We've cautioned before that "women voters" are not a monolithic bloc that can be won over with a single message. But as the economic downturn has hit women especially hard, it's easy to see why Barack Obama is trying to appeal to women by discussing the economy -- hitting on the issue of equal pay and highlighting Lilly Ledbetter's story.
Obama was an original co-sponsor of the legislation to reverse the result in Ledbetter's case; McCain opposes the bill because, he said in April, it "opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems." Well, yes, that would be the point of a law prohibiting pay discrimination.The Obama campaign has asked Clinton to talk about Ledbetter when she campaigns for him. Obama, who didn't focus much on the issue during the primary campaign, hosted a meeting Monday on pay equity; the campaign released a memo contrasting Obama and McCain on women's issues. As I sat down to write this column, an e-mail arrived from the Democratic convention announcing that Ledbetter would be speaking there.
That's all well and good, but it's worth bringing up that it's tough for even the most impassioned campaign rhetoric to connect with real life. This piece from Salon last week, about a middle-class mother who takes her children to a soup kitchen for the first time, drives that point home. She describes her situation this way:
It had been a hard decision for me to go in the first place. We had a house full of food, mostly from the food bank, and some staples friends who were moving had given us. I was employed as a secretary for the county, a job that didn't make use of my graduate degree or my intelligence but had let me keep the kids in the same school and city after my divorce. I made a decent wage. I had health insurance and dental insurance. On my desk was a packet of new retirement and savings options. But summer child care was $1,800 a month for my three kids, and the child support I received from their father was a paltry sum mandated by the state. It didn't even begin to cover the cost of one kid's child care for a single summer month. We didn't qualify for WIC vouchers or food stamps. The previous week, I had swallowed my pride and driven my old Subaru to a local food bank. The women there were kind and gave me a box filled with cans of tuna and bags of pasta. I was only allowed to get one box per month, though, and what they gave me would last a week, maybe 10 days. I was looking into weeks of hunger. The Dining Room served dinner to families only twice a week.
And the experience leads her to this conclusion,
But the moment I walked into the soup kitchen -- the moment I acknowledged, publicly, that I could not provide food for myself or my children (which is why the soup kitchen is so much more difficult than the food bank) -- is the moment that my ability to believe in the politics of this country was forever altered. I know why poor people have historically low voter-turnout rates. If you vote, you acknowledge that you believe in the system. And to believe in the system when you're at the very bottom, when you've watched the chrome and ink-black SUVs drive by while you're packing your own beater with dried beans and lentils, to believe at that point is fucking painful. You either say the system works and you've earned your place, or you concede that there is something wrong and there might not be any way to fix it. The entire summer of 2007, as I struggled to keep us fed, I hated thinking of politics, an unusual characteristic for me. It hurt to listen to any presidential candidate talk about the working poor, and not because they weren't genuine, but because all their talk was just that -- talk. It was like listening to my former self, the one who didn't know how bad things could get.
Stories like this get across what's tough to convey with broad articles and polling about how the economy is affecting women. There's a wide gulf between the way the economy is discussed and how it's lived.
Related:
Obama on women and work
Life on WIC
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Politics is the privilege of the middle class
When I was a teenager I belonged to Amnesty International, I stood on the steps of the courthouse protesting the death penalty. My friends always told me that one day I would make a difference in the world. Ten years later I stood in a used book store pawning a box worth of video and college textbooks (and not the kind of textbooks that you are so happy to be rid of at semesters end, but reference books I received as Christmas presents from my parents. Books that I treasured) hoping that I would get enough money to buy groceries that week. Had you asked me then what my stance was on the death penalty or how I voted in the last election I would have looked at you as if you were crazy. Politics were an abstract, something you tossed about when you had enough to eat and you weren't shuttling from pawn shops to payday loan centers to feed yourself and pay your bills. Like so many things I had cherished, poverty had stolen my belief system as well. My beliefs were not stolen because of a lack of faith in the system, but simply because I was too busy subsisting to even dwell on them. What was happening on a Senate floor in Washington was so removed from my life that I couldn't conceive of its importance. The stress of poverty exhausted me to the point that I could not see beyond it.
As I was able to leave the situations that had put me in such a difficult place, my interest in the socio-political world around me returned. But this time I had a new perspective. While I am sure many impoverished women have a greater strength and purpose than I had during those harsh years, I realize that the time and money and relative peace in my life enables me to fight the good fight. And now I don't just fight for the abstract ideals as I did as a teenager, I fight for the women who don't have the strength to fight for themselves.
It's good to see that Obama is recognizing that women voters are not strictly basing their votes off of choice (because, believe it or not, there are some idiots in Washington who think that that's how women voters work).
Pieceopie, I completely agree. The reason why we have a political system that works for the middleclass is because the middleclass has the free time to deal with it, which people on welfare, people in soup kitchens, struggling to feed themselves and their kids. Unfortunately, it's a system that keeps perpetuating itself.
I'd like to see a campaign where change is more than just a word, and I hope that it is with this guy, cuz this is my first election, and if he's spewing cardboard rhetoric, my optimism may very well die.
I just wrote a post about my personal experiences with going to a food bank earlier this year so that I could keep my family fed over on the CA NOW blog: http://www.canow.org/canoworg/2008/08/poverty-persona.html