A Woman's Place
Why do so many women vote against their own interests?
At 8:30 a.m. on Election Day, I stood in the drizzling rain outside an elementary school in Etowah, North Carolina, gently accosting voters as they exited the building.
“What brings you out today?” I asked the stream of people hustling to their cars.
One nurse was happy to chat. She had lost her home in Hurricane Helene and was busy searching for a new place to live, but still made time to vote. “As a woman, I’m really afraid of losing specific rights,” said Amelia Jones, 31. If more people lose access to abortion, she worried that “things will get desperate. We’ll see a lot of horrible things, healthcare-wise.” She planned to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Another voter had the opposite view. She was a mother of four, so determined to vote that she’d found childcare for her two youngest kids so she could make it to her polling place that morning. “I just don’t want a woman to be president,” she said.
This young mom was one of millions of white women who turned the tide for Trump. As I read the election results last Wednesday, her statement haunted me. A red wave had swept the country, across many regions and demographic groups. But early exit polls indicate that for the third time, a majority of white women—53%—voted for Trump. None of them wanted a female president. They chose a rapist and convicted felon instead.
Some pundits say Trump won due to the spiraling cost of groceries. The pandemic ravaged our economy, and many of us never clawed our way back to the middle class. Voters blamed the Biden administration for their economic pain, even though it began with supply shortages caused by the pandemic.
Racism also played a huge role. As Melanie Campbell, chair of the Power of the Ballot Action Fund told the New York Times:
This level of vote was not because they were worried about grocery prices. … They were worried about white privilege, white status, and sent the message that a multiracial democracy is fine as long as they’re at the top.
I agree. But my reporting on maternal health has led me to a third conclusion: In addition to its centuries-long subjugation of Black and brown people, this country does not value the lives of women.
We love pregnant women, but mothers are expendable. Working women, doing the extraordinary work of raising tiny humans while pursuing their own careers, are criticized and belittled. If mothers do not work outside the home, they are ridiculed or ignored.
In 2019, Yvonne Lindgren, a legal scholar who focuses on reproductive rights, argued that Trump tapped into a longstanding conservative narrative that “conflates opposing abortion with protecting motherhood and American culture and values.”
Perhaps the young mother I met thought a vote for Trump—who most of us would not trust around our children—would protect her family and religious beliefs. I have no idea; she didn’t stay and chat. But I do know many women are abused, frustrated, and sick of being told their lives are not worth saving. That anger has to go somewhere. Now we know where.
This essay is adapted from reporting that first appeared in The Assembly and the NC Local Reporting Workshop.
I would say #1 comes down to values, and #2 is our shared experiences with women in leadership roles. It's pretty clear that misogyny plays a key role, which now interacts with "anti-woke" (progressive) values across genders and racial/ethnic groups. Generally, women make better transformational leaders, but transformational change is very hard, and usually fails, which has implications on how folks see women as successful or unsuccessful leaders. There seems to be a thread in the literature that women do not like other women in leadership roles, but I'm not getting into those politics. ;)
The data seem pretty clear that the majority of people in this country, including women, do not appear to value women leaders.