Kamala Harris & The Politics Of Joy – CleanTechnica

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

If you watched the Democratic National Convention last week, you were a witness to a cultural and political shift in the United States. Gone were the tired old white men we are accustomed to seeing at such events. What we saw instead was an endless stream of smart, successful, articulate women of color like Kamala Harris who exploded the negative myths about them that have dominated human culture for millenia. Readers are always free to disagree with my musings and many of you will, but what I saw in Chicago last week was a revolution fueled not by hatred but by joy — the joy that comes from women in America finally taking center stage, a place they have deserved since the nation was formed.

The Empowerment Of Women

In a blog post on August 18, 2024, Heather Cox Richardson put a spotlight on how long and arduous the path to equality for America’s women has been. It was exactly 104 years ago that the Nineteenth Amendment went into effect after the Tennessee legislature ratified it by one vote. It was one of those moments when the gates of history turned on a tiny hinge. The deciding vote was cast by Harry T. Burn, who supported suffrage but was under pressure to vote no. His mother urged him to vote yes despite the pressure. “I believe in full suffrage as a right,” he said. “I believe we had a moral and legal right to ratify. I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for her boy to follow, and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.”

The new amendment was patterned on the Fifteenth Amendment, which protected the right of Black men to vote. It said, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” Some may recall the movie about the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg entitled On The Basis Of Sex, in which she became prominent in legal circles for her fierce and tenacious insistence that the plain words of the Nineteenth Amendment become firmly embedded in American jurisprudence.

Like the momentum for the Fifteenth Amendment, the push for rights for women had taken root during the Civil War, Richardson wrote, as women backed the United States armies with their money, buying bonds and paying taxes; with their loved ones, sending sons and husbands and fathers to the war front; with their labor, working in factories and fields and taking over from men in the nursing and teaching professions; and even with their lives, spying and fighting for the Union. In the aftermath of the war. As the divided nation was rebuilt, many of them expected they would have a say in how it was reconstructed. But to their dismay, the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly tied the right to vote to “male” citizens, inserting the word “male” into the Constitution for the first time.

Boston abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, the author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was outraged. The laws of the era gave control of her property and her children to her abusive husband, and while far from a rabble-rouser, she wanted the right to adjust those laws so they were fair. In that moment, it seemed the right the Founders had articulated in the Declaration of Independence — the right to consent to the government under which one lived — was to be denied to the very women who had helped preserve the country, while white male Confederates and now Black men both enjoyed that right.

“The Civil War came to an end, leaving the slave not only emancipated, but endowed with the full dignity of citizenship. The women of the North had greatly helped to open the door which admitted him to freedom and its safeguard — the ballot. “Was this door to be shut in their face?” Howe wondered.

From Elizabeth Stanton & Susan B. Anthony To Kamala Harris

The next year, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, and six months later, Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe founded the American Woman Suffrage Association, which wanted a general reworking of gender roles in American society. At the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, the convention’s Declaration of Sentiments, which was modeled explicitly on the Declaration of Independence, asserted that “all men and women are created equal” and that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” It listed the many ways in which men had “fraudulently deprived [women] of their most sacred rights” and insisted that women receive “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.”

Suffragists had hoped that women would be included in the Fifteenth Amendment, and when they were not, decided to test their right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1872 election. According to that amendment, anyone born in the US was a citizen. Women were certainly citizens and should be able to vote, they reasoned. In New York state, Susan B. Anthony voted successfully, but was later tried and convicted — in an all-male courtroom in which she did not have the right to testify — for the crime of voting.

In Missouri, a voting registrar named Reese Happersett refused to permit suffragist Virginia Minor to register. Minor sued Happersett, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision in 1875, the justices decided that women were indeed citizens, but that citizenship did not necessarily convey the right to vote.

This decision meant the fat was in the fire for Black Americans in the South, as it paved the way for white supremacists to keep them from the polls in 1876. But it was also a blow to suffragists, who recast their claims to voting by moving away from the idea that they had a human right to consent to their government, and toward the idea that they would be better and more principled voters than the Black men and immigrants who had the right to vote according to the Fourteenth Amendment.

For the next two decades, the women’s suffrage movement drew its power from the many women’s organizations put together across the country by women of all races and backgrounds who came together to stop excessive drinking, clean up the sewage in city streets, protect children, stop lynching, and promote civil rights. Black women like educator Mary Church Terrell and journalist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, publisher of the Woman’s Era, brought a broad lens to the movement from their work for civil rights, but they could not miss that Black women stood in between the movements for Black rights and women’s rights, a position scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw would identify In the twentieth century as “intersectionality.”

In 1890 the two major suffrage associations merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association and worked to change voting laws at the state level. Gradually, western states and territories permitted women to vote in certain elections until by 1920, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, California, Oregon, Arizona, Kansas, Alaska Territory, Montana, and Nevada recognized women’s right to vote in at least some elections.

Suffragists soon recognized that action at the federal level would be more effective than a state-by-state strategy. The day before Democratic president Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated in 1913, they organized a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., that grabbed media attention. They continued civil disobedience to pressure Wilson into supporting their movement.

A War Leads To Victory For Women

Still, it took World War I to light a fire under the lawmakers whose votes were necessary to get a suffrage amendment through Congress and send it off to the states for ratification. Wilson, finally on board as he faced a difficult midterm election in 1918, backed a constitutional amendment, asking Congress, “Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?” Congress passed the measure in a special session on June 4, 1919, and Tennessee’s ratification on August 18, 1920, made it the law of the land as soon as the official notice was in the hands of the secretary of state. Twenty-six million American women had the right to vote in the 1920 presidential election.

Crucially, as the Black suffragists had known all too well when they found themselves caught between the drives for Black male voting and women’s suffrage, Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws meant that most Black women and women of color would remain unable to vote for another 45 years. And yet they never stopped fighting for that right. Women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Amelia Boynton, Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Constance Baker Motley were key organizers of voting rights initiatives, spreading information, arranging marches, sparking key protests, and preparing legal cases.

In 1980, women began to shift their votes to the Democrats, and in 1984 the Democrats nominated Representative Geraldine Ferraro of New York to run for vice president alongside presidential candidate Walter Mondale. Republicans followed suit in 2008 when they nominated Alaska governor Sarah Palin to run with Arizona senator John McCain. Still, it was not until 2016 that a major political party nominated a woman, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, for president. In 2020 the Democrats nominated California senator Kamala Harris for vice president, and when voters elected her and President Joe Biden, they made her the first female vice president of the United States.

And so, on the anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the delegates in Chicago came to together to celebrate the nomination of Kamala Harris for president. As Heather Cox Richardson wrote, “It’s been a long time coming.”

The Soft Bigotry Of Sexism

It is said that for those accustomed to privilege, equality feels like punishment. On the right, we have cartoon charters like JD Vance wailing about “childless cat ladies” and promising laws that will make every uterus in America the property of governments at the state and federal level. We have a woman in Texas who faces incarceration for the crime of voting, just as Susan B. Anthony was 150 years ago. Women all across America are facing criminal prosecution for the crime of becoming pregnant while the males who contributed to the pregnancy are exempt from all legal consequences. Is that equal justice under the law?

Compare the speech given by Michelle Obama to any speech ever given by Donald Trump or JD Vance. Hers was cogent and logical. She said when Black women face an obstacle, they square their shoulders, get to work, and do something. They do not expect a golden escalator to carry them to the top and they do not rely on the “affirmative action of generational wealth.” But even while she was taking Trump apart in public, she did it with a sense of joy that was in marked contrast to the venom, vituperation, and vitriol that has become the hallmark of the so-called Republican party. The United Center in Chicago was electrified by what she had to say, as were those of us watching on television. Michele Obama gave the perfect intro to the speech Kamala Harris would deliver at the close of the convention.

The Takeaway

Many people have been waiting for someone, somewhere, to confront Donald Trump and his coterie of co-conspirators and expose them for the small-minded weaklings they are. Anyone who is familiar with the Wizard of Oz will immediately see the similarity between the scene where Toto the dog pulls back the curtain to expose the wizard as just a doddering old fool, a creature of bombast and bilious blatherings, a huckster and a grifter who based his supposed power on a charade.

Now that Trump and his acolytes have been exposed as frauds, they have lost their power to frighten, intimidate, and browbeat us with their spew of distortions and outright lies. Kamala has set us free from the tyranny of Trump and made it possible to be proud of our nation again. She has given us hope. She has given us joy. Now go forth and spread the word. A smart, savvy women of color will lead America forward starting in January of 2025. The promise of the women’s suffrage movement, as embodied in the Nineteenth Amendment will finally be realized.

Many years ago, during the dark days of the Bush Lite administration when truth was taking a back seat to fears about yellow cake and weapons of mass destruction, I had the opportunity to ask Harry Belafonte if there was any way to counter the forces of ignorance rampant across America. “Yes,” he said, “the empowerment of women.”  His vision has taken more than 20 years to come to fruition, but now the time is here. America will soon celebrate her first woman president and We Are Never Going Back!