White Patriarchy and Politics: How Women Vote

 Women are reliable voters, more so than their male counterparts.  That suggests that a gender-based political movement would be powerful force—if there were such a thing.  Rebecca Traister takes her readers through a sequence of political realities that effect female issues, female politicians, and female voters in her book Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger.  She argues that our nation was constructed to be led by a white male minority, and much of our history and current difficulties can be better understood if one takes that perspective as a starting point.  Her book was published in 2018, leaving the 2016 presidential election to be the critical political event. 

“White patriarchal minority rule was established by America’s founders when they encoded slavery into our founding documents and built our electoral apparatus around its protection.  It was strengthened when they granted white men the franchise and violently guarded that exclusivity for almost a century, ensuring that it was only they who created and controlled the courts, the businesses, the economic systems, who wrote the legislation and created the customs and set the norms on which the country was built.”

Much of Traister’s focus is on the norms that have been created and imprinted into our national psyche that constrain women in pursuing their goals by limiting the actions deemed acceptable for them.  That will be a topic for another day.  Here we are interested in some insights she provides into how the white male minority has used its position of dominance to maintain its power.

“White men have had a nearly exclusive grip on political, economic, social, and sexual power in the United States, despite being only around a third of its population.  The way that a minority power protects itself from the potential uprising of a majority is to discourage unification of that majority.  And the best way to discourage unification is to split the majority against itself, by offering benefits and protections of power to some while denying them to others.”

The main strategy is to pick off white women voters and use a dependence on their white male spouses and parents to keep them in line.  This, of course, has been the strategy of would-be patriarchs since the inception of the practice thousands of years ago.  “If you stick to doing the womanly things that need to be done, we will provide your social, racial, and economic needs in our dangerous manly world.”  This argument continues to be effective.

“And so, some American women have been offered the advantages of white supremacy, advantages that turn on other women’s disadvantages…And women’s dependence on men has in turn made it in many women’s interests to support policies and parties that protect the economic and political status of the men on whom they depend.”

“But the particular form of the subjugation and ensuing dependency also works to divide them from nonwhite women, to whom none of the advantages and protections of this economic or social or political supremacy accrue, and discourages potential alliances between white and nonwhite women who might otherwise rise up together to challenge white male power.”

The attraction of this “proximal power” white women gain from their allegiance to white men has enabled patriarchy to be a potent force over the millennia.  Women have been their own worst enemies in the effort to escape subjugation by males.  Traister reports some startling voting trends.

“Those white women who are or have been most directly connected by marriage to white men are far mor likely to vote Republican than their never-married peers.  According to a paper published by political scientists Dara Strolovitch, Janelle S. Wong, and Andrew Proctor, who reviewed the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election study numbers on voting patterns, a majority 59 percent of never-married white women voted for Hillary Clinton, compared to the almost reverse majority of married white women, 57 percent, who voted for Donald Trump.  Sixty percent of white widows voted for Trump; 56 percent of white women who were separated from husbands voted for Trump; and 49 percent of white divorced women voted for him.  In other words, the study concluded, ‘The more distant’ white women are ‘from the benefits and investments in traditional heterosexual marriage, the less likely they are to support Republican presidential candidates,’ i.e., candidates of the party more likely to support traditional white heteropatriarchy.”

Nonwhite women are not only disadvantaged by the minimal support received from white women, but also because their men can be attracted to the male advantages of patriarchy without the ability to provide the same proximal power that white wives receive.

“Bur racial advantages are not the only thing the white patriarchy is willing to dole out to divide people.  There is also patriarchy itself, the benefits of which have been offered up to men of all races.  Though nonwhite voters overwhelmingly chose Clinton over Trump, in all racial categories, more men than women voted for Trump.  Only 4 percent of black women voted for Donald Trump, but 13 percent of black men did…Black men may enjoy, and work to perpetuate, advantages that accrue to their gender, even as they are oppressed because of their race.”

With only their anger and frustrations to motivate them, black women have taken the lead in the battle against gender and racial injustices.

“Black women have long been the backbone of our political and progressive past: the strategists and protestors and organizers and volunteers, the women who’ve gotten out the vote and licked the envelopes, pioneered the thinking that led to the revolutions.”

“Which makes it a terrific injustice that the movements to liberate women and African Americans have so often been understood as having been led by white women and black men.  They are understood this way because white supremacy and patriarchy permit white women and black men greater access to money, and more proximity to the media that covers social movements and the politicians who respond to them, than black women have.” 

Traister provides some final advice on this topic.

“The post-2016 moment offers a chance for white women to be awakened to the many reasons that they should be angry.  But crucially—urgently—the opportunity is not simply to be angry on their own behalf, but also at the injustices faced by other women, women who experience those injustices in part due to the very mechanisms that protect and enrich those white women.  And in order for a new white wokeness to be integrated effectively into a contemporary movement, it must not take it over; there must be acknowledgement that white women are late to the party.”