_Maddie Niblett is a freshman journalism major at MU. She is an opinions columnist who writes about politics for The Maneater._
Missouri GOP Senate candidate Courtland Sykes struck again, releasing a thoughtful musing on women’s rights last week in which he painted himself as a heroic future father, loving husband-to-be and, surprise surprise, raging sexist. In the first two sentences of the inflammatory five-paragraph statement, Sykes manages to say that the “price” for his support of the other half of the world is domestic subservience, claiming that he expects “to come home to a home-cooked dinner at 6 every night, one that [his fiance] fixes…”
I could write a whole column about those words alone, but it gets even better. The tirade goes on to refer to “career-obsessed banshees who forego home life and children and the happiness of family” (read: a female who isn’t a stay-at-home mom) as, and this is actually a real quote, “nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she-devils who shriek from the tops of a thousand tall buildings they think they could have lept over in a single bound —had men not been ‘suppressing them.’”
Let’s take a second to recover from reading that violently worded sentence. The fact that Sykes talks about “career-obsessed banshees,” however brash the phrasing, isn’t necessarily the issue; I’m sure there are some women out there who are involved with their work lives an unhealthy amount, as are some men. The issue is that he brings up this unrelated topic in a question specifically about women. Being overly focused on a career is in no way a gendered issue, but he talks about it as if it is, letting all who will listen know that when he calls out “career-obsessed banshees,” he’s actually talking about any woman who has a self-sufficient career and doesn’t exist to serve men.
At the end of his rant, Sykes ties his points together by stating that he does, in fact, support women’s rights, “but not the kind that has oppressed natural womanhood for five long decades.” Translated, he’s saying that he supports a woman’s right to be a housewife and nothing more. Five long decades ago, before modern feminism began oppressing natural womanhood, women did not have the right to make choices about their own bodies, hardly ever held public office and earned approximately 40 percent less than men did. The feminist movement fought for women’s choice to become whatever they wanted to be; the only thing that feminism “oppressed” was the misogyny that held women down in the first place. When Sykes talks about “natural womanhood,” he’s describing the outdated stereotype that a woman’s place is in the home, and deviance from that established gender role results in something against the correct order of things.
Let me be clear: Feminism is the belief that women can be whatever they so choose. That includes a “traditional” housewife who stays at home, has dinner ready at 6 every night and cleans her house in the suburbs that has a white picket fence for her husband, three kids and dog. The point is, choosing to fill that role is okay, and women who do so should feel empowered by their choice. The issue here is that Sykes holds the assumption that this stereotype of domesticity is the state of, as he puts it, “natural womanhood”; the idea that every single woman should fill this role is the basis upon which misogyny is built. No gender, male included, is inherently meant to be any one thing.
