katie ferrari

But how much of an impact single women will have on this election and on public policy in the years to come depends, in large part, on whether they begin to recognize their growing political power. Part of this is simply a matter of getting out the vote. According to Page Gardner, in 2016, “for the first time in history, a majority of women voters are projected to be unmarried,” but going into the previous presidential-election season, nearly 40 percent of them had not registered to vote. This is partly because of the very obstacles that single women need social policy to account for: Many are low-earning single parents with erratic schedules, low wages, few child-care options, and no time to wait in lines at polling places where conservative lawmakers have made voting difficult and time consuming.

[Republicans] have mostly retreated to shaming and attempting to punish single women, as when Rand Paul suggested in 2014 capping welfare benefits for women who have children out of wedlock, or Rush Limbaugh referred to unmarried law student Sandra Fluke as a “slut” and a “prostitute” after her testimony in support of mandating birth-control coverage.

Men, especially married wealthy white men, have for generations relied on government assistance. It’s the government that has historically supported white men’s home and business ownership through grants, loans, incentives, and tax breaks. It has allowed them to accrue wealth and offered them shortcuts and bonuses for passing it down to their children. Government established white men’s right to vote, and thus exert control over the government, at the nation’s founding and has protected their enfranchisement since. It has also bolstered the economic and professional prospects of men by depressing the economic prospects of women. In other words, by failing to offer women equivalent economic and civic protections, thus helping to create conditions whereby they were forced to be dependent on those men, the government established a gendered class of laborers who took low-paying or unpaid jobs doing the domestic and child-care work that further enabled men to dominate public spheres.

Whether or not single women are looking for government to create a “hubby state” for them, what is certainly true is that their (white) male counterparts have long enjoyed the fruits of a related “wifey state,” in which the government has supported (white) male independence in a variety of ways. It’s hard for us to recognize this, since it has been the norm for so long — and here, it’s useful to recall Elizabeth Warren’s stirring “You didn’t build that” speech, in which she pointed out that “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.”

But also, a lot of men seem to have the unfortunate idea that they are entitled to be in control and that they need to be in control. It’s an impossible goal. No one’s totally in control of anything. This inability to accept a complex world of equals in which you negotiate in good faith with equals and find common ground is tragic and probably lonely, and a lot of the programming men get seems harmful to them first, all that proving your manhood kind of stuff; the limits on what straight men are supposed to feel and express and enjoy; the toleration of bullying and jeering - those ways some men and boys police others who might not fit the model as well (and that kind of bullying and shaming is a major force in the rampage school shootings we’ve seen the past 15 years, according to Michael Kimmel’s excellent book Angry White Men). It seems like a straitjacket. Free us all.