Since the beginning of the United States, the very constitution upon which our government was founded did not define women or people of color as people.
When the founders wrote “for the people, by the people,” what they meant was “for the (white, wealthy) men, by the (white, wealthy) men.”
White men, age 21 and older, who owned property were given the right to vote in 1776, and though the 15th amendment removed racial barriers to voting in 1870, states continued to practice voter discrimination, effectively denying Black people the right to participate in elections.
White women were granted the right to vote in 1920, and it wasn’t until 1965 that Black people were ensured a free path to the voting booth with the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Even still, today, politicians participate in voter suppression in myriad ways, trying to keep women (and others relegated to the margins by a system built for and by men) away from voting booths.
What’s so scary about people who don’t look like you practicing their right to vote? They won’t vote for you.
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This week, women and other minorities won BIG on election night. Virginia turned blue, electing its first woman governor, Abigail Spanberger; New Jersey elected its first Democratic woman governor, Mikie Sherrill; and Virginia also elected Ghazala Hashmi as Lt. Governor, making her the first Muslim woman to be elected to a statewide office in the nation.
Mary Sheffield was elected as the first Black woman to be Mayor of Detroit, and Michelle Wu, Boston’s first Asian American woman mayor, ran unopposed and will serve a second term. These are just a few of the night’s sweeping victories.
Zohran Mamdani, elected Tuesday night as the first Muslim mayor of New York City, was polling at only 1% a year ago. He won in a landslide on a platform supporting the working class, immigrant people of the iconic American city. He’s also not yet 35, and his spouse, Rama Duwaji, is not yet 30. And, to top it all off, Mamdani announced his transition team last Wednesday, which is a slate of all women who have the experience and leadership he needs as he takes the helm of America’s largest city.
Sing it with Queen Bey—Who runs the world? Girls!
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As a feminist theologian and storyteller, as well as a follower of Jesus and the women whom he followed, it’s my job to read the ancient stories of the past, the stories that have shaped and continue to shape our faith, with an eye on their connection to what and who is happening now.
It’s not as if the women of this week are new. It’s that the witness of Deborah, Huldah, Hagar, Queen Vashti, and other ancient women live onward within us. It’s that women of the past are intricately connected to the women of today. After all, without their leadership and wisdom, we’d be hard pressed to be here in the first place.
In a time when systems attempt to silence women, the women of the past remind us how to sing songs that testify to the fullness of humanity’s goodness; they remind us that women have survived for centuries by gathering together, standing their sacred ground, and seeking justice, mercy, and love.
Ancient voices in scripture, and the ones we must imagine because they weren’t recorded or acknowledged, help us see a way forward as workers, protectors, leaders, mothers, and truth-tellers. They bear witness to the fact that oppression can be confronted and transformed through the lives, voices, and stories of women. They point us to a wide-hipped, big-bosomed God who was with them then and is with us now.
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While I do not presume to think that all of the women elected last Tuesday night are inspired or led by women in the Hebrew Bible, I do like to think that somehow, some way, all of us who woman* are connected in our pursuit of justice, our belief in mercy, our embodiment of courage, and our relentless devotion to hope.
Hence, the women of the week are the women who came before us, the women who stand beside us, the women who rise within us, and the women who will come after us…for without each and every one of us, none of it is possible. With each and every one of us, anything is possible, even and especially being elected to offices the founders of America never dreamed we’d inhabit.
So, take courage, dear hearts, in the women of this week and the women of always. If it’s not over, it’s not the end.** Amen.
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*To woman is to live in such a way that uproots and uplifts the untold, incomplete stories of our lives and places, at the very center, the voices and names of those whom society, culture, and systems have relegated to the sidelines, or tried to erase altogether. (definition found in the Introduction to In the Beginning Were the Women: Matriarchs, Mystics, Wise Women, and Warriors in the Hebrew Bible.)
**It’s no mistake that at the end of a week in which women and minorities swept elections across America, The New York Times published an opinion piece by a man entitled, “Did Women Ruin the Workplace? And Can Conservative Feminism Fix It?”
I refuse to link to the article, and I refuse to read it because in a time when women’s rights are under attack and have been and are being stripped away at every turn, The New York Times should be fired for publishing such hogwash.
The only thing that’s ruined the workplace is patriarchy, which knows no gender.
Like the time when I was fifteen and the male owner of the local florist shop jerked the mop out of my hands, yelling, “Don’t you know how to mop? That’s NOT how you do it!” Mind you, it was my first day of work and no one taught me how to use an industrial mop and bucket.
Or the time when I was twenty-one and waiting tables and a male coworker asked me, in words I won’t directly write here because what he said was so vile, who I performed sexual favors for to get my job. (I reported his offense, and he was fired immediately, but I was also a white woman whose Dad’s best friend knew the owner, which is how I got the summer job in the first place. Scenarios like this often go a different way for women who don’t have as much privilege or proximity to privilege as I did.)
Or the countless times I’ve heard references to dicks and how people in the workplace are measuring them to demonstrate their power and bravado. As if male anatomy is the only way to describe power. As if the old, tired trope that the larger a man’s penis is, the stronger, better, more powerful he is, is appropriate for the workplace or anywhere. As if the old, tired trope is even true.
Honestly, I’ve been spared the more horrific experiences many women in the workplace have not.
Make no mistake, the more elections we win, boards we lead, books we write, power and freedom we claim, the more absurd articles will be published trying to diminish our worth.
The patriarchy is dying. True, it’s a slow death, but still, it’s a death, and it will die hard. The grasp for power over always does.
So, stay ruinous in the best ways possible, you people who *woman. Know the truth. Speak it. The only ones actually ruining the workplace (and the world) are the greedy, power-hungry men who’d rather see people starve.
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