As the Trump-Harris race shows us, sexism remains alive and well
Fifty-four years ago this Sept. 19, Mary Tyler Moore launched an eponymous hit series on CBS about a young woman who was “gonna make it after all” as a TV journalist in Minneapolis. “Mary Richards” would build a life for herself as an independent woman. The show ran for seven seasons and won a stunning 29 Emmys. Widely hailed for being part of so-called Second Wave Feminism, which focused on equality and discrimination, the series dealt with sex, sexism, birth control and other hot-button topics of the time.
Debuting as women were surging into the workplace in larger numbers, the Mary Tyler Moore Show paved the way for other TV efforts that revolved around women demanding to be on equal footing with men. Among them were “Rhoda,” “Murphy Brown,” “30 Rock” and, in some respects, “Friends” and “Cheers,” all heavily influenced by Moore’s groundbreaking effort.
How can it be that a half-century on from then America has still not left the battles over sexism behind? How can it be that for the current generation of women political figures such as Donald J. Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, are doing their best to remind us of what, in many respects, were the bad old days? How can it be that gender remains an issue for many Americans as they ponder whether a woman can serve as president?
Women now approaching their 60s — such as Vice President Kamala Harris, 59 — were children when “Mary Richards” was challenging glass ceilings on Moore’s show. But, all around them, real women were doing the same.
Harris’s late mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, for instance, came to the United States from India alone at 19, earned a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology from the University of California Berkeley, and went on to make important contributions as a researcher focusing on breast cancer. As a single mom, moreover, she raised Harris and her sister after splitting up with Harris’s father.
As gains that women have made are under siege now, it’s no surprise that Harris should adopt as one of her campaign mantras “We are not going back.” In counterpoint to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” evocation of a mythical American past, Harris’s tagline suggests progress in matters such as reproductive freedom, LGBTQ rights, Black and other minority rights, and a modern version of feminism — one in which a woman can become not only the first female vice president, but president.
Harris would have America “turn the page” — another tagline — on Trumpism. That, pathology, as she sees it, is the 78-year-old former president’s use of racial divisiveness, his juvenile treatment of opponents, and his well-recorded disrespect for the military, his disregard for the law (as his felony criminal convictions suggest) — along with his sexism.
Trump’s attitudes and actions toward women, of course, seem like something on which turning the page seems well overdue. Recall Trump’s lewdness in the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape. Take note of his sexual abasement of E. Jean Carroll, after which juries found him liable for abuse and defamation, costing him more than $90 million. Don’t dismiss his hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and his extramarital affair with Playboy model Karen McDougal, part of his well-documented pattern of cheating on three wives.
Remember that about two dozen women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct dating back to the 1970s. Recall that his first wife, Ivana, accused him of rape during their 1990 divorce (she later retracted her claim). Another woman accused him of “attempted rape” in 1993 at his Mar-a-Lago resort, but settled a separate breach of contract case and forfeited the rape claim. Still another alleged that Trump attacked her on a flight to New York. Trump denied it all.
Just how vile is he? He looks on own daughter, Ivanka, in, well, a less than fatherly way. “If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her. Isn’t that terrible? How terrible? Is that terrible?,” he said in 2006 on ABC’s “The View.” And, in a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, Trump reportedly celebrated her “beauty,” adding, “If I weren’t happily married and, ya know, her father …” He was even rebuked by his former chief of staff for sexual remarks about Ivanka in front of White House staff.
Trump’s extraordinary litany of public comments define him, too. To pick three from a very long list, he labeled his own former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and former Gov. Nikki Haley “birdbrain,” said “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband, what makes her think she can satisfy America?,” and said of talk show host Megyn Kelly “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” He slandered Harris as “Dumb as a Rock,” only to be humiliated by the former California State Attorney General and former U.S. Senator’s brilliance in skewering him in their debate.
Fortunately, many American women have long had Trump’s number. “President Joe Biden won women by 15 points over Trump in 2020, according to exit polls, up from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s 13-point victory among women in 2016,” The Washington Post reported. “Polls suggest that this year, women prefer Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris over Trump by similar margins. Harris led Trump by 13 points among women in an ABC News/Ipsos poll” released in early September.
Disdain for Trump is especially pronounced among younger women — even while younger men don’t shun him quite as much. “Sixty-seven percent of women 18 to 29 supported Vice President Kamala Harris in a New York Times/Siena College poll in six swing states last month, compared with 40% of young men,” The New York Times reported. “Fifty-three percent of young men in those states backed Donald J. Trump, compared with 29% of young women.”
Still, substantial numbers of women back Trump, in spite of his misogyny and coarseness. Trump has implied that Harris’s former romantic relationship with Willie Brown, a former San Francisco mayor, fueled her political success. And as the Times reported, he recently shared a screenshot on Truth Social showing an image of Harris and Hillary Clinton, appended with commentary from another user, with a reference to oral sex.
Asked by a Times reporter what she thought about Trump posting that image, co-founder of Moms For Liberty Tiffany Justice stammered: “You know what, I think that, uh, a lot of people say a lot of things. And we’re focused on the issues that are hurting American voters.”
Women who support Trump seem willing to turn their eyes away from a lot. Like Melania Trump, who suggested that her husband’s celebration of sexual assault in the Hollywood Access tape was just “locker room talk,” they wave aside his depravity.
Evangelical women who back him may see Trump as the sinner who is G-d’s tainted vehicle in areas such as abortion, although his waffling on the matter — declining to endorse a national ban — lately has irked many of them and smacked of betrayal. As he has sought to win over women concerned about such bans, Christian leaders have suggested his backpedaling could dissuade religious voters from showing up on Election Day. R. Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminar, told The New York Times’ The Run-Up podcast that Trump faces the “grave danger” of evangelicals staying home on Nov. 5.
Harris and her team, however, are busy reminding voters that Trump just last spring proudly claimed to have destroyed the protections of Roe v. Wade by appointing Supreme Court justices who gutted the longstanding legal precedent. “After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone,” Trump said on his social media platform.
Trump, moreover, has lost some of his base even among evangelical women. The Rev. Billy Graham’s granddaughter, Jerushah Duford, famously condemned Trump in 2020. “How did we get here?,” she asked in a USA Today piece exhorting others to abandon him. “How did we, as God-fearing women, find ourselves ignoring the disrespect and misogyny being shown from our president? …. Jesus loved women; He served women; He valued women. We need to give ourselves permission to stand up to do the same.”
In mid-August, Duford made her support of Harris clear, taking part in an “Evangelicals for Harris” Zoom call. “Voting Kamala, for me, is so much greater than policies,” Duford said. “It’s a vote against another four years of faith leaders justifying the actions of a man who destroys the message Jesus came to spread, and that is why I get involved in politics.”
Will more women turn out for Harris? They might if they look into Trump’s history more closely, along with the views of his “childless cat ladies” running mate, Vance. The GOP vice presidential nominee apparently would have many women of the Mary Tyler Moore generation revisit their child-rearing days with grandchildren and give parents more voting power than childless Americans.
“In 2020, [Vance] did not demur when the podcast host Eric Weinstein asserted that helping care for youngsters was ‘the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female, in theory,’” The Atlantic reported. “The next year, Vance suggested that parents should have ‘more power—you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic—than people who don’t have kids.’ He also tweeted, “‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people.’”
In past elections when Trump ran, the gender gap was substantial. This time around, it could prove to be a yawning chasm. And when one explores why, the question arises: How could any self-respecting woman, of any age and any religion and any race, support this man?