Election Day Reads

Good Morning!!

The great day has arrived! I’m going to go and vote as soon as I can wake up enough to function properly. I couldn’t get to sleep last night. I watched Hillary’s rallies in Philadelphia and Raleigh and then lay awake for a couple more hours, unable to stop my mind from racing. I think my body is registering how important this day is to me, even as I try to stay calm.

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve wondered why I wasn’t allowed to do all the things boys and men could do? Why couldn’t women be lawyers, doctors, priests? Why couldn’t girls even be “altar boys?”

When I was in elementary school, I sometimes fantasized about being a boy–not because I actually wanted to be male, but because then I would have the freedom to do what I wanted to do and not what I was “supposed” to do. It’s amazing to me now that I realized even then that I was considered less than in my culture.

Hillary Clinton speaking in Philadelphia last night.

When I was in high school, it was still a basic assumption in our society that “real women” didn’t want careers. The height of a girl’s dreams was supposed to be to get married, raised children, and help her husband become successful.

When I was a junior in high school, I read The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan; and suddenly I began to understand why my smart, college educated mom often seemed dissatisfied and frustrated. That book changed my life; it reinforced the inner feelings I had always had that girls and women didn’t deserve to be treated as less than boys and men.

Next month I’ll be 69 years old. I’ve waited all my life for the day when I could vote for a brilliant accomplished woman as President of the United States. That day has come and I plan to enjoy it to the fullest.

I know this won’t instantly change the culture we live in; in fact the sexism and misogyny will almost certainly get worse–just as racism got worse after we elected the first Black President. But if this is what we have to go through for girls an women to someday be treated equally, then so be it.

Tonight Hillary Clinton will be President elect. Little girls will know that they can be anything they want to be, even though they still will have to work twice as hard as their male counterparts to achieve the same level of success, and even though their achievements will still be denigrated and ignored. But we will have moved a bit closer to real change and real equality.

A few reads for you before I head to my polling place:

Claire Landsbaum at The Cut: So Many Women Put ‘I Voted’ Stickers on Susan B. Anthony’s Grave That the Cemetery Is Staying Open Late on Election Night.

On November 8, 1872, Susan B. Anthony was arrested for illegally casting a ballot in the presidential election. More than a century later, single women are the nation’s most potent political force. Anthony’s grave in Rochester, New York, is a popular destination for women who want to honor her memory by doing their civic duty, and according to the Democrat & Chronicle, this year the city’s mayor is making it even easier to do so.

Mt. Hope Cemetery, where Anthony is buried, usually closes at 5:30 p.m., but on Election Day, it’ll be open until voting ends. “Visiting Susan B. Anthony’s gravesite has become an Election Day rite of passage for many citizens,” Rochester’s mayor told the paper in a press release. “With this year’s historically significant election, it seems right to extend that opportunity until the polls close.”

Kevin Kruse at Politico: What It Took. How a lifetime of compromises and concessions brought one woman to the brink of history.

In early 1979, on a community access television program called In Focus, the wife of the new governor of Arkansas was peppered with question after question about all the ways in which she was an untraditional woman.

“The thought occurs to me that you really don’t fit the image that we have created for the governor’s wife in Arkansas,” the host, a self-described “newsman,” said to 32-year-old Hillary Rodham. “You’re not a native, you’ve been educated in liberal Eastern universities, you’re less than 40. You don’t have any children. You don’t use your husband’s name. You practice law. Does it concern you that maybe other people feel that you don’t fit the image that we have created for the governor’s wife in Arkansas?”

Audience for Hillary’s midnight rally in Raleigh, NC last night

She looked through her large, thick-lensed glasses and smiled.

“No,” she began, “because just as I said before … ”

She had made a choice. In 1974, she had moved to Arkansas to be with her boyfriend, Bill Clinton. It was a decision that would dictate so many others, big and small, for decades to come—and here, in this spartan studio, on this rinky-dink show, was one of them. How to respond to this man?

This issue of wifeliness was being put to the first female lawyer at the finest firm in Little Rock. Rodham had been 1 of just 27 women among the 200-plus students in her law school class at Yale. She was one of only three on the staff of 44 attorneys on the Watergate impeachment team. She could have responded to the interviewer by pointing out any of these things. It was the ‘70s: She could have responded with an impassioned lecture about feminism, or chauvinism, or women’s lib. But she didn’t. She responded with an equanimity that must have been a challenge to muster. “That doesn’t bother me, and I hope that doesn’t bother very many people,” she said.

You already know the story, but I hope you’ll read the rest anyway.

J.J. Holmes and his sister with President Obama

You know about this story too, but this article about the disabled 12-year-old boy who was kicked out of a Trump Rally is really inspiring: An anti-Trump disabled boy was booed at a rally. The next day, he got to meet President Obama.

Twelve-year-old JJ Holmes has been enamored with the 2016 presidential election.

By Election Day, the boy would encounter two of the most polarizing figures in this campaign season — Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and President Obama — and his experiences with them would be vastly different.

For months, JJ, who has a severe case of cerebral palsy, has been sitting on his knees at his home in Longwood, Fla., using his nose to type searches on his iPad for “Mary Poppins” plays and Trump events, his mother said. Throughout the election, she said, he had been itching to go to a rally — to express his disdain for Trump, who came under fire last year for mocking a reporter with a disability.

“I wanted to go because Donald J. Trump made fun of disabled people,” JJ said in a video statement Monday to The Washington Post, using his computer vocalization device.

Please go read the whole thing. You won’t regret it.

Adele Stan at The National Memo: Pantsuit Feminism Is Real Feminism.

On November 8, if America doesn’t make history by electing its first former beauty-pageant owner and reality-show star as president, it will do so by electing the first woman to occupy the Oval Office. A woman in a suit; a suit that has pants.

Much is made of Hillary Clinton’s sartorial choice of the matching jacket and slacks as her signature look. But whether the subject of celebration or mockery, the response stems from the same fact—that a woman in public life who shucks nylons and pumps in favor of the freedom of movement long afforded men, well, that’s a woman who is claiming power.

Hillary with LeBron in Cleveland

Some might claim that the pantsuit is merely a symbol of feminism, one that can belie the motives of the woman who wears it. Symbol though it be, there is nothing “mere” about it: the pantsuit, as worn by the first presidential nominee of a major U.S. political party, is feminism itself. Its existence as an acceptable form of female dress in the halls of power is the result of thousands of years of feminism, and in Western culture, particularly the last few hundred.

The battle to unbind women from corsets and crinolines and bustles and busks was the work of feminists. It’s hardly a coincidence that the doffing of the corset in the 1920s, together with the adoption of a shorter dress that hung loosely on the frame, coincided with the time women gained the right to vote. But pants were another thing entirely. Pants were—and often still are—symbolic of something other than comfort or even ease of movement. Pants are a symbol of power and self-possession. Pants encase and protect the genitals while skirts offer access. A woman in pants is claiming her body as her own, treading her own path in the world.

Yes! When I was in high school in the 1960s, girls weren’t allowed to wear pants. We weren’t even permitted to wear culottes, which were very popular then. Today as an old retired lady, I wear jeans most of the time and the heck with anyone who disapproves of it.

The New York Time Editorial Board: The Question for James Comey.

Never mind.

That was the message James Comey, the F.B.I. director, sent to Congress on Sunday in his latest headline-grabbing interruption of the 2016 presidential race.

Having dropped a bomb packed with innuendo on Oct. 28 when he informed Congress that there was a new stash of emails that “appear to be pertinent” to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, Mr. Comey had to dig himself out.

On Sunday, he reaffirmed his original decision in July to recommend against charging Mrs. Clinton for her careless handling of emails containing classified information when she was secretary of state. The new emails — on the computer of Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Mrs. Clinton’s close aide Huma Abedin — contain nothing except personal messages and duplicates of emails that had already been reviewed, investigators found.

But you can’t unring a bell. The damage Mr. Comey’s back-and-forthing has done to the election, to his own reputation and to that of the F.B.I. is profound. Nine days of early voting passed after he made his rash announcement about the new emails, an announcement made when he and his investigators knew nothing about the content of those emails because they didn’t even have a search warrant. That was nine days during which millions of voters went to the polls under the false impression — created by Mr. Comey’s action — that there was new evidence against Mrs. Clinton, showing possible criminality.

More at the link. Too bad the political reporting of the story at the NYT was so horrendous and irresponsible.

One more read from a man who saw his abusive father in Donald Trump. Don’t miss this one: My Father Donald Trump, by Oliver Lee Bateman. I’m not going to excerpt from this essay; I hope you’ll go read it at Medium.

I’m going to head out to vote soon, but I’ll be around all day. Please post your thoughts and links in the comment thread and have a fabulous election day! If this thread gets too long, I’ll post another one, and so on until the election is decided tonight.

I love you all!