On Thursday, I received the news that Elizabeth Warren was ending her campaign for president. I had intended to write an article about why Warren had my vote, but I never got to write it and I never got to vote for her. I had a lot of grief and anger around the circumstances of her campaign ending.
I expected that the news would be a blow to my spirits but what I didn’t expect was how much grief and anger I would also have over losing yet another opportunity for a female president. My feelings on the subject were big and I got the sense that many other women felt the same way.
It’s rare that I write what I call “reactionary” articles, meaning, pieces that are written in real time in response to recent events. Most of the time, I don’t have my thoughts about events in order soon enough to write such articles.
So it was a big deal when I decided on Thursday morning that I was going to write something, and that by Thursday evening, I had published “When the Heck are Women Going to Get a Shot at the Presidency?” on Medium.
It was even more exciting when Medium notified me that their curators had selected my article for both their Politics and Women sections, which means anyone who has those topics listed under their interests would be shown my article on their front page and in their regular emails of recommended reading. (You can read the rest of my work on Medium here.)
I didn’t publish it here because I felt like it was more suited to the story of the moment nature of Medium, but since the article is totally in line with the rest of my blog, I wanted to share it with you here as well.
Here’s a clip:
“What does it say about our society’s view of women’s competence and general abilities that we cannot entrust a single woman with the presidency? What does it say about society’s view of all of the incredible women I know and what they’ve accomplished? What does it say about society’s view of me? How is it possible that none of us are good enough?
Why couldn’t a person like me do this job? What is it about us that is so terrible that we can’t be trusted with the position even once? If our only two explanations for this 0 to 46 imbalance is natural inferiority or societal oppression, that means one of two things for me is true: Either I am inherently inferior at leadership OR I live in a society where everyone believes that I am inferior. Neither of these options is acceptable.”
Go read the whole article on Medium
About the writer: Kella Hanna-Wayne is the creator, editor, and main writer for Yopp. She specializes in educational writing about civil rights, disability, chronic illness, abuse, and Dissociative Identity Disorder. Her work has been published in Ms. Magazine blog, The BeZine, and Splain You a Thing and in 2022, she released a self-published book of poetry, “Pet: the Journey from Abuse to Recovery“. You can find her @KellaHannaWayne on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Medium, and Twitter.
Related Posts
At Yopp we're dedicated to providing educational material for social justice that emphasizes the individual experience of lived oppression and helps you understand the whole picture instead of memorizing do's & don'ts.
