Which Women Support Hillary (And Which Women Can’t Afford To)

[Fawke Em]

Others have catalogued Hillary Clinton’s opposition to policies that would redistribute wealth and power toward women a la the Nordic model, so I’ll keep that brief here. Suffice to say that she has spoken about women caring for their children on welfare with venom and has made herself an enemy of the poor. She is surely not the most egregious opponent of women’s well-being—she is, after all, pro-choice—but her allies, practically speaking, are big donors like Goldman Sachs and Walmart, which lobby hard against redistribution and good treatment of women in the workplace. Voting for Hillary is, unfortunately, a strike against poor people.

So, to support Hillary Clinton is to support a genuinely good example for white-collar women’s behavior when trying to beat sexism at work at the expense of policies that might help the majority of women. Or is that a false dichotomy?

Some believe that the presence of Bernie Sanders in the race has offered an alternative—his policies redistribute more, and he is a self-professed feminist, but…he is man. No inspiring grit-in-the-face-of-sexism to be had in this old white dude. He is, however, a socialist and, if you haven’t figured it out already, I think socialism is women’s best hope because it accounts for the policies that will get them the stuff they need. His policies are better for more women because they’re more redistributive.

“When we heard Bernie Sanders talking about everything we’ve been talking about it was a no brainer,” says Karen Higgins one of three co-presidents of the National Nurses Union and a nurse for the last 40 years. She’s spent the last 37 working in intensive care and at 62 still works full-time at Boston Medical Center. When I spoke with her, she was home preparing to go campaign for Sanders in New Hampshire. The NNU has endorsed him, citing his longtime alignment on their trademark issues: single-payer healthcare, taxing Wall Street, less college debt for their kids, and opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which includes concessions to pharmaceutical companies. Contrary to much commentary on the left, the nurses don’t regard a commitment to single payer as foolishly ideological: Higgins describes receiving intensive care patients whose first question is what the treatment will cost and how they can pay. She differentiates between an insurance system (Obamacare) and universal healthcare, which would eliminate the need for individuals to wrangle with private companies. It’s been a long time since a serious candidate carried a commitment to this system as a banner issue. The nurses of the 90 percent female union, as a result, have found themselves more inspired by Sanders.

http://www.thenation.com/article/which-women-support-hillary-and-which-women-cant-afford-to/