The long wait for the gender-equity moment

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Shortly before the 2016 elections, my oldest son, then in kindergarten, asked me who I was voting for. He was very busy with his own elections at school — red vs. blue, hot dogs vs. hamburgers, indoor recess vs. outdoor recess — and so naturally he was very interested in how I weighed in on these matters.

Before 2016, I had bled red and voted accordingly each election. Now, I wasn’t so sure: I just couldn’t fathom putting a man who bragged about grabbing women’s genitals in the most powerful seat in the world. Conversely, my son’s father admired Donald Trump’s support of the anti-abortion movement and the elevation of small businesses. As a new social worker, I was keenly attuned to finding ways for everyone’s needs to be met, so I chose my words carefully.

“Well,” I said. “Your father is going to vote for the boy candidate and I’m going to vote for the girl candidate, and that’s OK. We can vote in different ways and still love each other.”

My son put his fist on his chin and thoughtfully lifted his bright blue eyes toward me. “Well then, I think I’m going to vote for the boy candidate, too.”

At the time, I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps I had oversimplified the argument a bit for him. The 2016 election wasn’t just a battle of gender politics, but it also was — just like the 2008 election wasn’t just a battle of racial politics, but it also kind of was. Barack Obama and John McCain in 2008 both exemplified their parties: one young, charismatic if slightly spurious, and definitely promising; the other proven, dedicated but also heavily tied to institutional inequity. One of them was also Black and the other white, and for some that made the decision easier. We needed to begin the slow process of reversing the injustice upon which much of our nation was founded.

But according to the results of the 2016 election, we weren’t as a nation quite ready to address the gender inequity that has also been the backbone of many nations’ growth. According to the United Nations, unpaid domestic labor accounts for 10-39% of a country’s GDP. In 2019, if American women earned minimum wage for the unpaid work they do, they would have made $1.5 trillion. And it’s not just about money; it’s also about practical considerations and consequences. Iceland’s “Long Friday” of 1975 is a seminal example. When 90% of their women walked off the job, the whole country nearly shut down. Long indeed, it must have seemed.

Come to think of it, it’s not too unlike the long months of March, April and beyond that we had in 2020. During those months, parents of all genders experienced the trials and tribulations of this so-called “women’s work”: teaching children, caring for ill family members, scrubbing toilets and baking bread. Few of us can look back on those first months and not think of Zoom meetings gone awry or homes that slowly deflated into a permanent state of relative disarray. The minutiae of our lives started to mean so much more. Home wasn’t just where we landed after an evening out with friends or a late night at the office, and it wasn’t just the purview of small children. It was where we congregated, chose who mattered most to us and cared for them. Home, and the work therein, mattered. If we didn’t take care of it, we would be crushed. If we did, then we rose higher than before.

In our post-pandemic world, we are in danger of forgetting this lesson. We’ve held onto remote work and we’ve reopened restaurants and gyms and churches. But we musn’t forget that we once felt, viscerally, the weight of the work at home. We can’t forget that our country and our lives today are founded on “women’s work.”

This year, my son won’t need to ask how I’m voting. And I’m not sure that I can find a middle ground on this issue — not when the needs of so many women who came before me finally have a chance to be addressed. All I can hope, as I look into his bright blue eyes, is that he knows, at least somewhat, what women have given him.

Laura Hanley, of St. Cloud, is a trauma therapist.