A reproductive rights supporter holds a banner outside a rally where Gov. Gretchen Whitmer spoke in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Nov. 6.BRITTANY GREESON/The New York Times News Service
This is the weekly Amplify newsletter, where you can be inspired and challenged by the voices, opinions and insights of women at The Globe and Mail.
Marsha Lederman is a columnist at The Globe and Mail.
Rare has been the moment over these last few years when I have watched developments in U.S. politics and not felt sick to my stomach. But this week was less awful, as a promised/threatened (depending on your perspective) Republican red wave (or “bloodbath” as Donald Trump Jr. prematurely put it) did not materialize.
The results of the U.S. midterm elections are still somewhat in flux as I write this, but we already know that for the Democrats, the outcome was far better than feared. Poll predictions aside, it can be unusual for the party in power to perform well in midterms – especially when circumstances are grim, such as skyrocketing inflation and a looming recession. This is generally when people want change.
But they don’t want crazy.
Recent developments, including the actions of a conservative-dominated Supreme Court, were too much for women and young people in general. It appears the overturning of Roe v. Wade galvanized voters, women in particular (but not solely). The abortion issue, analysts are saying, helped stem the red wave. Women do not want to lose autonomy over their bodies.
For the Republicans, the anti-abortion stance backfired at the ballot box.
As U.S. President Joe Biden said on Thursday, “Women in America made their voices heard, man.”
A number of candidates with extreme anti-abortion views lost their elections.
They include Bo Hines in North Carolina, who had called for a “community-level review process” for pregnant women who had been sexually assaulted to access abortion.
This is in addition to states where abortions rights were directly on the ballot – and where women’s rights prevailed.
So thank you, young people who came out to vote. Thank you, women. Thank you, Republicans, for pushing voters to the brink with your anti-woman policies and your nasty rhetoric.
Actually, I take that back. I can’t thank this iteration of the GOP for anything.
Also, a reminder that victory for individual women does not always translate into victory for women in general. I give you Sarah Huckabee Sanders. She will make history as the first female governor of Arkansas. But the state’s governor-elect has a spotty record with the truth, having served as White House press secretary for Donald Trump.
(I also give you far-right anti-abortion conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was re-elected in Georgia. And like-minded (although I use the word “mind” loosely here) Republican Lauren Boebert who, as I write this, is in a very tight race with Democrat Adam Frisch in Colorado.)
I still have moments where I fantasize about how different the U.S. would be – how different the world would be – had Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump in 2016, as she should have. That’s history now. And we are now a polarized, ugly world.
Even if the results of the U.S. midterms are good for women, that is no reason to become complacent.
Did you hear Ron DeSantis’s victory speech, after winning re-election as Florida governor? Where he bellowed about the woke agenda? And the people cheered?
“We reject woke ideology,” Mr. DeSantis, who is widely believed to harbour presidential aspirations, said to wild applause. “We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”
Woke is the term for being alert (or awake) to social injustice in society – racism, in particular. But also gender discrimination and other types of social injustice.
That’s what these people were cheering against.
Women, racialized people – all of us – should be extremely concerned about this.
The next two years are going to be interesting … and scary. I sure hope women and young people and others who believe in bodily autonomy and social justice can make America good again.
What else we’re thinking about:
The Scotiabank Giller Prize was awarded this week to Calgary’s Suzette Mayr for her novel The Sleeping Car Porter, which the jury said “brings to life – believably, achingly, thrillingly – a whole world contained in a passenger train moving across the Canadian vastness, nearly 100 years ago.”
I have had a busy fall so have managed to read only one of this year’s shortlisted books: Tsering Yangzom Lama’s We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, set in Tibet, Nepal and Toronto, is a gorgeous meditation on exile and connections – familial and geopolitical.
Consider this stunning passage: “It is one thing to spend your life circling a place you cannot enter. It is another to be forced to walk away from all you know, launched toward an abyss, onto this rocky earth that breaks apart, dissolving under your feet, as if to say even the earth here is precarious.”
This novel is highly recommended. And The Sleeping Car Porter is next on my list.
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