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It's reverse Victorianism all over again. Word is that the federal Liberals are working on strategies to attract women voters, and that Leader Michael Ignatieff insists he wants one-third of Liberal candidates in the next election to be female.
Well, unless one plank in the party's platform is to find a cure for PMS, there is no such thing as a women's issue.
This October, it will be 80 years since we women won the Persons Case -- but we're still not treated like we're people.
We're always considered women first and it's assumed we all have the same issues on the top of our mind just because we have two X chromosomes. Those issues are invariably child care, health, pay equity and seniors.
It's also assumed that all women hold identical positions on these issues. Maybe I was absent that day, but I'm unaware that a mass meeting of the sisterhood was convened to put forward a formal "women's position: on any issue.
I don't understand why so many male politicians don't get it.
Women care about the same issues as men do, and as with men, those issues vary depending on the individual.
Further, Mr. Ignatieff -- may I call you Mike? -- please do not condescend to us by a) parachuting women candidates into ridings, and b) assuming that women will flock to the polls to vote for them.
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All of this thinking on the part of male politicians -- that means you, Mike -- is just an updated version of the Victorian ideas about women's sphere. Children and family occupied that sphere then, and they still do now.
That's why the national child-care program is the first "women's" issue that comes to mind. As if men have no interest in the day-care arrangements for their own children, in health care (unless maybe it'' Prostate Cancer Week) or in seniors (apparently, men do not have elderly parents. Only women do).
Back in 1898, my newspaper, the Calgary Herald, editorialized that: "If we had a few bright women in the city council of Calgary we should not have to wait long for shade trees on the streets." Now it seems if we have a few bright women as Liberal MPs, dropped into ridings and dutifully elected by all the ladies --can't you just see them in their hoop skirts, buttoned-up boots and bonnets, descending on the polling stations? -- then we should not have to wait long for that national child-care program.
It would be nice, however, if the women candidates in those ridings got the nomination on their own steam, just as male candidates do.
It's insulting to women to excuse them from going through due process, and it's insulting to their male opponents who might be much better candidates but are forced to step aside for the ladies. After all, it's only been 94 years since the Herald declared that with Agnes MacPhail sitting as an MP in Ottawa and Irene Parlby in the provincial cabinet, "there could not be any question raised as to the fitness of women to serve as members ..."
It was MacPhail who said: "When I first came to the House of Commons and walked out into the lobby, men sprang to their feet. I asked them to sit down since I'd come to walk around. I didn't want them doing me favours."
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In September 1915, Kerby expressed her annoyance to the Herald that women couldn't wear more comfortable clothes because they had to cover up so much.
"Men surely know what we are. Just stop thinking about us and keep busy," Kerby said.
Male politicians ought to know by now that women are people first.
Now just stop thinking about us, and keep busy crafting a platform that will win voters based solely on the strength of its principles.
- reprinted from The Windsor Star