Growing up, I had no television, so we rarely had a chance to watch political debates. But today, watching these events is a family affair. We’ve seen debates that were comical, disturbing, depressing, occasionally impressive. But even when a debate seems more like bad stand-up comedy than serious politics, I try to provide my kids with enough information to understand the basic issues. I hope they will stay politically educated and civically engaged and be well equipped to assess data and make political decisions regardless of social pressure.
Last night’s presidential debate provided us with multiple opportunities for a giggle. As Ohio residents we laughed at the memes about our pets being eaten (our pets are fine) but also discussed the racism latent in Donald Trump’s talk about immigrants devouring cats and dogs.
But despite the dystopian atmosphere pervading our national politics, watching the debate left me energized. It is exciting to know that, even in a world filled with violence and injustice, my daughter can witness women being courageous, forceful, and empathetic not only in a domestic sphere but on a national stage.
It’s not that I didn’t have women to look up to as a child. My mother modeled creativity and community building; my grandmother modeled resilience and independence. As a teenager, I looked up to the women who taught me how to ride and handle horses. But then I entered a very conservative college. When I chose, in that space, to pursue an academic career, I had a sense of entering an unexplored country.
That sense was based on residing in an anachronism, a cultural bubble where people were deliberate about their rejection not only of current social progress, but of past progress as well.
In the philosophy department at my college, there were no women teachers. In my entire time as a student, not just as an undergraduate but in both my graduate programs, I had only four women professors. And in my undergraduate program, at an institution where people seriously debated questions like “Is it moral for women to have jobs at all?” or “Should women be allowed to wear pants?” simply identifying as a feminist could get one attacked and excluded.
At a different school, I would have encountered more women in academia, even celebrated scholars. Yes, this would have meant navigating questions of identity, liberation, and intersectionality, like, “What are the limits to our obligations to support other women?” or even “Is wearing makeup something we do for ourselves, or for the patriarchy?” But these would have been questions relating to our bodily existence in the world, not to an abstract “essence of femininity” we felt compelled to instantiate.
Even as I grew more adept at doing the work of philosophy, I felt like an outsider, not because of ability, but because I had no sense of how to perform the role I had chosen. The young men in my philosophy program could look at our all-male faculty and get a sense of who they wanted to be. I could not do this in quite the same way. Even superficial things like how to dress professionally, or figuring out the limits of appropriate humor, were all male coded.
I said that I was living in an anachronism. But many communities across our nation, and many churches and schools, tacitly held the same assumptions about women that dictated my life: We were too emotional to be good leaders. Our real vocation was in the home. We ought to focus more on how to please men. Pursuing a career was selfish. I remember how media personalities, and not just conservative ones, mocked women in politics in the 1990s.
Dress codes alone sent a message that we were second-place to men in the workplace or in the political sphere. Men had a uniform, the suit and tie. Women did not. When a woman dressed professionally, she had to steer between seeming too feminine, and therefore frail, and too masculine, and therefore unnatural. This prejudice was clearly still around in 2016, with the jokes about women in pantsuits.
None of this has stopped women from claiming our places at the table. But even in the 21st century, we still get pushback specifically because of our gender. Every time a movie features a complex and authoritative woman as a hero, people get angry. Multiple movements exist, including one of our two major political parties, that want to put women back into the small domestic boxes where we used to be trapped. And women who are queer, non-white, or disabled face additional pressure to be smaller, less-than, quieter, even nonexistent.
As a Gen-X parent raising a Gen-Z daughter, I want to tell her that the world is filled with exciting opportunities for adventure, creativity, and activism. But I must warn her, too, that the world is filled with dangers. It is also filled with people, including other women, who will tell her, even in 2024, that she must conform to narrow gender roles if she wants to be respected or successful.
While our culture has made enormous advances in gender justice, people in progressive areas may not be aware that those advances are not always visible in some pockets of the nation. There are still areas where people use scripture to control women, or where any woman who steps over the guardrails around “traditional femininity” is mocked and ostracized. And some of the people calling the shots in those spaces would like to call the shots for the whole United States.
So, yes, it was exciting to sit beside my daughter and watch Vice President Kamala Harris debating former President Donald Trump on the national stage, to see her model authenticity, assertiveness, humor, empathy, and boundary-setting. I hope that the young women of tomorrow will feel freer to seek their paths in life without pausing to worry about things like gender roles or “the feminine genius” or “what men want.”
I have become critical of the concept of role models, because humans are individuals. And I think it is always dangerous to view anyone as a hero or infallible authority. As a teenager without a role model, I shouldn’t have worried so much about uncharted territory, especially since it really wasn’t uncharted. But this, too, is a gender expectation placed on women. We’re admonished for stepping over the cute little white picket fences that have been installed to keep us in our place.
Still, having mentors and examples with shared life experiences can be important for personal formation, especially during the turbulent teens and 20s. And seeing women who have claimed their right to be fully human can inspire us to do the same.
It is unfortunate that in so many Christian churches, women are still treated as second-class citizens. I don’t want the message my daughter takes from our faith to be that she is less capable than men of leading, inspiring, and making decisions. I don’t want her to believe she is less capable of imaging Christ. And I know that as I encourage her to live out her creative vocation, whatever that may be, we are both going to encounter multiple challenges from a world that will tell us both we are transgressing our boundaries. But I am glad that she has so many more opportunities than I had to see women stepping lightly over those boundaries into the larger world.
Header Images: Wikimedia Commons/Gage Skidmore: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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