conservative supporters of the president and Brett Kavanaugh aren’t betraying their gender — they’re sticking with what they believe
By Susan Chira | The New York Times
(Editor’s note:Opinion pieces are published for discussions purposes only.)
What are those women thinking?
The ones who cheered President Trump’s mockery of Christine Blasey Ford at a rally in Mississippi, tweeted #HimToo in support of their sons who might one day be, in their eyes, unfairly accused of assault?
On the left, they’re being reviled as gender traitors, depicted as betraying the sisterhood and acting against their own best interests. The Democrats’ hope for a blue wave rests on female voters coming out to register their displeasure with the president’s party. Women will be acting as a political force.
But women don’t automatically ally with other women, as Senator Susan Collins’s vote to confirm Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court demonstrated. Sisterhood doesn’t override partisanship or deeply held moral views. Victims of sexual harassment didn’t all believe Christine Blasey Ford. Women don’t act as one.
The question is why so many people are still surprised that they don’t, even after the election of 2016.
Political scientists have found that some of the very attacks that were supposed to alienate all women in 2016 — such as Mr. Trump’s jab that Hillary Clinton was playing the “woman card” — instead made a segment of women more enthusiastic about him, and more hostile to her. Some women, primarily the core loyalists of President Trump’s reshaped Republican Party, hold decidedly traditional views about women’s place, prerogatives and power.
And in 2018, some women appear receptive to Mr. Trump’s midterm strategy of attacking the #MeToo movement, even if it angers some college-educated and independent women who Republicans fear they may have lost anyway.
“Why is it that it’s hard for us to think of women as being sexist?” said Erin C. Cassese, a political scientist at the University of Delaware who assessed women’s attitudes by sifting through new data on the 2016 elections. “In the common usage, a sexist is a man who has disdain for women, who objectifies and demeans women.” But that’s too limited a definition, she explained: “Sexism is a broader set of attitudes about power and relationships between men and women.”
No one is saying that being a Republican woman means being a sexist. But for some conservative women, however they are labeled, political power rightly lies with men.
