Kamala Harris has not given birth to children — and is therefore unfit to be president of the United States of America — appears to be the first line of attack the GOP has come up with since the presidential race was upended this weekend when President Joe Biden dropped out.
Which is so predictable it borders on laughable. Except if the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that the GOP is deadly serious in its endeavor to turn Onion headlines into political platforms and subsequently laws.
It’s also in keeping with the messaging the GOP has been trying to attach to Harris for a while now. In 2021, now-VP nominee J.D. Vance warned against a ruling political party dominated “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” He was referring to Harris, AOC, and Pete Buttigieg (who, with his husband, became parents to two adopted infant twins in 2021).
First of all, Kamala is not childless. (Nor does she appear to be miserable. Whether she owns a cat is unclear.) And even if she were, this would not make her less than: Less than human, less than woman, less than capable. Less able to successfully run the country. Goodness knows, being married and having children has not been the redeeming factor in any number of people who have been, or want to be or, are currently in charge.
Harris does have children, however. She is the stepmother to her husband Doug Emhoff’s two children with his first wife, and they refer to her as Mamala. They have, by all accounts, a loving and supportive relationship. One might argue that navigating the blending of a family and negotiating the role of step-parent, and doing it well, calls on exactly the skills a person needs to lead a divisive country.
These stepchildren apparently do not “count,” though. Which raises any number of thorny questions: At what age should she have stepped into the role of step-parenting to make it “count”? Is there an age? Or does parenting a child who is not genetically your own count at all?
It’s hard to understand how it benefits the GOP to follow this line of argument where it inevitably leads; there are obviously plenty of blended families, however you define the term, on both sides of the aisle, and caretaking is one of the great acts of love (and not limited to parenting). And yet, here we are. Presumably, in part, because this criticism is so easy, and so familiar.
Last month, Newsweek ran an op-ed that argued Taylor Swift is a bad role model for girls because at 34 she remains unmarried and child-free. Nor is this critique limited to real-life people; who can forget Ben Shapiro burning a Barbie doll in effigy last summer because he was angry at the “wokeness” of a story that sidelined Ken?
Pitting women with children against women who don’t have them is hardly the purview of the GOP. Even left-leaning websites know that doing so is a guaranteed traffic bonanza. Which is not a surprise in a world where our narratives around both roles remain so limited and our support systems around child rearing so punishing for women.
And yet, this argument rests on the foundational belief that one must experience something directly to have any say over it. (And if we’re going to implement this as the basis for who gets to be in charge, it will immediately disqualify all men from making decisions over women’s bodies — arguably not the worst outcome.) At its core, though, this thinking denies the very thing that makes us most human: our empathy. The ability to put ourselves in another’s shoes is not just the golden rule, it is a fundamental necessity to democracy.
But, of course, whether or not Harris is a parent, or how she parents, is not the GOP’s real issue. The real issue is that the GOP wants to exert control over every aspect of women’s lives, beginning with their bodies. The Dobbs decision was the beginning, but it is far from where they hope to take us. The Project 2025 manifesto wants to eliminate coverage of emergency contraception. Vance, himself, has said he’s in favor of a national abortion ban. And there is an increasing push on the right to roll back no-fault divorce.
Harris represents an idea of womanhood that flies in the face of all this. One that is increasingly popular according to statistics. Marriage rates are dropping globally, and people are having fewer children. As for being miserable, studies show single women may be the happiest among us.
Harris did not marry until she was 49. She’s had an enormously successful career, despite not having prioritized marriage or children. It certainly doesn’t hurt that she almost always appears to be enjoying herself, perhaps never more so than when grilling Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
For most of her life Harris has succeeded outside of both the things we are told make women successful and worthy: marriage and motherhood. Which, as we know, are also the two things, in this country at least, that punish women the most financially.
She is proof, in other words, of other, satisfying, ways for women to be. Ways to be that might also offer a path to the most powerful position in America. Cats or otherwise.
Glynnis MacNicol is a writer and a podcast host. Her most recent book, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, published in June.
From Rolling Stone US
