The 2024 US election will be all about women
Kamala Harris, the first ever female vice president of the United States of America, is now officially her party’s nominee for president. Should she win, she would not only be the first woman to lead the country in its near 300-year history, but the first female president of Black and South Asian descent. Yet Harris’ historic ascendency has merely amped up an existing political maelstrom around women in America: their rights, their freedoms and bodily autonomy.
Women (and inexplicably, cats) have found themselves in the firing line this election cycle, a consequence of the Republican pick for vice president, JD Vance – a fledgling senator from Ohio – who made "childless cat ladies" his insult du jour when faced with the prospect of running against a female candidate for the presidency. As humorous and patently absurd as Vance’s cheap and unoriginal shot is (and the internet’s predictable seizure of it as prime comic real estate), it hints at a far more insidious facet of the 2024 election. It is women – childless cat ladies or not – who are up for debate.
Even before Harris stepped up to fill Biden’s shoes, we knew that women would play a key part in the 2024 election. Abortion is one of the major issues on the ticket. Since the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022, a total of 22 states have effectively banned abortion. Should she win, Harris has vowed to sign reproductive freedoms into law – reversing the measures that she has taken to calling ‘Trump abortion bans’ in a somewhat transparent attempt to align his name with the increasingly extreme conservatism encroaching on America.
Vance is the new poster boy for this dogmatism. Previously the well-regarded author of the bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which was adapted into a Netflix film starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams, he once self-defined as a ‘Never Trumper’ but has made a whiplash-inducing about turn. His traditional values are now infused with the disturbing potency of MAGA aggression – Trump's rebrand of America First, which includes hugely controversial stances on everything from immigration to guns. Vance's stance on women is that they should be married, at home and raising children. His policies have even offered financial incentives for doing so (the Fairness for Stay-at-Home Parents Act), all while espousing the belief that women should stay with their husbands even when domestic abuse occurs.
His comments on childlessness are farcical at best, insulting at worst. This is especially because, not only has he weaponised a woman’s inability or unwillingness to have children – actually positing the notion that a lack of progeny should make your vote count for less (“When you go to the polls in this country, as a parent, you should have more power”) – but his beliefs would ironically eradicate many women’s ability to have a child (he voted against a bill ensuring access to IVF), and make the lives of those who do, immeasurably harder (Vance seems to rather perversely oppose childcare, once tweeting that “Universal daycare is class war against normal people”).
It goes without saying, perhaps, that Vance is as pro-life as Harris is pro-choice. Harris' pick for VP, Tim Walz (who went viral recently for calling both Trump and Vance "weird") stands as a direct counter to Vance on this issue also. In his two terms as governor of Minnesota, he revealed progressive policies on abortion access and stood alongside Harris at a Planned Parenthood event in his state last spring. In choosing Walz, Harris has solidified her commitment to reproductive freedoms, and a woman’s body has once more become a battleground for radically diametric political ideologies.
Reproductive freedom is a central pillar of feminism for a very simple reason. Pregnancy, childbirth and childcare present the single biggest millstone around our collective necks. Societies that underscore a woman’s sole responsibility to produce and rear children (the former unavoidably and the latter through apparent wilful blindness to a man’s ability to parent), do so at the price of her engagement with other aspects of life. This silos them. It excludes them from intellectual and fiscal freedom. If America’s rallying cry is "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" it would seem that conservatives such as Vance see women merely as a tool in the pursuit of this for men.
This new conservatism embraced by Vance has at its apotheosis, Project 2025. The 900 page document, penned by the ultra-conservative think-tank/lobbying group Heritage Foundation, is radically regressive and dystopian to such a degree that Margaret Atwood should be suspicious of plagiarism. Though it falls short of calling for a nationwide abortion ban, it proposes a withdrawal of the abortion pill (which many women rely on for access to safe, early-stage terminations) and suggests that the department of Health and Human Services should "maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family". The document also promises to eliminate the terms "sexual orientation", "gender equality", "abortion" and "reproductive rights" from all laws and federal regulations.
Trump has publicly disavowed most, but not all, of its content – but, worryingly, it has been constructed by many of the lobbyists who have been instrumental in his rise to power, including former officials from his time as President. Should he return to the White House in November, one shudders to think how much of this alarming manifesto could make its way into his administration.
Tragically, whether childless cat lady or mother of eight, living on a farm like the Trad Wife aesthetic that is exploding online, women have somehow once more been reduced to the sum total of their (reproductive) parts. It is as though the famous Meredith Brooks song has been cut short: ‘I’m a bitch, I’m a mother.’ That’s it. Those are our options. For all the cat barbs aside, what is at the crux of these warring viewpoints is the question of a woman’s worth beyond her ability to produce children.
This year, we will once more see a woman run for president against Donald Trump. But the loss of women’s rights and the blatant targeting of those that remain as a central tenet of this debate show how dramatically the political landscape has regressed in the eight years since.
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