When It's About Women, It's About the Economy

Barack Obama has presented himself as a post-racial candidate, one who doesn’t discuss race unless pressed, but whose meteoric rise signals an end to a obligatory need to examine all things racial. African Americans worry that white America might delude ourselves into believing that we are finally becoming a color-blind society.

In addition to this delusion, there are other downsides to a post-racial strategy.

First, it has allowed the Republican Party to configure Sarah Palin as the post-feminist VP candidate. She can have it all: five children, including a special needs infant; a beauty queen; a rifle toting free market advocate; and a political career. However, by characterizing her as post-feminist, the Republicans have silenced any discussion about the agonizing balance that most women face between work and family. By keeping mum, we have delayed bringing this important discussion out of the private family realm and into making issues like child care, parental leave, and reproductive health a public policy.

Second, it conflates all discussion of women’s rights into a single issue: abortion. That is the only women’s issue that Palin and the Republicans will discuss. It's there for one reason: to appease the right wing. However, women’s rights cannot intelligently be collapsed into a single concept, and by allowing the Republicans to frame Palin as they have, they have succeeded in distracting women voters away from the complex web of women’s issues. And it is women voters who will elect either Obama or McCain. In 2004, women outnumber men by 9 million votes.

What are women’s issues? Yes, it's access to health care, child care, reproductive care. It's now the economy. According to research done by Carolyn M. Byerly, Associate Professor at Howard University, 80% of women polled are worried about the economy and how it affects their lives and the lives of their children. That number jumps to 88% for women of color. Yet no one is framing how the economic downturn is affecting women and children?

Watch this snippet of Couric's interview with Palin and tell me that you want this woman in charge of our economy.