Lynn Sherr for Bill Moyers: Agree: It Was Sexism

[ehrnst]

Last edited Wed Nov 16, 2016, 11:46 AM - Edit history (2)

I combed the polls. I read some thoughtful pieces about the Meaning of it All. I perused some rants on Twitter. And then I realized how it sounded just the tiniest bit familiar.

It was definitely, unequivocally, sexism.

Not every red vote, and maybe not always consciously. But the tide that turned America into a nasty pit of hatred is a direct descendant of the entrenched male privilege – and fear of change by both sexes – that has kept women down for centuries. The same old insistence, barely recast, on keeping a woman in her place.

“Women have enough influence over human affairs without being politicians,” huffed one Philadelphia newspaper in 1848 when a few women first raised the issue of voting rights. “Mothers, grandmothers, aunts and sweethearts manage everything. Men have nothing to do but to listen and obey…”

A New York editorialist finessed the point five years later. “We saw, in broad daylight … a gathering of unsexed women … publicly propounding the doctrine that they should be allowed to step out of their appropriate sphere, and mingle in the busy walks of everyday life, to the neglect of those duties which both human and divine law have assigned to them. … Is the world to be depopulated? Are there to be no more children?”

Didn’t women know their place? At home?

The opposition to woman suffrage sped ahead on the low road, slamming anyone who tried to move beyond the kitchen or the bedroom, for their looks, their speaking ability, their sex.

“Susan is lean, cadaverous and intellectual,” wrote one newspaper of suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony, “with the proportions of a file and the voice of a hurdy-gurdy.” Another described her as “the typical old maid, tall, angular and inclined to be vinegar-visaged.”

At 5’5”, she wasn’t even that tall.

http://billmoyers.com/story/agree-it-was-sexism/

[spooky3]

1. The "look at that face" tactic has a long history.

[longship]

2. Author is not Moyers. It's Lynn Sherr. nt

[duffyduff]

6. Lynn Sherr is a longtime broadcast journalist.

She is just as reputable as Moyers.

[ehrnst]

11. Thanks - corrected.

[Cobalt Violet]

4. nope, it was the Establishment Democratic Party's classism.

I guess Chuck Schumer was wrong when he said: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”


Abandoning Democrats for the votes of Republicans hasn't been working out. We can't keep repeating this.

[duffyduff]

7. Wrong. The Dems had nothing to do with this travesty.

You want to deny sexism exists. The "left" can be even worse than the right on this.

These entitled white dudes that you speak of were not going to vote Democratic anyway because they fell sucker to a DEMAGOGUE who has no intention of improving their standard of living. They hate women and minorities and Trump pandered to that hatred. They are basically stupid and thirty years too late to do anything about reversing the course of the economy.

Go ahead and engage in the fantasy these white dudes can be reasoned with. They can't. They can't be fixed because most of them are not intelligent and cannot be reasoned with. They have to literally lose everything they have got and be kicked in the head to have sense knocked in them, and even then, it is doubtful it would work.

They have been RAISED by sexist, racist parents, and it is difficult if not impossible for them to overcome that upbringing.

[ehrnst]

9. Thank you. (nt)

[Cobalt Violet]

16. I guess not to those in the bubble.

[ehrnst]

8. The white straight men felt abandoned by the Democratic party.

So we have to return it to them.

Certainly the people of color were overwhelmingly for Hillary - I guess they don't count in the "classism" argument.

Women overwhelmingly voted for Hillary. They don't count, either, in the "classism" argument.

When white straight men feel left behind, THEN we have a class problem.

Everything else is relegated to mere "identity politics."

[BainsBane]

14. You mean all those guys who didn't vote for Russ Feingold?

Seems to me what you are arguing is precisely abandoning Democrats in order to get Republican votes. That is what all this angst about white male voters is. The goal seems to be to alienate the Democratic base to regain the first-class voters that really matter.

The fact is Clinton dominated among lower incomes and Trump among higher incomes. They liked his bigotry. They liked that he insulted women and people of color. She overwhelmingly won poor and working class voters. She didn't win white men though, and for some those voters matter more because those citizens matter more. They voted for a fucking billionare, and you've swallowed the inane notion that he is less of an elite than the millions of single mothers struggling to put food on the table? Why? Because cable news says so?

[lunamagica]

5. K&R

[TrekLuver]

10. And what about all the women that ended up voting for Trashpot?

[BainsBane]

13. Did it never occur to you that women can be sexist?

Even misogynist? I've known a number of them, and some of the Trump voters certainly are.

[TrekLuver]

15. Yes it occurred to me. But I think more people just hated her thanks to all the years

of bashing and out right lies being mainstreamed. I think more people hated her because her name was Clinton rather than because she was a woman.

Of course she lost votes due to sexism...but undoubtedly she also gained some votes because she was a woman as well.

[BainsBane]

12. A woman following a black man

Was just too much "establishment" for many to bear.