School of Law University of California, Davis 400 Mrak Hall Drive Davis, CA 95616 530.752.0243 http://www.law.ucdavis.edu UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper Series The Women Feminism Forgot: Rural and Working-Class White Women in the Era of Trump Lisa R. Pruitt This paper can be downloaded without charge from The Social Science Research Network Electronic Paper Collection: http://ssrn.com/abstract=3197273 ElectronicElectronic copy copy available available atat:: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3197273https://ssrn.com/abstract=3197273 KEYNOTE ADDRESS THE WOMEN FEMINISM FORGOT: RURAL AND WORKING-CLASS WHITE WOMEN IN THE ERA OF TRUMP Lisa R. Pruitt* I. Forgotten, Invisible, Hidden ....................................................................... 543 A. Rural Americans .................................................................................... 543 B. Working-Class Whites ........................................................................... 547 II. From Neglect to Contempt ......................................................................... 552 III. So What’s Been Going on with “Those Women” While We Weren’t Looking? .................................................................................................. 557 A. The Gendered Rural Socioeconomic Milieu .......................................... 557 B. Violence Against Women and Rural Porn ............................................. 560 C. Deaths of Despair ................................................................................... 561 IV. The 2016 Election: Revealing a Fractured (or Non Existent) Sisterhood .. 565 V. Who Are Those Women, Anyway? ............................................................ 570 A. The View from Trumplandia: Rationalizing Bad Behavior, My Boyfriend’s Job, and Fake News ........................................................... 570 B. Division within the White Working Class ............................................. 578 C. Some Feminist Ruminations on These Trends ....................................... 584 * © 2018. Martin Luther King, Jr., Professor of Law, UC Davis. Keynote address for the Toledo Law Review Symposium on Gender Equality: Progress and Possibilities, delivered October 13, 2017. Thanks to law students Juli King, Anujan Jeevaprakash, Kristen Vlavianos, Jon P. Ivy, Jaclyn Feenstra, Danielle Patterson, and Ruhao Liu, as well as undergraduate students Madeline Thomas, Liz O’Neill, Mahima Ali, and Fiona Fan for research assistance. Special thanks to Liliana Moore, who not only managed the manuscript with precision and good cheer, but also took on many significant research tasks. I am very grateful for the engagement and helpful comments of Michele Statz, Ann M. Eisenberg, Shelley Cavalieri, Amanda Kool, Irene Joe, Ash Bhagwat, June Carbone, Nancy Isenberg, Kathryne M. Young, Louise Bettner, Shannon M. Monnat, Hannah Haksgaard, and Ann Tickamyer. 537 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3197273 538 UNIVERSITY OF TOLEDO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 49 VI. A Personal Journey: Who Are You and What Have You Done with My Mother? .................................................................................................... 588 VII. Who’s Calling Whom a Racist? ............................................................... 594 VIII. Conclusion ............................................................................................... 597 IX. Postscript: Reason for Hope? Salvaging Some Sisterhood. ................... 601 N October, 2016—just a few weeks before the election—news broke of a I 2005 video of Donald Trump bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy.”1 I had not viewed Trump’s candidacy as particularly strong up to that point, but I was sure this video would be the final nail in the coffin of his run for the American presidency. What self-respecting woman would vote for a man who admitted not just to objectifying women, but to assaulting them? Further, Trump’s bragging about inappropriate interactions from his own mouth only enhanced the credibility of allegations many women had already made public against him.2 Donald Trump was nevertheless elected president. Exit polls showed that 52% of white women voted for Donald Trump, and 41% of all women did so.3 * * * On March 8, 2018, the guerrilla feminism account on Instagram posted this message: “happy international women’s day except to the 53% of white women who voted for trump.”4 * * * When I initially received the kind invitation to deliver this keynote at the University of Toledo College of Law, the organizers prompted me to give a talk on the theme of intersectionality. I immediately thought about rural women because rural populations, broadly speaking, are the folks to whom I’ve devoted the lion’s share of my scholarly energy for more than a decade. But I also thought about women in the white working class, the other demographic cluster about which I’ve been writing since 2011.5 I’ll come back to that latter group momentarily, but let me ponder rural women specifically for a bit. 1. See David A. Fahrenthold, Trump Recorded Having Extremely Lewd Conversation About Women in 2005, WASH. POST (Oct. 8, 2016), https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump- recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in-2005/2016/10/07/3b9ce776-8cb4- 11e6-bf8a-3d26847eeed4_story.html?utm_term=.2dd9a6690c25; Scott Neuman, Billy Bush: ‘Of Course’ It’s Trump’s Voice on ‘Access Hollywood’ Tape, NAT’L PUB. RADIO (Dec. 4, 2017), https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/04/568255700/billy-bush-of-course-its-trumps- voice-on-access-hollywood-tape. 2. See, e.g., Megan Twohey & Michael Barbaro, Two Women Say Donald Trump Touched Them Inappropriately, N.Y. TIMES (Oct. 12, 2016), https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/us/ politics/donald-trump-women.html. 3. Exit Polls 2016, CNN: POLITICS (Nov. 23, 2016, 11:58 AM), http://edition.cnn.com/ election/results/exit-polls. 4. Screenshot on file with author. 5. See generally Lisa R. Pruitt, Acting White? Or Acting Affluent? A Book Review of Carbado & Gulati’s ACTING WHITE? RETHINKING RACE IN POST-RACIAL AMERICA, 18 J. GENDER RACE & JUST. Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3197273 Spring 2018] THE WOMEN FEMINISM FORGOT 539 Regarding rural women, I thought about how spatiality and other features of geography intersect with gender to create and aggravate issues like domestic violence6 and abortion access,7 and how they influence the ways in which legal actors assess parental fitness.8 I recalled Judith Baer’s imperative that we must attend to women’s situation more than we attend to their character—that we need more “situation jurisprudence” and less “character jurisprudence.”9 So, for this talk-cum-article, I would focus on how the rural socio-spatial lawscape constrains and shapes rural women’s opportunities and choices, how it renders them economically and physically vulnerable, how the entrenched form of patriarchy that tends to characterize rurality limits their options10 and—too often, I fear— squelches their dreams. But wait, I thought. Been there, done that. I’ve done it in half a dozen articles and more book chapters in the past decade, publications that did address the plight of rural women, what Baer calls their “situation.” Here is a summarizing quote from my 2007 article, Toward a Feminist Theory of the Rural: The vulnerability and hardship with which rural women live have been discounted as the state has taken away their children and faulted them for their acts of self- preservation. The fundamental right to abortion has been denied to many of them as restrictions on that right have been upheld as inconsequential, even as evidence has shown how heavily the restrictions weigh upon them. To the extent the law has recognized the difficulty inherent in their situations, it has often blamed the women for their circumstances. Judges … may not understand that rural women generally have less economic, social, cultural, and political power than both urban residents and rural men. They may not understand that spatial isolation and lack of anonymity limit these women.11 It is now abundantly clear that not only do many judges not understand these aspects of rural women’s lives, neither do most urban dwellers. Neither do political pundits, least of all those on the left. Neither do most national politicians, for that matter. I continued: 159 (2015); Lisa R. Pruitt, The False Choice Between Race and Class and Other Affirmative Action Myths, 63 BUFF. L. REV. 981 (2015); Lisa R. Pruitt, The Geography of the Class Culture Wars, 34 SEATTLE U. L. REV. 767 (2011); Lisa R. Pruitt, Who’s Afraid of White Class Migrants? On Denial, Discrediting and Disdain (and Toward a Richer Conception of Diversity), 31 COLUM. J. GENDER & L. 196 (2015). 6. See generally Lisa R. Pruitt, Place Matters: Domestic Violence and Rural Difference, 23 WIS. J.L. GENDER & SOC’Y 347 (2008). 7. See generally Lisa R. Pruitt & Marta R. Vanegas, Urbanormativity, Spatial Privilege, and Judicial Blind Spots in Abortion Law, 30 BERKELEY J. GENDER L. & JUST. 76 (2015). 8. See generally Lisa R. Pruitt & Janet L. Wallace, Judging Parents, Judging Place: Poverty, Rurality and Termination of Parental Rights, 77 MO. L. REV. 95 (2012). 9. See JUDITH BAER, OUR LIVES BEFORE THE LAW 42-62 (1999). 10. See generally Lisa R. Pruitt, Gender, Geography and Rural Justice, 23 BERKELEY J. GENDER L. & JUST. 338 (2008). 11. Lisa R. Pruitt, Toward a Feminist Theory of the Rural, 2007 UTAH L. REV. 421, 484 (citations omitted). Electronic copy