Feminist Currents

Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies is delighted to continue our interactive column, “Feminist Currents.” Eileen Boris, Hull Professor and chair of the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, created this column. She will now be joined by Elizabeth Currans, assistant professor of women’s and gender studies at Eastern Michigan University. They pose a question and invite our readers to respond. Boris and Currans then synthesize and summarize—their intent is to cook up a gumbo out of your responses: mixing, seasoning, and throwing in their own ingredients, as they enable us to engage in feminist dialogue. We see this exchange as a way to strengthen and enrich our feminist community. Or, in Boris’s words, “‘Feminist Currents’ is a place for feminists to debate pressing and not so pressing (sometimes whimsical but hopefully compelling) issues of the day, to share perspectives and thoughts, to develop strategies, and to connect scholarship and teaching to social justice.” The following column was written a month after the 2012 elections. You are reading it nearly a year later.

“Binders full of women,” “legitimate rape,” “first openly lesbian senator”—these memorable phrases emerged from the 2012 election, one that CNN dubbed “the year of the woman” and the Huffington Post named “a groundbreaking, glass-ceiling-smashing milestone for women.” ¹ Worthy women became women firsts: senator from their state or representative from their ethnic group. Republicans fought another “war on women,” placing the body at the center of public discourse through Indiana candidate Richard Mourdock’s claim that “God intended” pregnancies from rape; vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s touting of his pro-life position no matter “the method of contraception”; and talk-radio partisan Rush Limbaugh’s insults against Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke, who dared to defend mandatory access to contraception required by “Obamacare” even at religious institutions. According to popular accounts such attacks led to a feminist victory: a record [End Page 255 ] number of women elected to Congress (twenty senators, seventy-seven representatives) and the widest gender gap ever at twenty points. (Obama won 12 percent more women—down by 2 percentage points from 2008, however—and Romney 8 percent more men; the gender-gap number results from adding together these numbers.)

The issue of reproductive rights made a difference in a few races, notably the Missouri and Indiana senatorial contests. Single women and young women (eighteen to twenty-nine) voted overwhelmingly for Obama. But so did women with children, who joined other voters to rank the economy their top priority. And in this regard racialized class made a difference among women. Obama owed his victory to the 96 percent of African American, 76 percent of Latina, and 66 percent of other minority, predominantly Asian American, women who went for him. White women, disproportionately better off economically, voted similarly to their men, with 56 percent supporting Romney. ² Romney and Ryan couldn’t quite get the significance of equal pay, which the Democrats promoted as helping wage-earning women care for their families. Further, the Democrats never missed an opportunity to remind women of the material benefits of Obama’s health insurance law. Romney, in contrast, directly appealed to maternal concern for the future of their children, with his “Dear Daughter” campaign ad portraying a mother rocking a baby while the voiceover explains, “your share of Obama’s debt is over $50,000. And it grows every day.” ³ The “mommy wars” that pundit Hilary Rosen reignited with her disparagement of Ann Romney as someone who “never worked a day in her life”—as if motherhood wasn’t hard labor—reflected the demographic targets of the two campaigns. ⁴ More broadly, we might conclude, women’s bodies—as reproducers, workers, and candidates—dominated media coverage of the 2012 election. But was this a campaign about women or one in which “woman” served as an organizing object for political parties?

For this column we asked, “What do you think the significance of the 2012 US election is for women’s, gender, and sexuality studies?” You certainly didn’t agree. Three major narratives emerged from...