Yesterday, I posted a quote by President Obama on my Facebook wall. It said: "Women are not an interest group. They are mothers, and daughters, and sisters, and wives. They are half of this country and they are perfectly capable of making their own choices about their health."
The more I think about it, the more I see that the President missed a big part of the point that he was trying to make. By using the words "mothers, and daughters, and sisters, and wives" he defined women strictly by our relationships to men, perpetuating the stereotype that we have only the rights and power that men grant us. Women are executives, and professors, and astronauts. Women are entrepreneurs, and artists, and factory workers. Women are representatives, and senators, and cabinet secretaries, and Supreme Court justices. Women are doctors, and lawyers, and yes, even Indian chiefs. Women have been heads of state in Great Britain, and Germany, and Israel, and India, and Pakistan, and someday soon a woman will be the President of the United States. A woman does not need a man to define her, or to grant her the right to make her own decisions about health care or any other aspect of her life. Her definition and rights are every bit as inherent as his.
Madeleine L'Engle wrote in one of her journals that she refused to relinquish her rightful place in "mankind" by using politically correct language and "falling down personholes". American women need to stop relinquishing our full inclusion in the phrase "all men are created equal" by accepting the sort of language the President used to describe what makes us capable of making those choices. There is no doubt that those roles are important ones, but they do not make up the whole picture any more than if he were to describe men as "fathers, and sons, and brothers, and husbands". Those are good reasons for men to care about women's healthcare, but they are hardly the reasons that would be given -- if any were even considered necessary -- to argue that men should be able to make their own health care decisions.
Re-electing President Obama is still a much better choice as far as this American woman -- a mother, and a daughter, and a sister, and a partner; but also a college graduate with loans to pay, and a customer service representative for a family-owned business, and a person with pre-existing conditions who would like to be an entrepreneur herself someday -- is concerned. But he should take another look at what he said in this quote, and maybe ask Elena Kagan and Hillary Clinton and Gabrielle Giffords -- not to mention Michelle Obama -- what they think about it.
Women are just as much mothers, daughters, and sisters to women as men. The quote is about women relative to their human relationships. It's about humanizing women in political discussion, rather than talking about them as a single monolithic political issue. That's a message we can get behind relative to all groups of people, be they African-Americans, Latino-Americans, or LGBT+ Americans. People are not defined by things that they cannot control, like gender, race, or orientation. They are defined by the relationships and connections which they make with one another.
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