Older Women Share What Voting for a Woman President in 2016 Means to Them
Politics
Women have only been legally guaranteed the right to vote for 96 years. And on Tuesday, millions of women across the country—some of whom were alive when women’s suffrage was still a pipe dream—will finally have the opportunity to vote a woman into the United States’ highest office.
We spoke with a few of our older relatives and friends about what this election means to them, and what it’s like to vote for a woman for the first time (or not).
Carol Rothkopf, 87, writer and editor in Summit, New Jersey
I voted for Hillary Clinton by absentee ballot. There was never a moment’s hesitation as she is indisputably the best qualified candidate for the presidency in this race (not to mention previous ones). She has worked for the public good all her life and served with distinction as First Lady, two-term senator from New York, and Secretary of State. Her experience and intelligence put her in another class, indeed almost on another planet, compared to the Male Chauvinist Pig, or MCP as [we] used to call his type, whose political experience is nil. A draft dodger, tax evader, six-time abuser of the bankruptcy laws, and pretend philanthropist whose only apparent skill is putting his name on buildings and denying access to African-Americans who wanted to rent space in them. There is not space enough to enumerate the three thousand plus suits he has brought against any one who seems to disagree with him in private or in public. He has kept many lawyers, including the disgraceful McCarthy associate, Roy Cohn, in lucrative business with him.
He has co-opted the Republican party and, I believe, destroyed any credibility it had in the process. (Vide, for example, Paul Ryan announcing that he would vote for DJT but not campaign for him—thus sayeth the party’s putative chief.)
His hateful utterances about women, Mexicans, Muslims, and slyly, Jews, have NO place in our political discourse and, in fact, disgrace it. The thought of Trump having the right to name the next several Supreme Court nominees is sick- making (as is the congressional Republicans’ obstructionism and seeming obliviousness to their Constitutional duty). It is even more seriously frightening to think of Trump in charge of the nuclear code. Reason enough to vote for Clinton (who has never played TV footsie with Putin, Assad, and others of that ilk).
I trust that I am preaching to the choir when I say it is imperative to vote for Hillary Clinton for president. The fact that she is a woman is a plus because we are long past much of the rest of the world in making this decision without considering the candidate’s sex. Clearly, I am disturbed and angry at what Trump has been doing in his egocentric run for the highest office in the United States.
I hope to be happier a week from today. My mother voted in the first presidential election open to women and I am proud to have taken this a step further by voting (as my mother would have done) for HRC.
Am proud my eldest grand daughter is Features Editor of Jezebel and grateful for the opportunity to share my views as an octogenarian and resident of New Jersey (which will soon see its opportunistic Trump-supporting governor found guilty of yet another crime!) Aside from a long career as a political junkie, I continue as a freelance writer and editor
Kappy Vorona, 85, retired nurse in Virginia
It took me a long time to wake up to the frustration so many women felt (including my mother), but I finally did intellectually, though not really emotionally. It’s a good thing that we have HRC on the ballot, and that there were and are women fighting to be fully accepted. But I don’t know who HRC really is, and I wish I could be more certain of her authenticity. I will, however, be voting for her.
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