‘VOTE FOR A WOMAN’ CAMPAIGNS A FLOP

I watched in anticipation as the race for president of the United States unfolded. It was interesting for me, because I was curious to see if Americans would vote for Trump, who has been in an endless battle with the law, or for a woman. Americans have always portrayed themselves as the most politically liberated and ‘woke’ nation, as the new age calls it.

So, voting for a woman by a ‘woke’ nation should not be a problem, right? Wrong! We went through the same thing when it was time to vote for Hillary Clinton. This time, it was a double-edged sword because not only is Kamala Harris a woman, but she is also a Black woman. But that’s not my point today. My point and question today are: Why is it that every time there’s a race for a leadership position between a man and a woman, we (and I say ‘we’ in the most liberal way possible) always count on women voting for the woman? Why are women the primary targets of the ‘vote for a woman’ campaigns? When a man is running for office, he hardly ever makes this his campaign strategy; targeting other men and counting on them as his allies because of gender is never a strategy.

Woman

Why is it a thing when it comes to women? And when that woman fails to make it to office, the reason is always: ‘Other women did not show up for her,’ but it’s never a thing for men to blame their gender for not showing up. It is true that it is always resoundingly clear that women who back a man competing with a woman for a leadership role, such as in the US presidential election, are voting against their own self-interest. What a woman stands for and what she can bring to the table for her fellow women is always a gain for them. But they never look at it like that. In this case, women voted for a man who clearly could not care less about their sexual and reproductive health. They are not the only ones who voted for this; men did too. By that, I mean men voted for a man who does not care about women’s reproductive health.

And that is the problem. Reproductive health should not just be a women’s issue; that is why blaming women for not voting for Kamala is problematic. In many ways, the election results, even in our communities, always seem to contradict generations of progress made toward women’s equality and women’s empowerment generally. Women have made strides in nearly every facet of life, be it education, STEM or other fields, making more money in higher-paying jobs, yet they remain underrepresented in both business and government. I remember how only one woman was voted into Parliament, and when the four women had to be selected as per the provisions of the constitution, it took so much lobbying and advocacy to further convince parliamentarians that it was the right thing to do.

Suitable

Whenever something like this happens, when it is election time and people have to vote for a suitable candidate, campaigns that focus on getting women to vote for each other have the unintended result of putting men against women. Something interesting has been happening on social media right after Trump won the elections; social media posts were circulating by men that read; ‘Your body, my choice.’

Instead of sensitising men on the importance of reproductive health for women, the campaign was used to attack men, and they used the result as a tool to retaliate. So, my question is: Is it still wise to have campaigns that are gender-specific? When has this ever worked before? I have seen the ‘votela make’ campaign in the country, term after term, without producing any positive results. Isn’t it time we went back to the drawing board to re-strategise?

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