Why "W" doesn't stand for women
Baumgardner, Jennifer
0N JANUARY 31, less than two weeks after George W. Bush became the fortythird president of the United States of America, the Six Rivers Planned Parenthood in Eureka, California, was fielding...
...The broader his platitudes, the more insistent the standing ovation...
...We tolerate the mistreatment of women and gay people in the military, we tolerate not having Head Start, we tolerate unequal pay...
...By contrast, W. was raised on the inside, a vantage point that has given him little opportunity to empathize...
...In his world, women are helpmates or mothers or daughters...
...His campaign mantra was basically 'I trust Americans—they're tolerant.' But tolerance is exactly the problem...
...Education" comes with "triple-funding for reading" and "character education...
...Faced with his shameful record of leaving thousands of eligible children out of government-subsidized health care, Bush did what he does best: he changed channels, accusing Gore of challenging W.'s good heart...
...If Congress approves any pro-life attack on women's access to safe and comprehensive reproductive health services, Bush is likely to sign it into law (in sharp contrast, again, to Clinton...
...Clients didn't understand what this policy meant for them," the clinic director told us...
...Here's one salient example: W. claims to want an army of mentors for kids with a parent in prison...
...The teenagers looked confused...
...Certainly W.'s opaque-but-friendly approach in the campaign foreshadows what we can expect from the man...
...Thus, another aim we had was to see how the clinic could be used as an organizing space, much like women's bookstores and certain kinds of churches tend to be...
...Remember the debate in which Al Gore called him on his health care record in Texas that seemed to negate his "leave no child behind" slogan...
...In fact, the enthusiasm was so disproportionate to the content that the applause had to be the sound of hundreds of hefty, white, male Republicans patting themselves on the back...
...This mix of traditional privilege and feminist-influenced culture means that he knows enough to have women in his cabinet, but not enough to represent women's interests in his administration...
...Although the Six Rivers area is fairly conservative politically, California itself has a strong majority of prochoice representatives...
...We might assume, then, that the thirteen thousand clients who pass through the Six Rivers clinic are part of that majority...
...His Eisenhowerera, old-boys-club approach is tempered by his having spent the last thirty years living in an America that has been dealing with women's rights...
...We wanted to figure out how to bridge the gap between patients and politicians, with the hope that, armed with knowledge of what Americans really want, we could reinforce the will of the pro-choice-but-passive legislators who are as responsible as the conservatives for encroachments on abortion rights...
...Which is why callers to Six Rivers Planned Parenthood wondered whether the clinic was still open at the same time that they expressed shock at W.'s pro-life stance...
...We then tried to make sense of the global gag rule: "Um, it means that health organizations in poor countries won't get any aid money from us unless they promise not to provide or counsel abortions as a family planning option...
...After all, they had heard on the news that Bush's first act as president was to reinstate the Mexico City Policy or "global gag rule," which Bill Clinton had reversed as his first order of business eight years earlier...
...0N JANUARY 31, less than two weeks after George W. Bush became the fortythird president of the United States of America, the Six Rivers Planned Parenthood in Eureka, California, was fielding calls from worried patients...
...Pro-life organizations are lobbying heavily to ban so-called "partial birth" abortions again...
...No matter, no one is worried that she'll be making policy, just as W's pro-choice mother (who was once on the board of Planned Parenthood), Barbara, never got in the way of George Sr.'s antichoice agenda...
...There was no mention of the fact that women pay fewer taxes—because they make less money—and are therefore less likely to benefit from even the $200 per year estimated increased refund...
...I think the drug benefit is sort of aimed at women, and the supposed concern of women for domestic 'caring and sharing' type issues...
...And doggone it if his wife, Laura, isn't openly pro-choice...
...Still, it must be said that in Washington, D.C., and in the world of politics generally, women are outsiders...
...It's an apt metaphor: W.'s America keeps barriers for women invisible but impenetrable...
...A former teacher obsessed with reading and possessed of a verbally challenged spouse, she will travel across America to promote sound teaching practices...
...But it's not his heart we have to worry about, it's his politics, politics that so far has W. standing for "white" and "well-heeled," but not, as the GOP contended during the campaign, for women...
...Further, even among those who do make it to the polls, there's no guarantee that they vote for pro-choice candidates or even link the clinic's existence with pro-choice representation and policies...
...They were also extremely concerned that abortion had just been "overturned...
...W' S VISION for women...
...My writing partner, Amy Richards, and I were interviewing staff at abortion clinics, gathering data as we traveled around the country on a book tour...
...Even though he was disappointing to progressives and sexually foDISSENT / Spring 2001 .13 PLAN B cused on women in a way that pulled attention from his leadership, Bill Clinton has something many leaders do not...
...On February 27, 2001, George W. Bush, who lost the popular vote by half a million ballots, addressed Congress...
...Clinics house many contradictions—or at least complexities...
...What is so antiwoman about Bush and his leadership is hard to specify...
...Then came his plan: "Tax relief," not pay equity or raising the minimum wage, both of which affect women's incomes disproportionately...
...Why doesn't W. stand for women...
...So did we...
...OWHERE IS this more obvious than in his handling of abortion and other is_ sues of sexual choice for women...
...JENNIFER BAUMGARDNER iS the co-author, with Amy Richards, of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future and a frequent contributor to the Nation, Ms., and Nerve, among other publications...
...Hillary Clinton broke that mold, love her or loathe her...
...I thank you for making a new President feel welcome," said Bush to nonstop applause...
...Amy Richards, who is one of the founders of the Third Wave Foundation (a national organization for feminist activists between the ages of sixteen and thirty), sums up W. this way: "Bush has too much faith in individuals over leadership...
...The number of women in prison has increased at least threefold in the last half-decade, as a result of stiff mandatory sentences for possession of even small amounts of drugs...
...Rather than mentors for kids after their parents are incarcerated, how about mothers' helpers for poor women, after-school programs for poor children, and a legitimate welfare-towork plan...
...Nor did they understand what the Bush presidency meant for them: "Many of the callers didn't even know that Bush was pro-life until after he got into office...
...I think it's fair to say that character education isn't going to include the feminist views on choice, birth control, sexuality education, and the like, nor will it preach male accountability when it comes to STDs or pregnancy...
...Welcome to trickle-down women's rights...
...The truth is that many people who use services such as those offered at Six Rivers (contraception, prenatal care, Pap smears, and testing for sexually transmitted diseases [STDs], as well as abortion) probably don't vote, just as 50 percent of the eligible electorate does not vote...
...He is like the glass ceiling...
...The clinic is nestled near the Oregon border, just north of a breathtaking Redwood forest, and is the only abortion provider within a hundred miles...
...W. listed many issues that affect women more than men, but, with the minor exception of the prescription drug benefit and its sibling Medicare (and his sentence about elderly women needing this benefit the most), he never actually mentioned "women...
...Welcome to W's America, where no social ill is too sick to he kissed by a platitude from the president and sent on its way...
...She is already reassuring reporters that she is "not going to run for Senator of New York...
...He more than likes women, he empathizes with them...
...The next day, Amy and I visited a high school in Petaluma, California...
...These same women, many of whom have children, could be caring for their own families if they weren't locked up so precipitously and if more help were available within the community...
...And women—we who use clinics, or raise kids without health care, or are in prison, or care about people who are—are the only ones who can change that sexist reality...
...DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 15...
...After thirty years of feminism, how did we end up with W? "He tried to telegraph his concern for education and suburban values to 14 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 PLAN B women," says Nation columnist and feminist Katha Pollitt, who noted that basically it worked with white women during the election49 percent of whom voted for him...
...If only...
...In fact, she wasn't really the First Lady in our minds—she was Hillary, which is why she could make the transition to Senator Clinton...
...W.'s head of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson, announced that he will take the approval of RU-486 under consideration again, despite the fact that this abortifacient has been in use in Europe for nearly a decade without mishap...
...Clinics, even those that do not provide abortions, are already political spaces, whether clients realize it or not...
...Well, the camera winked briefly at Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, but we've already heard that she's about as powerful as a Mac Plus, and that it is Vice President Dick Cheney (who sat behind the president, fittingly, to his right) who calls the shots...
...WELCOME TO the world of passive-aggressive, antichoice activism...
...There is something about him that is very manly in an exclusive way," says a friend who, despite working for the pharmaceutical industry, finds Bush terrifying...
...Simultaneously, however, "he was telegraphing to the Christian Right how anti-abortion he was while soft-pedaling it to the rest of us," says Pollitt...
...He doesn't say that the vast majority of parents in prison who actually have custody and care for their children are mothers...
...The point of women's liberation is to have the choice to be whoever you are...
...12 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 PLAN B Our late-January visit coincided with a spate of calls from clients who wanted to know if Six Rivers Planned Parenthood was still open...
...Presidents' wives do make a difference in how women are treated during an administration...
...Because there is nothing in his life that would ask him to stand up for women, including (so far) women themselves...
...Feminism is, of course, as much in favor of women having traditional professions as it is of their breaking into male-dominated ones...
...The applause for his simple statements was frequent and deafening...
...Laura Bush's remarks have shied away from this type of ambition...
...W. has selected John Ashcroft as attorney general, a man who described abortion as "an atrocity against the future" and who has a twenty-year antichoice track record, including support for laws to criminalize abortion and to define life as beginning at fertilization (which precludes many forms of birth control...
...Along with respect, being First Lady comes with assumptions about staying in your place...
...The closest Bush will come to that is to claim support for children who are "innocently" dependent on the system...
...For example, polls show the majority of Americans to be pro-choice...
...President Clinton, rural poor kid and son of a single mom, was also a scrappy outsider (for a straight white guy...
...Nah, that would be addressing women's needs...
...We explained that abortion was still legal, although with several pernicious barriers...
...The real reason that W. doesn't stand for women is because, let's face it, he doesn't have to...
...W. doesn't dislike women, clearly, but he doesn't see them as full human beings outside of their traditional role...
...The kids— most of whom were working class and middle class—were very interested in the concept of the male pill, wondering when it would be available (not for a while...
...In fact, W.'s way with women hearkens back to a time before feminism, the days when women weren't at the table...
...With that comes a fond disrespect that—like his global gag rule and its ensuing confusion for women who want clinic services—is subtly paralyzing...
Vol. 48 • April 2001 • No. 2
