A female relative of mine recently told be about a flurry of activity in her company that involved the possible election of a woman for the first time to a certain position. The problem was that some did not like this woman or think she was qualified.
Well, said I, just because someone shares your gender doesn’t mean you’re going to support her for a certain job. Which brings us, of course, to Amy Coney Barrett, the apparently wonderful, brilliantly successful jurist, teacher, Catholic, wife, mother of seven (including a special needs child) and soon-to-be “replacement” for the late, deeply lamented Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In this Barrett will be opposed by many women who believe she will threaten their right to choose and the Affordable Care Act. She will also be opposed by many men as well who see her as a possible rubber stamp for a Trumpian second term should the presidential election descend into a Bush v. Gore slugfest.
I wish I could say that there isn’t a certain hypocrisy in this, but there is. Feminism is humanism. It’s about the rights of all of us to choose a life path and if that path is to be a wife and mother first and foremost or to be anti-abortion, so be it. Let’s not be hypocrites. But let the opposition not be hypocritical either. Barrett can do what she does, because she — and many of us — have built our careers on the backs of women and men who do essential and menial tasks. She’s not home with her children all of the time and I’m sure she’s not coming home in the evening to clean the bathrooms. (She is not alone in this. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as different a woman and a Catholic from Barrett as you can be, is a wonderful, brilliantly successful politician, fundraiser, wife, mother and grandmother. I’m sure the Speaker has a slew of assistants.)
There’s nothing wrong with this. We owe it to ourselves to support those who’ve made our careers possible with the best wages and working conditions we can provide, along with our understanding and the little extras that make jobs worthwhile.
We also owe it to ourselves to be honest. Conservative columnist Ross Douhat’s piece in today’s New York TImes offers a number of self-deluded observations, not the least of which is that Amy Coney Barrett may become in her own way a three-initialed icon. I’m afraid the not-so notorious ACB will never match the peerless RBG. For one thing, Ginsburg could become an icon because of the contrast between her tiny body and towering legal presence. Iconography is by the very term visual. The arts- and Armani-loving RBG dressed and accessorized distinctively, never more so than in her expressive judicial robe collars, which she used as examples of gesture politics. There’s nothing to suggest that the nice-looking, conservatively dressed Barrett is ever going to be anything but a nice-looking, conservatively dressed woman, like thousands of other women who head to business every day.
But then, Douhat isn’t a cultural writer or a woman. The same column contains this stop-you-in-your-tracks gem:
“But then (conservative feminism) also argues that feminism’s victories were somewhat unbalanced, that they were kinder to professional ambition than to other human aspirations, and that the society they forged has lost its equilibrium not just in work-life balance but also in other areas — sex and romance and marriage and child rearing, with the sexes increasingly alienated from one another and too many children desired but never born.”
Huh? Feminism is humanism. It is pro life choice, rather than being pro-life or pro-choice. If you want to be primarily or exclusively a wife and mother, be so. Many of us, however, don’t want to be that. Nor do we want to belong to any sects that reinforce traditional gender roles, as in the People of Praise movement in which Barrett and her husband are members. (The essentially Catholic Charismatic group uses the term “handmaiden” to refer to women, as in Mary’s response to the archangel Gabriel’s announcement that she would become the mother of Jesus: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done unto me according to thy word.” It is a world that has unfortunate connotations in the era of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale..”)
If the sexes are alienated today, it’s because women evolved and men didn’t. Also, it’s not possible for a desired child not to be born. Women don’t have abortions, because they wanted those children. They didn’t want them or they didn’t want them enough.
Again, their choice. Let’s have the freedom to make choices. But let’s be honest about them and why we’re making them. And let’s face facts. Barrett will never be the Notorious ACB — although there’s still a chance for her to be infamous.