"Where the White Women Vote?"
We've all seen this pic of the Trumps on Election Day 2016:
Lots of us made the obvious joke about Donald cheating off Melania’s vote.
Yet, what if there’s more? What if, in fact, now-POTUS was engaging in an ancient tradition?
And, in doing so, he helps illuminate a potential issue around White Woman’s voting rights, in America?
Follow:
First, Get the Poor White Man
I’ll confess, I’m still doing a fuck-ton of reading on these topics. The data is…fragile, to say the least. Yet it matches work I’ve read in past, like how the Confederate political leadership used up Poor Southern Whites. (See LOOK AWAY!, for example).
And the key is in the initial history of voting in America, esp. Southern voting. As is well-known, American Voting was seen as an act by those who could afford to take time off to vote. There’s a lot of no-joke Privilege aligned to voting (See: Electoral College).
That meant many poor Whites couldn’t vote, early on in the Republic. And that changed slowly, over the 1st 50-75 years of America’s existence.
What didn’t change, was how the Privileged saw the masses who could now vote. They needed to ensure that those folks “voted the right way,” lest there be Mob Rule (See: Federalist Papers [sigh....])
Here’s one example:
South Carolina’s crotchety David Gavin [was] a planter born in 1811 who filled the pages of his diary with diatribes against the evils of “democracy,” (which he alternatively defined as universal male suffrage, “mobocracy,” “hubuggery,” and once even the “Imp of Darkness”). Gavin believed that democratic government had foolishly handed political power to men lacking in landed property, men who inevitably voted according to self-interest rather than republican virtue. He even refused to celebrate the 4th of July in 1856 because he rejected a “freedom which allows every bankrupt, swindler, thief and scoundrel, traitor and seller of his votes to be placed on an equality with myself.”
(From “Masters of Fate: Efficacy and Emotion in the Civil War South“)
So how does that pressure to vote “right” play out?
By blatant tactics we’d blush at, today – but might seem familiar, as well:
Widespread illiteracy and semi-literacy among the lower classes — as well as the South’s stringent censorship laws — further prevented poorer whites from involvement in the political process. When the rich did allow the non-slaveholders to vote, they were still able to control the outcome of elections, as one man observed, by “means of the votes of the poor whites whom he owns, in owning all by which they can live for another day.”
A lower-class man who owed money to one of the county’s affluent slaveholders, or was in his employ, or lived as a tenant or renter on his land, surely felt compelled to support the rich man’s political causes. Whether this influence was subtle or overt or even coercive, poorer white men’s voting habits were carefully monitored. In some states like Alabama, a man’s right to vote could be challenged not only by the slaveholding election inspectors, but also by “any qualified elector.”
(From “The Myth of a Southern Democracy“)
This, above, is why the Lie of the Lost Cause came about, I fear. Without those lies, Poor White Men might turn against the Southern monied classes.
Better to turn them against the freed folks, and the folks who freed them. And, even better, you reinforce that the freed folks are as inferior as you say. This traps them, post-Reconstruction, in a Nation that cares not what happens to them.
Now, Run After the Poor White Woman
Reconstruction had a knock-on effect, when women’s suffrage was wounded in all this. That movement is oft-said to have grown from brave involvement in anti-slavery movements. But when the focus landed on providing the vote to male slaves, it took energy and synergy away.
As you all know, it would be decades more until women shared that right.
And when they got it, they were not in the systems of coercion men were trapped in, still.
So, another power was likely applied. And this point? Is where we desperately need more academic research + oral history applied.
Because – the evidence of coercion is (so far as I know) anecdotal:
White women would approach Slater to quietly say she had their vote—a fact they intended to keep secret from their Republican husbands.
[…]
Pam Johnson, a legislative campaign consultant, can’t forget what she witnessed as a poll watcher in 2011 in north Mississippi. A white couple in worn clothes shuffled into the rural precinct.
“I came to vote her,” announced the husband, proceeding to direct his wife to the voting machine. At every voting station in the precinct, Johnson saw a white husband standing alongside a white wife as she voted. Johnson objected to the violation of the women’s privacy. The precinct workers shrugged. That’s simply how it was done.
(From “The Political Lives of Mississippi Women, in Black and White“)
But compelling:
ps. if y’all think this is a joke, @RobTaber & I went to vote last week & a poll worker literally offered to put us next to each other so Rob could tell me how to vote
this went about as well as you’d think
he immediately insisted he was Haha Just Kidding
(From https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1057987884769255424)
And spinning off other women sharing their stories and research (CW: references to abuse):
When I was married to an abuser, I would “accidentally” vote early while he was at work, “forgetting” we were supposed to go together, but that carried a risk–and required my own car and not being turned away by poll workers for being unaccompanied.
My current district HAD private booths and removed them to replace them with ones where husbands could see what their wives were voting.
As in: money was spent to replace private booths with public ones.
(From thread starting at https://twitter.com/AnaMardoll/status/1057989338544398339)
We see, today, old tactics of voting suppression applied. We’re focusing on the overt tactics, the ones we can take to court and prove, or even the ones where new tools leave trails of tampering.
And in doing so, might be missing a huge issue. We’re, again, missing what happens in Women’s lived experiences.
I won’t debate how much of FLOTUS’ public statements and persona are her own. I will say, though, that no matter how much she owns responsibility for this regime, she deserves better than to have anyone “peeking” at her vote.
And – if said person, as I fear, uses his “peek” against her, then we have the outlines of The Problem. Married Women are pressured to vote the way their “landowners”, their Husbands want – just as his forefathers may have dealt with, many forgotten generations ago.
Just as White Supremacy is a National issue, so, too, might this be.
We need to understand this better. We need to ensure these anecdotes aren’t the tip of an iceberg that explains so much of Women’s Voting patterns in America.
But most important of all, we need to allow these women to express their own Truths. That is what Democracy – Our Mad Mobocracy – demands.
(Hat-tip to Steve at “No More Mister Nice Blog ” for important connective tissue.)