Dear Obama: Women Are People. Not just the Wives, Mothers and Daughters of People.

In the State of the Union, Obama used a habitual rhetorical device for referring to women: “We know our economy is stronger when our wives, mothers, and daughters can live their lives free from discrimination in the workplace, and free from the fear of domestic violence.”

Mellisa at Shakesville comments:

That framing is garbage. It is reductive, it is misogynist, it is alienating, it defines women by their relationships to other people, it suggests that Obama is speaking to The Men of America about their “wives, mothers, and daughters” and not speaking to those wives, mothers, daughters, and any women who are none of those things and/or do not define themselves that way.

It is infuriating to continually hear my President use that framing.

To that end, I have started a petition at the White House’s We the People website, petitioning the Obama administration to stop using the “wives, mothers, & daughters” rhetorical frame that defines women by their relationships to other people. […]

We now have 30 days to get 100,000 signatures in order for the petition to be reviewed by the White House. Sign the petition. Pass it on. Share it on social media. Email it to feminist friends. WORK THOSE TEASPOONS.

I’ve signed the petition.

This entry posted in Feminism, sexism, etc, Language Politics, The Obama Administration. Bookmark the permalink. 

13 Responses to Dear Obama: Women Are People. Not just the Wives, Mothers and Daughters of People.

  1. 1
    Myca says:

    I signed too, and I agree with the thrust of Melissa’s argument, though I think Obama’s framing is a deliberate, desperate attempt to coax some small measure of empathy out of the fuckers who oppose things like VAWA and the Fair Pay Act.

    —Myca

  2. 2
    Robert says:

    Not to derail, but opposition to the Democratic agenda on the latest iteration of VAWA (which has flaws at the Constitutional level totally unrelated to its core mission, which is fine, and supported on a bipartisan basis) or the Fair Pay Act (which does nothing to facilitate actual fairness in pay going forward, but rather sets up a special category of lawsuit which can be brought years or decades after a wrongful act is commissioned, leading to not only the possibility but the certainty that organizations will be sued for acts long since disavowed, committed by people long since dead, making defense against spurious claims extremely difficult) is not based on a lack of empathy for women.

    It is barely possible that you don’t know those things, and honestly think that the Fair Pay Act is all about requiring equal treatment or published standards or some other good-governmenty thing that would make you feel all warm inside; it’s barely possible that you think that without VAWA (which mainly serves as the appropriations conduit for a couple billion dollars in Federal grants to various law-enforcement and victims-rights organizations) it would become legal once more to rape and pillage through the distaff set. Barely, but I suspect you know the things I mentioned in the first paragraph.

    It’s not possible, however, that Barack Obama doesn’t know them. So the likelihood that he is using this (I agree) appalling “our wimminfolk” framing to attempt to get ’empathy’ for his aw-shucks-just-common-sense-lets-stop-beating-up-the-wimmins laws, is zero, because he is perfectly aware that the correlation between empathy for women and the predilection to vote for these technocratic lawyer-feeding-fest revisions to existing law is zero.

    He uses the appalling “our wimminfolk” framing because he wants his party and its agenda to get more male votes (the recordsetting 18-point gender gap that helped him earn reelection discomfits Democratic strategists), he is genuinely contemptuous of his ordinary fellow male citizens, he believes that referencing women as objects and property is a way to create a resonance between his own persona and that of the American backwoods yokels, and he honestly thinks American women are stupid enough not to notice it.

  3. 3
    Ampersand says:

    Shorter Robert: We should bend over backwards to not ascribe any bad motives to the GOP, because bad motives only belong to that horrible worthless scumbag Obama. Got it.

  4. 4
    Robert says:

    Nah, plenty of bad motives on my side of the table. No need to go inventing extra ones, then, just so as not to feel bad about being in a position of being obliged to point out that Obama really is a scumbag.

  5. 5
    Ampersand says:

    All right… Why do you think VAWA is unconstitutional? As you probably know, the stories given by GOP Congressmen have varied, so it’s necessary to know which one you’re talking about.

    As for the Fair Pay act, of course it’s always possible for the GOP to spin ludicrous stories about why any law, no matter how reasonable or sensible, will lead to bad outcomes for bosses (the only people Republicans care about). The fact is, if the only concern had been what you described, the GOP could have offered alternate legislation (or an amendment) that would address cases like Lily Ledbetter’s (sp?) but exclude cases of someone suing over what she got paid on a job that she quit thirty years ago, or whatever spurious concern it is you’re making up. I don’t recall that they did so. Am I mistaken?

    leading to not only the possibility but the certainty that organizations will be sued for acts long since disavowed, committed by people long since dead, making defense against spurious claims extremely difficult

    Since this is such a “certainty,” perhaps you can link to a couple of actual, documented cases such as you describe?

  6. 6
    Emily says:

    Roberts derailing. I noticed this exact thing when I read the SOTU. It stuck out like a sore thumb.

  7. 7
    Robert says:

    The old VAWA isn’t unconstitutional; it’s been around for years.

    There is an objectionable section of the new one which (as I understand it) is unconstitutional because it gives tribal courts authority to prosecute sexual crimes committed by non-Indians on tribal land. Tribal courts do not have to provide the procedural safeguards guaranteed under US law (and generally don’t). The government can’t delegate its responsibility to provide due process for American citizens to a different sovereign entity (which the tribes are), at least not when it knows those entities will not provide the due process.

    Why should Lily Ledbetter’s case BE addressed? OK, she got fucked over by her employers a thousand years ago. That sucks. But there is a statute of limitations on filing suit – every kind of suit, for every kind of harm. For pay discrimination, it’s two years or three years, depending on the type of discrimination.

    There are people all over the country who find out that X years ago, party Y did them wrong – and there’s not really a remedy. That is regrettable, but the reason for establishing SOME cutoff is obvious: if everything ever done under the sun is grounds to go to law, everything in society snarls to a halt as people sue over things that happened years and decades past. You have a certain amount of time to find out that you got fucked over. The ‘Fair Pay’ act creates a category of people who get extra time; effectively unlimited time.

    As for ‘show me a case’ – how about Lily Ledbetter v. Goodyear, the original one? Ms. Ledbetter worked for Goodyear for 20 years and following her retirement, filed a suit. The suit was dismissed because she failed to file suit in a timely manner; it went to the Supremes, who affirmed that the statute of limitations is not a minor matter to be disregarded. At the time of her suit, the person who she claimed had discriminated against her originally was dead.

    So how does Goodyear defend itself against a claim that one of its managers broke the equal pay laws, when that manager is years dead by the time of the trial? They can’t, obviously. That’s one of the basic and fundamental reasons for statutes of limitations – so that people won’t wait for the evidence-givers who can rebut their statements to die or retire into inaccessibility before filing suit.

    So this is not some vague random hypothetical that any law could cause this problem etc. The problem is specific and has *already occurred*. The law which Myca feels all woman-empathizers MUST support, gives women an ‘out’ on one of the safeguards meant to keep our court system fair and honest. It’s not about the ‘bosses’ – your old employers can’t come suing YOU years and years later, either.

  8. 8
    AMM says:

    If I may derail the discussion in the direction of the OP:

    I can’t help wondering what African-American women (esp. AA feminists) thought of the “wives, mothers, and daughters” line.

    I recall that there was a race-correlated disagreement over how to view Ms. Obama’s being a stay-at-home mother. For white feminists, it was seen as reinforcing Patriarchy roles, but for AA women, it was seen as (re-)claiming a right that is usually denied to Women of Color.

    That experience made me wonder whether AA women might view this phrasing somewhat differently from the way white feminists do.

  9. 9
    Ann Q says:

    and why are sisters left out?

  10. 10
    Honey Badger says:

    I agree with Myca. Many men just do not realise that women are people, and representing them as wives and daughters was probably the attempt to make those men realise that their own wives and daughters could be affected.

    I am from Germany. It is sad to admit, but many german men will not even oppose sexual harassment in discussions unless they are reminded that their own wives and daughters could be the victims.

    I understand your anger, though. But when I first used the “wives and daughters”-reasoning in a discussion, I was actually pleased with the success of it. I never had that success in discussions when I represented woman as people.

  11. 11
    Elusis says:

    I’m reminded of this essay at Family Inequalities:

    http://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/do-people-working-work-in-working-families/

    (Becos’ I’m a working person who’s not in a “family” and just as I’m not a wife or mother – but I am a daughter – I get tired of being left out.)

  12. Pingback: I agree with Melissa McEwan | Feminist Critics

  13. 12
    Philip N. Cohen says:

    It’s the old saw from the male comedian, who starts a joke with, “Don’t you hate it when your wife…” And then the audience is men, or is made to think like men if they want to get the joke.