Tag Archives: Democrats

Why the November election is important for young women, part 2

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You’ve just changed jobs, and this one’s really demanding. You recently moved. Maybe you struggle just to get by financially: work, sleep, work, maybe socialize on weekends. A romantic breakup has you tied up emotionally. In any of these scenarios you feel too stressed out to give much thought to voting in November. And you certainly don’t want to cast an uninformed ballot.

But the November, 2014, elections are especially important to women. While we won’t be electing a President, we will elect women and men whose decisions impact our daily life.

Here are suggestions on how you can quickly find out which candidates best represent you:

1) Choose one or two issues that are most important to you: the environment, education, reproductive rights, income inequality, the national debt, immigration, racial justice, gay rights, taxes, health. There may be another issue that personally affects you.

2) Find out who’s running for office. You’ll need to know what district you’re in. votesmart.org is a helpful site, or Google your state’s name and “voting districts.”

Yes, there are a lot of positions to be filled, but don’t let yourself be overwhelmed. I suggest you pay particular attention to just five office holders: at the federal level, U.S. Senator and U.S. Representative from your district; in your state government, governor, your state senator, and your state representative. Your U.S. Senator has a six-year term so may not be running this year. Your governor might not be running either. In this case you only need to learn about candidates for three or four positions.

3) Now begin matching the issues you’re concerned about to the person. Again, votesmart.org is a helpful site, though it does seem to give the person currently holding the office more prominence. Also, it can be a little confusing in that it identifies individuals who already lost in primary elections.

4) Go to candidates’ websites. Check them out in social media, Facebook in particular.

5) Ask someone whose opinion you value who they’re voting for and why. Then go to the candidates’ websites to make sure their stance on issues agrees with yours.

Only a hundred years ago women fought hard for the right to vote. Some went to jail, many were publicly humiliated. (My grandmother was among the first generation of women to cast a ballot.) When they did finally get the right, many relied on their husband to tell them who to vote for.

As a woman today, you have more education and experience “out in the world.” You can decide for yourself who supports your values, what candidates will work to ensure the best future for you, your children, our country, and our world.

Don’t let a few individuals determine the future for you.

Reunions, politics, and a liberal arts education, OR how I came to respect Republican classmates

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I didn’t particularly want to attend the fifty-year reunion of my college class. I’d have to compete with truckers for an eight-by-fifteen foot space on Interstate 81. I would miss several mornings of doing the Chicago Tribune Sudoku while eating my bran cereal. Most distasteful of all, I’d have to spend thirty-six hours with Republicans.

I reasoned that those who live near an institution are more likely to attend events such as a reunion. Since Bridgewater College is located in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, far from liberal urban centers of the state, the majority of those in attendance would probably be Republicans. Could I help maintain the peace by not talking about politics? Sometimes I can’t help myself.

At issue was my identity, the woman I’ve become in these intervening years, the things I care about. I care about the poor having food, heat in the winter, medical resources. I care about water safety, air safety, product safety, gun safety. I care about the rights of LGBTQ members of our society. These concerns, often labeled liberal values, are at the core of who I’ve become. I doubted I could suppress my political leanings for a whole weekend.

But I attended the event. I mostly held my tongue, asked people about their vocations, how many kids and grandkids they have, things like that. I listened for clues indicating openness to issues I consider important. Then I’d say something like, “I blog some, mostly political, sort of on the liberal side.” So it was that in small clusters we touched on topics of dissension but tread gently, respectfully.

The class of 1963 turned out to be a reasonable group.

I have a few clues as to why. We received a liberal arts education; that is, no matter our major, we were required to study science, math, literature, the social sciences, religion, and history. Many of us took electives in art and music. A paper in nearly every course and debates about issues in the various fields forced us to think critically. In his reunion profile statement one former student mentioned a philosophy teacher who “influenced my current and strong Socratic thinking.” We also learned to respect others’ opinions.

My classmates have traveled widely: Thailand, Japan, Peru, European countries. Perhaps that too explains the reasonable nature of our conversations: an openness that accompanies viewing the rich histories of other lands, witnessing firsthand how people of other cultures thrive and/or struggle.

I left the reunion trusting that members of the class of ’63—some conservative, some liberal in their views—have brought critical thinking skills they learned in college to the political process. Yes, we are reasonable people who have reached different conclusions.

But then we didn’t try to solve any of the country’s problems.

Politics and Clotheslines

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Late 19th century advertisement for laundry st...

Late 19th century advertisement for laundry starch manufactured by Gilbert S. Graves in Buffalo, New York, showing two women hanging laundry on a clothesline. 1 print : lithograph, color. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Line-drying your clothes seems to have become a political issue. I’ve concluded this because 1) The Huffington Post, a liberal website, reposted a blog with instructions for using a clothesline; 2) I, a liberal Democrat, hang my laundry outside; and 3) Were she alive, my mother, who was a Republican, would probably refuse to do the same.

So why is The Huffington Post promoting clotheslines? Maybe male liberals are more likely to share household responsibilities, and, being untrained in traditional women’s work, need guidance in maneuvering clothespins. Or, if liberal women are spoiled elitists, as some conservatives claim, a reliance on dryers may have stymied the hand-eye coordination essential for hanging up clothes. I tend to believe liberals take climate change seriously and work toward reducing carbon emissions.

Yet I’ll bet that most conservative women—many of them older, with line-drying experience—would, like me, laugh at the idea of someone needing instruction. For we girls used to have no choice but to learn women’s work. I, for one, resented Mom waking me up early every Saturday to do laundry. It didn’t occur to me that, having a job, she too would have preferred sleeping later.

Out in the garage stood our wringer washer alongside two rinse tubs. A woman could easily get a finger caught in the wringer as she transferred clothes from wash to rinse to second rinse. Three lines stretched across our back yard. A fabric clothespin holder was designed to slide along them. I learned from my mother, as she had learned from hers, to shake clothes out, hang shirts by their tails, ration clothes pins by using one to join two items. On cold days further north, I hear, clothes would be frozen when they were taken off the line.

For good reason Mom came to consider washers and dryers real progress. She never complained about the community she lived in not allowing residents to have clotheslines, a not uncommon rule these days. But how, being opposed to government regulations, could she tolerate such restrictions? Me, I demand the freedom to hang up my clothes.

I don’t fault my mother for having been a Republican. But if she were alive, I’d remind her of how washing machines and fabric have improved and urge her to line-dry her laundry. For the sake of the planet. Nevertheless, for reasons unrelated to politics, she‘d probably say, “Been there, done that.”