Gender mattered: America rejects woman candidate, again

Washington: “I believe men and women are equal. Except in one context. When you need to intimidate a foreign leader and project strength, you want a man,” Rebecca, a White woman in her early 30s, said, while chatting with a group of elderly women supporters of Kamala Harris, at a park in Bethlehem in northeastern Pennsylvania at the end of October. “And when you have a third world war approaching, and I believe that we are at a dangerous moment, I would prefer a strong man like Donald Trump to be in charge.” The other women clearly disagreed, but kept quiet, probably seeking to avoid an argument.

Hundreds of miles away, in the Deep South, Quinton, a Black man in his early 20s, doubled up as a security guard and parking attendant at a hotel on Beale Street in Tennessee’s Memphis. Asked about Harris, he said, “A woman can’t lead America. It is a man’s job. She will have a nervous breakdown. Women get emotional. How will she decide what to do when we have to fight wars or negotiate with foreign leaders?”

And in Washington DC, Phil, a White man in his 50s who worked in hardware store, said in mid October. “It is about strength and weakness. Kamala is weak. It’s not her fault. She is a woman. Trump is strong. Look they attacked him so much, but he survived because he is a man.”

Misogyny is not unique to America. And the idea of entrenched patriarchy is not just unique to men. But the conversations with Rebecca, Quinton and Phil showed how America’s misogyny and entrenched patriarchy has continued to shape American politics. The world’s oldest continuous living democracy has once again rejected a woman presidential candidate.

To be sure, the 2024 verdict was a result of multiple factors, and Trump may well have defeated a male nominee of the Democratic Party. But in Harris’s defeat, sexist assumptions about what a woman can do and cannot do was definitely a factor — it was also ironical to hear her being framed as weak when Harris has spent a lifetime overcoming challenges to rise to where she did, a sign of clear strength and character.

The fact that America hasn’t had a woman head of state ever, even when societies with a history of anti-women violence and at much lower levels of socio economic development have been comfortable electing women leaders, is striking. This reporter, for instance, has never heard a voter in India ever cite a woman leader’s gender as a factor in determining the vote while in US, the reference to Harris’s gender as a weakness was frequently heard.

Trump has now beaten the only two women who have become nominees of a major party — Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Harris now. And while women continue to find space in politics at other levels and in leadership positions across different professional spheres, this setback will haunt parties and make Democrats reluctant to nominate a woman candidate anytime soon.

The fact that Americans rejected a woman candidate in the same year when abortion was on the ballot adds another dimension to the verdict. Harris had made the restoration of reproductive freedom a central plank of her campaign, after the Supreme Court rolled back national abortion protections leaving women to the mercy of often brutal state bans. Women voters, in large numbers, voted for Harris and there is a gender gap that’s clearly evident in the election.

But just the fact that men didn’t think that abortion was an issue that concerned them too, like a majority of them didn’t think that a woman leader could represent them, will rank as a key and deeply disturbing takeaway about American society from the mandate of 2024.

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