New Hampshire Women Want to Be Included in the Constitution

by Alex DiBranco · 2010-02-09 09:40:00 UTC
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You let women get a little power, and what happens? They want to rewrite the whole constitution!

Good for them.

In the United States Senate, women fill less than a fifth of the seats. Pitiful. On the other hand, New Hampshire broke new ground in the 2008 election by voting a female majority into the state Senate, making it the first state in the nation to upset the tradition of male dominance. And women want the state constitution to recognize that they are here: proposed legislation would replace constitutional references to men with gender-neutral language, starting at the top, with "All men are born equally free and independent," according to the Boston Globe. Seems like a reasonable request. Lets see what reason the critics come up with!

First up to bat, we have the defense of the constitution as a sacred tradition that it would be wrong to fiddle with. It's not like the writers of the constitution provided for a way in which the document could be altered to reflect changing needs and justice, right? Oh wait, did they mean the sacred tradition of institutionalized sexism?

Well then, what about the beautiful music of the text? Republican Representative Jordan Ulery, argues, "There is a lyric quality, a literary quality, that expresses the ideals of the founding fathers. The bland gray socialist language just destroys all that."

Sorry -- when did we go from gender equality to socialism? Seems like Republicans see socialists everywhere these day. But I think Ulery is on to something: clearly, when the founding fathers wrote about men being equal and free they were doing it primarily to fit the rhythm of the verse, not for the actual content of the statement. I guess "people" just doesn't fit the syllable count there.

A similar 2008 bill crashed and burned when critics cried "political correctness!" and claimed "that the word he is accepted as a generic term in everything from laws to the Bible." Of course, women had to fight for a century and get their own amendment to the United States Constitution before those "generic" laws were applied to their rights. And don't even get me started on the Bible. Pointing to a tradition of institutionalized sexism is not a good excuse for continuing institutionalized sexism. The fact is, male pronouns used to be used for just about everything because just about everything referred to men. (In the non-gender neutral, penis carrying sense of the term.)

The final argument: we don't have time for this, there's other shit to get done. Well, if you stopped wasting time with arguments about how pretty the constitution sounds, you could wrap this up a lot faster.

Photo credit: Mr. T in DC

Alex DiBranco is a Change.org Editor who has worked for the Nation, Political Research Associates, and the Center for American Progress. She is now based in New York City.
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