Swing state women: Time to rewrite history.
The Boston Globe
When I was 17, I was denied the editor’s job at my high school newspaper because I was a girl — which I know because years later the faculty sponsor confessed and apologized.
When I was in my twenties, I got a job at a magazine where the men who did the hiring secretly considered dress size a job qualification, and months later watched the copy desk threaten a walkout to make sure a wildly capable size 10 got a job.
In my thirties, I owned more than one power suit and a collapsible stroller. And now that I carry a Medicare card, I am invisible. Ask almost anyone, including men my own age.
So much for women rewriting our identities in permanent ink.
White baby boomer women, born between 1946 and 1964, have for eight years taken a big chunk of the rap for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential election loss, and yes, a daunting number voted for her opponent — but there’s a subset of us who didn’t, who came of age when feminist was a compliment and not a historical footnote. We’d like to have a word, given the rights rollbacks that threaten all of us: My friends and I have been joyful warriors for a while; OK, not always joyful, and certainly flawed, but we got some stuff done. On Election Day, we can help write the next chapter and reclaim our dignity in the process.
What do we want? A woman president. When do we want her? Now, and with a yearning that surprised me at first and no longer does. To be blunt: Women my age are running out of time to witness gender equity in the Oval Office. Campaigns are a numbers game, polls, percentages, electoral math, target demographics, but all the spin in the world can’t budge the government’s life expectancy numbers. The eldest average boomer, now 78, is voting in her penultimate presidential election, and don’t get sidetracked defending how active and health-conscious you are; these are average numbers. The youngest average boomer, who turns 60 this year, can look forward to seven presidential elections after this one but has already voted in nine.
We have few opportunities left for celebration, for the chance to step around shards of ceiling glass and feel what I expect will be a lovely breeze as fresh air rushes in.
On a practical level, we are well-positioned to make a difference this time: A new study from KFF says that 7 in 10 Democratic women feel more motivated to vote in this election — and older women lead the pack with a 79 percent positive response, over 20 percentage points higher than younger women. And an earlier Emerson College poll reported a 10 percentage point gender gap among registered voters over 70, with more women than men identifying as Democrats and a three-point advantage for Kamala Harris. After a quarter-century of voting for Republican presidential candidates, we seem ready for a change.
A disproportionately large number of older voters lived in Rust Belt states — Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan — in 2018. If the Democrats among them haven’t moved out of state, they could be just the swing a swing state needs to go blue.
The only cloud on the horizon is the pace at which we embrace Harris’s candidacy, which is not as fast as younger voters. I worry, some, that older women who are used to being ignored have started to believe that they, and their votes, no longer matter, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
Victory feels so close, except for the angsty moments when the magnitude of the moment swamps us. Over the past month, my friends and I have developed a jittery version of Governor Tim Walz’s “We’ll sleep when we’re dead,” as we look for someplace to invest all this deferred energy. As an aggregate, we send texts to voters in Wisconsin, sign up to make calls in Pennsylvania, call each other to parse the polls and the headlines, and volunteer at voter registration events. We chat a blue streak: I am part of a group of strangers, brought together from around the country by a woman I’ve known forever, who discuss the election via email.
The formation and maintenance of boundaries, a fundamental aspiration in the world of therapy and self-care, is no match for this level of desire. I start conversations about politics with the baristas at my local coffee place. I admitted my enthusiasm to a financial type I’m pretty sure is a Republican and am ready if she wants to declare herself and debate. I remember how it felt to be in my twenties; it’s good to make some noise.
When nerves take over, and they do, I make jam, give each batch a campaign-related name, and post an Instagram story about it. I won’t nag people outright about voting, which would play into the caricature of the old lady with too much time on her hands. I prefer a gentler but firm nudge — like the debut of my Presidential Pantsuit Burgundy Plum jam, made when the local Burgundy plum crop coincided with the news that Harris’s pantsuit collection includes one in that color.
I know what too many people think I should do at this point in my life: Kick back if I can afford it, try not to be too much of a burden if I can’t, rifle entitlement programs and face hostility for it — an animosity that has always befuddled me, as though it were my decision to exist and not my parents’ — and get comfy on the sidelines.
Nope. There’s a contingent of us I’ll call the transition generation — not shirt-waisted homemakers like my mom, not as unfettered as my daughter — a shadow constituency ready to make one more run at the future. And if you still consider boomer an epithet, think again: Kamala Harris is one, though barely, born just two months before the category expired at the end of 1964, part of a younger crowd supposedly so different from early boomers, in experience and perspective, that it has its own
name, Generation Jones.
Listening to her, I don’t see where we diverge; more unites us than divides us, as they say. I’m not talking about granular policy points but about intent, which informs everything else and is where we align. I can’t tell if Donald Trump and JD Vance think they can rouse enough men to carry the day with their demeaning attacks on
Harris’s gender — and racial identity, intelligence, appearance, dating history, and first name — but every time I hear their insults I hear the sound of an older woman slamming the door on the way to her polling place.
I hope the election results redeem us. I hope the numbers remind people that there are older women who don’t fit the stereotype, who’ve been busy with change all our lives.
We can sleep when we’re dead with the best of them.