Women finding a way; it's traditional

The MAGAs don't like women. In fact, we scare them. We might just think for ourselves.

Note from a public women's bathroom

So contends feminist journalist Jill Filipovic. 

There is ... conservative rage and panic over the prospect of their wives voting for Kamala Harris and simply not telling them. Harris supporters have launched a strategy of telling women that their votes are private, and no one has to know who you cast your ballot for — including your Trump-supporting husband. Fox News’s Jesse Waters griped that a woman voting for Harris and not telling her husband is “the same thing as having an affair... that violates the sanctity of our marriage.” That, he said, “would be D Day.” (Waters, it’s worth noting, divorced after he had an affair and is now married to his former affair partner).

Donald Trump, for his part, has doubled down on his Big Daddy pitch to women: “I want to protect the women of our country,” Trump said at a rally. “They said sir I just think it’s inappropriate for you to say… I said well I’m gonna do it whether the women like it or not.”

Which doesn’t sound so far from “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

This is the misogyny election. It’s the election of abortion bans. It’s the election of conservative husbands who are enraged at the very thought of their wives having minds of their own. It’s the election of a man who boasts about sexual assault and demeans women who challenge him in the crudest of terms. ...

Here's hoping women can bring this contest home. The polls show an enormous gender gap between the voting intentions of men and women. It's girls against the boys. And the boys may get all hot up -- but do they vote? In general, women cast a considerable majority of ballots in presidential elections.

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None of this is entirely new. I've written here before about learning how to work elections from my Republican committee-woman mother and her diligently maintained turnout lists. She patrolled her precincts and woe to the Republican voter who didn't show up. "Too busy; went fishing" said one indignant note on a voting record.

Yet in the 1964 presidential contest between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, I was always sure she secretly pulled the lever for the Texan. She had dragged me to the kick-off for Goldwater's running mate, the local forgettable Congressman from nearby Lockport, William Miller. He was a small-minded, abrasive McCarthyite. She distributed the Goldwater lit. But Goldwater scared her. She couldn't vote for a man she thought both rigid and dangerous. So I am pretty sure she didn't.

My father dutifully turned out for Barry. But none of this stuff engaged him.

My mother remained a Republican until she died in 1999. I wonder whether she'd still be a Republican today? Upper middle class white women with college degrees in cities, like her, have mostly "evolved," now voting as Dems whether they trumpet it or not.

If Harris wins, a lot of women will have found their own way.