‘The elephant in the room is white and female’

There are only a few days left until the US midterm elections and, if a new poll is to be believed, white women might help contribute to a red wave. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that white suburban women have “significantly shifted” their support from Democrats to Republicans amid “rising concerns over the economy and inflation”. The Journal found that white suburban women “now favor Republicans for Congress by 15 percentage points, moving 27 percentage points away from Democrats since the Journal‘s August poll”.

Hang on a second. What about reproductive rights? What about the fact that Republican states have implemented dystopian abortion laws that, among other horror stories, forced a 10-year-old rape victim to flee her home state in order to have a safe and legal abortion? What about the fact that Republicans are threatening to overturn the right to contraception? Doesn’t that all count for something?

Democratic strategists certainly thought it might. After Roe v Wade was overturned in June, it looks like the November midterms would be a referendum on reproductive rights and Democrats spent accordingly. According to a CNN analysis, Democratic campaigns and groups spent $214m on broadcast TV ads that mentioned abortion – 45% of all the ad money spent by the party over that time. By contrast they spent less than $18m on ads about inflation; a fraction of the $77m Republicans spent on the topic during the same period.

It seems that, when it comes to white suburbia at least, abortion-focused ads have fallen on increasingly indifferent ears. Reproductive rights are still a concern, according to the Journal’s poll, but they’re not as top of mind as the fact that food prices are through the roof and we seem to be hurtling into a recession. It’s understandable that people might be more worried about feeding their family than family planning right now. Still, it’s not like you can trust Republicans to make the economy better; they have a track record of doing quite the opposite. You can certainly trust them to make reproductive rights worse, however.

The fact that white suburban women might vote for a party that is eager to legislate their uteruses just because the same party is making vague promises to fix the economy has shocked some commentators. On Thursday, Sunny Hostin, a co-host of ABC’s The View likened suburban women voting Republican to “roaches voting for Raid … they’re voting against their own self-interest”. It’s not really a great idea to compare any group of people to cockroaches and this quote was immediately seized upon by the rightwing press and spun into its own news cycle. Still, you get the idea, voting for a party that doesn’t quite see you as human seems bonkers.

Alas, white women have been voting against their own (reproductive) interests for a very long time. White women have voted for the Republican candidate in the past 18 presidential elections, the Washington Post has noted, “breaking only for Lyndon B Johnson and for Bill Clinton’s second term”. White women memorably voted in large numbers for Donald Trump, a proud misogynist. “The elephant in the room is white and female, and she has been standing there since 1952,” the political scientist Jane Junn wrote in 2016. “This result has been hiding in plain sight, obscured by a normative bias that women are more Democratic than men. They are … But this does not mean that white women are more Democratic overall. They are not.”

The takeaway here, by the way, isn’t that American voters don’t care about Roe v Wade being overturned any more. Abortion rights are still very much top of mind for voters. Among likely Democratic voters in the CNN poll, 29% named abortion as their top issue, while 27% chose the economy. The Republicans’ extreme stance on abortion has galvanized more young women to say they will vote; despite the Wall Street Journal’s poll, there’s still a very good chance reproductive rights could help swing the midterms in the Democrats’ favour. Still, the Journal’s poll is also a sobering reminder that women are not a monolith. Some women will also vote in ways that threaten their bodily autonomy if it helps bolster their status overall. Patriarchy requires its handmaidens.

China tells women to ‘respect family values’ in revised law

“Women should respect and obey national laws, respect social morals, professional ethics and family values,” according to an amendment to China’s Women’s Rights and Interests Protection Law. As birth rates drop in China, the government seems to be trying to push more women out of public life and into traditional caregiver roles. Last month, for example China’s Politburo standing committee, the small group that runs the country, became entirely male for the first time since 1997.

Alcohol deaths rose among women during the pandemic

Excessive drinking has been killing increasing numbers of middle-aged American adults for nearly two decades. However, things got markedly worse during the pandemic when lockdown drove many of us to drink. Alcohol-related deaths rose by 26% from 2019 to 2020; among women aged 35-44 they went up 42% in the same period. From 2000 through 2018, age-adjusted alcohol-related deaths rose yearly, but never at a rate higher than 7%, NBC reports.

Miss Puerto Rico and Miss Argentina marry in a secret ceremony

Hoping Netflix makes a holiday movie about this immediately.

Women globally retire with a quarter less wealth than men

The wealth gap is largely due to the gender pay gap and the fact that the burden of parenting still largely falls on women.

Only 5.3% of all US state legislators are women with children under the age of 18 at home

That’s according to data collected by the Vote Mama Foundation, which is dedicated to getting mothers, specifically Democrats, elected to public office. Meanwhile only 7% of members of Congress are mothers of minor children – in comparison, nearly 18% of people in the US are mothers with kids under 18.

The week in pawtriarchy

Your dog may be judging you – but only if your dog is female. A new study out of Japan has found that female dogs can recognize “a human’s competence and adjust their behavior based on their evaluation”. Luckily for me I have a male dog who doesn’t notice my incompetence. He’s a good simple boy.