Dispatch #84 White Lesbian Age 68 Considers Waging the Battle for Women's Human Rights

March 22nd 2021    

62 Days Since Inauguration of First Woman Vice-President

1033 Days Until the 2024 Presidential Primaries Begin 

In three years, we will see a woman running for US President.  How will the country be able to believe/see/accept that a woman can and should be the national leader? Wide-ranging and intensive public discourse and action must occur to replace old narratives with new stories – to create and imprint a new vision for women as leaders.  

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The Biden-Harris Administration is reportedly tackling gender equity as a policy issue as serious as pursuing racial equity and dismantling structural white supremacy. “The White House is taking gender equity seriously. Really!” www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/us/gender-council-biden-administration.html. The ongoing visibility of very senior female officials can create one piece in what must be a multi-layered and nuanced campaign.

In her March 12^th New York Magazine article titled “Abuse and Power Andrew Cuomo’s governorship has been defined by cruelty that disguised chronic mismanagement. Why was that celebrated for so long?”, Rebecca Traister wields her detailed reporting to identify what she describes as the brutal white male leadership style, and provides trenchant analysis about how and why this toxic approach to leadership survives and thrives. 

Traister is rightly celebrated for her intelligent and fierce reporting on gender, politics and power.  Her book Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger (Simon & Schuster October 2018) creates brilliant ode to women's rage at patriarchal oppression — an extensively researched history and compelling analysis of women’s political power to reject patriarchy.  Traister concludes her NYM piece with these observations:

For an awfully long time, we have accepted the indignities and mediocrity of brute white patriarchy as our only option, both because we couldn’t imagine better and because even the act of pointing out that it should be better felt futile. And so this kind of power could be petty, corrupt, threatening, skeezy; it could be handsy at weddings and harassing at the office; it could lie and cover up and be sent to jail and still it would be our norm and all we had to turn to in a storm, through a pandemic. We had to pin our hopes on it as a refuge from other, worse brutal white patriarchs. And so we learned to love it, to tune in to its daily briefings and allow its self-assuredness to wash over us. 

Until this week — when an allegation of groping was referred to police and Democrats in the Legislature initiated the first step toward impeachment — it seemed quite possible that Cuomo’s governorship would survive. So far, Cuomo has refused to entertain calls for his resignation, instead requesting an investigation and circulating a statement, which he asked female lawmakers to sign, suggesting that calls on him to step down are tantamount to undermining Tish James. It’s a classic Cuomo defensive deployment of feminism and one of many signs that he is not going down without a probably very ugly fight. As he has so often in the past, Cuomo might well win that fight. But with more than 55 lawmakers in his party calling on him to step down, it is harder than it has ever been to imagine him winning a fourth term, or fashioning himself into a national political figure, or continuing to exert the stranglehold on his state and party that he has become accustomed to. In that sense, what we are witnessing, after a year of meteoric rise, is the extraordinary, crashing two-month fall of a man whose power, for a decade, has been almost total.

The brutality that Andrew Cuomo has brought to politics — connected as it has long been to his authority and his ability to take whatever he wants from his staff and his state — has, like his sexualized advances, been drained of a lot of its appeal.

We didn’t know we had an alternative. Now, it seems, we might have many. 

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/andrew-cuomo-misconduct-allegations.html 

Now, you MUST take 90 minutes and watch the District of Columbia Harriet Tubman Day March 10^th 2021 program celebrating Harriet Ross Tubman. The attached PDF gives more details about the program. GO HERE NOW:  https://youtu.be/S4BYZA3Ov_4 !!

You will be astonished and humbled by the accomplishments and legacy of this amazing woman.  Here is the alternative leadership model -- Harriet Tubman doing whatever it takes to fight for the liberation and human rights of others, her powerful compassion and dignity shining like the North Star with the complete absence of self-aggrandizement.

Then go ahead and be exhilarated by Cynthia Erivo performing the song Stand Up from the movie Harriet!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn19xvfoXvk Movie highlights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3HICKj-4Zs Academy Awards 2020 performance.

And yeah, kudos to Teen Vogue for this excellent discussion of filibuster explaining how the filibuster emerged to preserve slavery and then to defend Jim Crow and oppose civil rights and voting rights. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/senate-filibuster-what-is-how-works  

Come on Senate Democrats, it is time to seize power and wield it for social justice.