Throughout the ages it’s been true. Now, here we go again. Sexism and misogyny 3.0. With the second reign of Donald Trump women will continue to be ignored, excluded, trivialized, objectified, assaulted, shamed, and afraid.
In the truly old days women became chattel when nomadic societies ceased to be mobile and agrarian. Before yielding to land ownership, life meant that everyone in the family and community had respectable tasks. Men hunted, women planted, and no one was treated as a lesser being. When land was claimed and “owned,” everything changed. Men became warriors who fought each other for everything that was on the property, including livestock, tools, furnishings, and women, along with children, who were regarded as a husband’s personal property.
Fast forward to modern times and notice how women are still treated as chattel. Here’s a true example, shared by Catherine Allgor, Ph.D. at the National Museum of Women’s Art in 2012. A woman applies for a mortgage to buy a house. She is older than her husband, is senior to him in their careers and earns more money. She has bought houses before, her spouse has not. Still, in the transaction, she is listed as “wife,” and as such she is subjected to the legal practice of coverture, a term that still exists since colonial times.
Based on English law, coverture meant that no female had a legal identity. A child was covered by her father’s identity, and a wife’s identity relied on her husband’s, which is why till relatively recently wives assumed her husband’s surname. Before that, wives were considered to be “feme covert,” a covered woman who did not exist legally. (Sound familiar?) Originally that meant that females couldn’t own anything, had no rights to their inheritances, or their children. They couldn’t work, enter a contract, or have bodily autonomy because husbands had the legal right to rape.
Coverture, Allgor explains, is why white women weren’t allowed to vote until 1920. They couldn’t serve on juries until the 1960s, and marital rape wasn’t a crime until the 1980s. In my personal experience during that decade, I was denied in-state tuition when I earned my master’s degree, because although I met every requirement for it, including being co-owner of a house, the college argued that I wasn’t legally a resident of Maryland because I didn’t earn half of our family income. It took me seven years to win the case against them.
Women are still infantilized and treated as children. It occurs in the workplace, the marketplace, the academy, religious institutions, and in homes when others, often men in domestic settings, treat women as errant children. Infantilizing women is linked to objectification because it sets up an unequal power and control situation. Women in various settings threaten the androcentric paradigm that has us locked into various, unrelenting forms of patriarchy. Examples include using demeaning nicknames, suggesting that women don’t understand a topic, using physical gestures like a hug that they wouldn’t use to greet women vs. men All of these gestures and words are meant to convey to women that men have superiority over the person who is subjected to these differentiations.
In 2018 the Harvard Business Review published an article written by four female researchers that revealed that words used in the business sector choose different ways to describe women vs. men in significant ways. Their research found that even young females are often described as “bossy” while that term is not applied to boys. In adulthood being called “ambitious” is an insult for women but not for men. … “The problem is that the words used to evaluate women differ from those used to evaluate men which reinforces gender stereotyping,” say the authors. “Similarly, people are more likely to use [words] like “superb,” “outstanding,” “remarkable,” and “exceptional” to describe male job applicants. In recommending female applicants, people used fewer superlatives but less specificity.” Then fact is: Words matter.
The incoming president and his pals play all these cards in spades. Name calling, put downs, sexual transgressions and more will not suddenly quiet down or disappear. The likelihood is they will be exacerbated by an overblown sense of superiority and adoration by Donald Trump’s second win. Every bit of misogyny and sexism women have had to endure in the past will be more pronounced and dangerous by this administration and its rightwing collaborators.
Consider the fact that women have been robbed of bodily autonomy, lifesaving reproductive healthcare, and policies that are geared to breeding rather than being. Already women are dying from preventable crises during pregnancy and miscarriage. That is nothing short of state sponsored femicide. Women, like words, matter, but not in the incoming administration.
An article in The Brooklyn Rail published in 2017, shortly after the last election Donald Trump won, captures the shocking reality that links the political situation ahead of us to the chillingly relevant book The Handmaid’s Tale, which suggests “parallels between a fictional totalitarianism, and the policies and ideological proclivities of Donald Trump’s administration. In many ways, these comparisons make sense: the world of The Handmaid’s Tale contains the brutal objectification of women, widespread loss of civil rights, the manipulation of facts to control the political narrative, and an authoritarian state that fetishizes a return to religious or traditional values.”
Is it any wonder that the red cape symbolizes what women have feared since Roe v. Wade was overturned? Will history prove to be prologue?
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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.