New York Times’ Susan Chira, a “senior correspondent and editor on gender issues,” handed her paper’s mighty megaphone to angry anti-Kavanaugh women in “After Kavanaugh, Some Women Feel Powerless, Others Pumped Up.”
Chira had nudged against the conventional liberal wisdom that all women were against Judge Brett Kavanaugh in a Sunday Review piece. But her Wednesday piece read as emotionally charged feminist propaganda.
The words they choose: Despair. Rage. Fear. Hopelessness. Determination.
The bruising battle to confirm Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court may be over, but the reverberations for women who opposed him are not.
In more than 50,000 responses to an invitation for women to share reactions about his confirmation battle, a wrenching question emerged about the hearing’s aftermath: Will the main result be resignation and withdrawal, or will it redouble activism and engagement?
As those who lost this battle try to figure out how and whether to gird for the next ones, many women who opposed Justice Kavanaugh are pulled both ways.
“I cried in the bathroom at work, I cried at home, I cried in the car, the whole time knowing that Brett Kavanaugh would inevitably end up on the Supreme Court,” wrote Katelyn Sullivan, a 27-year-old graphic designer from Burlington, Vt. “I waver between feeling the power of women’s anger and feeling like meaningful change is out of reach.”
The responses ran the political gamut, with many also writing to support Justice Kavanaugh.
But a single paragraph was all the room Chira had for “the many” Kavanaugh supporters. The rest was all undirected feminist anger and the assumption of Kavanaugh’s guilt.
But after two heady years of marching, organizing and running for office, after once-invulnerable men were toppled by accusations of sexual harassment, many women who opposed the nomination are asking themselves how much has really changed -- and how much still can.
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But many women said the hearings had reminded them of the formidable barriers to change posed by an entrenched political structure still controlled by older white men. And some who were rooting for Democrats to win back Congress in the elections could not shake a dread that once more their side would lose.
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For these women, the hearings were a live, communal swing from jubilation that a female accuser was first seen as widely credible to disgust that male power once more ruled the day. They described feeling silenced and sidelined, not only by men, but in a singularly wrenching betrayal, by other women -- those who voted to confirm Justice Kavanaugh and those who believed him over his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford.
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Even more, the hearings were a painful flashback to 2016, when Democratic women were shocked not only that Hillary Clinton lost, but that a man whose unapologetic embrace of swagger and sexual entitlement could be elected president.
Like her husband, perhaps?
Chira handed over her valuable NYT news space for ramblings like this:
....“But sweet Jesus, I’m the underpaid director of a severely underfunded community food pantry in a service area that has some of the highest rates of food insecurity in the entire nation. My husband and I own a print shop. I have two small children who are in school, in soccer, in other activities … and the birthday parties, constantly … and that doesn’t even touch on how I manage to keep the plates spinning in every other aspect of my life.”
