What Do Women Want?

That old question was answered many years ago during the heyday of the feminist movement. The answer: everything. From the beginning of the Women’s Suffrage movement in the 19th Century to the attempted passage of the Equal Rights Amendment back in the 1970s, the true answer has been equality, and it looks as if we’ve arrived in politics if not in salaries. I floated the idea for this cartoon a couple weeks ago as a rough sketch and got a decent response. The more I’ve read about Hillary’s campaign, the more I felt I needed to draw it.

Young women today don’t care if a woman is running for president. They’ve said overwhelmingly that they won’t vote for Hillary just because she’s a woman. They’re voting for Bernie Sanders by a large margin, 11 percentage points in New Hampshire and similar poll results across the country. They like his outside-the-box positions and view of what America could be. Older women (those over 65, my crew) prefer Hillary by 19 percentage points. The split seems to be between those who’ve memorized women’s history for a test and promptly forgot it, and those who lived it and still bear the scars.

I know this; the young women I know aren’t being led by the nose, male or female. The recent comments made about their sisters by prominent women’s rights pioneers are abhorrent and downright insulting. This isn’t the world of “Mad Men,” when white men ruled the world. This is Carli Fiorina, Gov. Nikki Haley, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, JLo and Queen Latifah’s domain, women in charge of their bidness and their bodies. I suspect that if any of those women were publicly humiliated by their mate the way Bill did Hill, they would’ve tossed his ass out the door in a nanosecond and still would’ve been elected to the United States Senate.