“Such a nasty woman.”
Donald J. Trump referring to Hillary Clinton during the third presidential debate in Las Vegas on October 19, 2016
“She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell after sanctioning Senator Elizabeth Warren during the hearing for Attorney General nominee Jeffrey Sessions on February 7, 2017
The first quotation is an example of manterruption, the second of mansplaining. Both have been transformed into powerful social media memes – and T-shirts – to further the cause of women’s rights. They have, as the saying goes, “gone viral.” One woman tweeted: “Thanks for the new battle cries!”
For the record, during their third and final debate, Clinton interrupted Trump fewer than five times; Trump interrupted her more than forty times, more than in any of the other debates. Ironically, only minutes before, Trump declared (to audience laughter) that “no one has more respect for women than I do.”
When Clinton said, “Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger. He goes after their dignity, their self-worth, and I don’t think there is a woman anywhere who doesn’t know what that feels like,” many of us agreed and shared with one another our harrowing experiences. Janet Jackson’s 1986 hit song “Nasty,” which had become a theme for women dealing with disrespectful men, was played again, capturing the essence of our problem with Trump.
On the evening of Tuesday, February 7, Elizabeth Warren started to read a statement that Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had written 30 years ago opposing the nomination of Jeffrey Sessions for a federal judgeship. Accused of violating Senate rules against impugning another senator, Warren was barred from continuing by a vote down party lines, followed by McConnell using a strategy designed to silence women. One woman tweeted that his words were “every woman’s epitaph.”
Unable to finish speaking in the nearly empty Senate chamber, Warren took to Facebook Live (“They can shut me up, but they can’t change the truth,” she said.) where she read the entire statement for an audience of over 7 million by Wednesday afternoon.
Here is one paragraph from that statement: “Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge. This simply cannot be allowed to happen. Mr. Sessions’ conduct as a US Attorney, from his politically-motivated voting fraud prosecutions to his indifference toward criminal violations of civil rights laws, indicated that he lacks the temperament, fairness and judgment to be a federal judge.”
In between the dates when the two “manly” quotations were made, on the day after Trump’s poorly attended inauguration, millions of women (and men) around the world, including Antarctica, took to the streets and marched. One woman’s invitation to forty friends to protest a sexual predator making his home in the White House grew to the largest and most peaceful single-day demonstration in U.S. history.
The sheer numbers made an impact, but what really made the day special was the sea of pink hats. The Pussyhat Project was launched over Thanksgiving weekend to draw attention to Trump’s caught-on-tape boasts about grabbing unsuspecting women by their genitals. Its mission was to provide people on the marches with a means to make a unique collective visual statement and to provide people unable to physically participate with a way to represent themselves and support women’s rights. What a rousing success it was, as you can see from the photo of Eleanor Roosevelt sporting one.
Following the march, the organizers of the Women’s March on Washington posted the “10 Actions for the first 100 Days” campaign for joint activism to keep up the momentum. Last month, an Upper West Side “Huddle” convened in our Meeting House to strategize how to implement those actions. In the coming weeks, months and years, we at Ethical will continue to partner with individuals and groups to fight for human rights and environmental protection.
Stay tuned!
