By Lynda Kirkpatrick
If I had been born back in the 1800s when the Republican Party was being formed, I would have most likely been a Republican. True to its antislavery foundation, the Republican Party established itself as the national party of reform. Its anti-slavery stance attracted activist women to the party before the Civil War. Moreover, the party supported women’s suffrage, endearing itself to reformers like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucy Stone, who self-identified as Republicans.
Acknowledgment of women in the party’s platforms in the 1870s and the creation of a Republican women’s auxiliary in the late 1880s kept women in the Republican Party after slavery ceased to be a political issue. Judith Ellen Foster founded the Women’s National Republican Association in 1888. She declared that “woman is politics.” She challenged women to engage in partisan politics in order to reform society, which was a woman’s role. She built the WNRA into a substantial unit of the Republican party, and its members advocated for Republican candidates each election cycle.
The Republican Party pioneered the right of women to vote and was consistent in its support throughout the long campaign for acceptance. It was the first major party to advocate equal rights for women and the principle of equal pay for equal work. So, what happened?
The roots of the Republican Party have eroded into the opposite of where they started. We have candidates running who are advocating for women to lose their right to vote. North Carolina Lt Gov Mark Robinson was criticized on social media for comments that he wanted to “absolutely” go back to America before women could vote. He is now the Republican candidate in North Carolina for Governor and personally endorsed by Donald Trump. 172 Republicans voted against the Violence Against Women Act, including Alabama Representative Robert Aderholt. For decades, the Republicans have fought against women’s rights. Today’s Republicans want to restrict women’s access to contraceptives and control women’s freedom of choice.
Right after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, the House Democrats introduced a bill to ensure nationwide access to birth control. The bill passed the House even though 195 Republicans voted against it. The Republicans in the Senate prevented it from passing. Also, the Supreme Court has struck down a stalking conviction as “unconstitutional” and apparently decided the Constitution becomes the enemy of the popular laws designed to protect women.
In 2017, in an attempt to gut equal pay for women, the Republican-run Equal Employment Opportunity Commission halted the pay data collection rule, which determined whether or not women were being fairly compensated in the workforce.
In the past several months, Americans have witnessed all manner of faux outrage. Republicans are “simply outraged” that the estate of Dr Seuss would opt to remove several of its own books from circulation due to racist tropes. They are “outraged” that Democrats have not given Donald Trump credit for the Biden-propelled vaccine rollout that will lead to the end of the pandemic in the United States. They are “outraged” that a Black woman could possibly take the stage at the Grammy Awards and perform a song dedicated to the vagina. They are “outraged” at the idea of a pregnant member of the military serving her country. The idea of a woman being beaten to death by their partners or the reality of women being tracked and gunned down at massage parlors and spas……. No outrage there!
It’s not worth applauding the 29 Republicans who did vote to renew the Violence Against Women Act. It should have been all 201 of them because there is no partisan politicking when it comes to attacks based on race, gender, or sexuality. I won’t applaud those representatives for doing the obviously decent thing. I will ask, though, now and in the future, what the Republican Party sees as its birthright moving forward. Because if you aren’t with us, you are against us. Republicans have made this their goal. They are against us. There is no going back. It’s clear that the modern-day Republican Party no longer stands where it started out. Their House and Senate votes against women have been loud and clear. So, I have to ask, when the Republican Party is so “anti-women,” why do women continue to vote for Republicans? This, my friends, is why today, I am a Democratic woman standing up for women’s rights.