Kamala Harris is accustomed to having to work to make her voice heard. Of course she is: she’s a woman. She’s a Black woman, a South Asian woman. Not so many decades ago, a voice such as hers would have been hard to make heard in the broader public sphere, let alone from a podium or expressing the policies of a government.
What do we hear, in 2024, when we listen to her? What does it mean to have a woman running for US president now, eight years after Hillary Clinton hit that glass ceiling hard — and two years after the reversal of Roe vs Wade? That catastrophic, regressive decision of the US Supreme Court indicates a new threat to women’s rights. I have had the benefit of access to safe and legal abortion, and I used that access with hardly a second thought — I’m almost ashamed, now, that I took it for granted.
Progress is not inevitable; we are far beyond Francis Fukuyama’s notion of “the end of history” arriving thanks to the triumph of liberal democracy. No such luck. In 2023 the UN warned that progress towards full equality for women across the world had gone into reverse. Considering the history of feminism can — at least — point towards a better future. If rights for women around the world are to be protected and preserved, we must hear women’s voices clearly, must give them room to speak.