BRATTLEBORO — Let's just get it all out there. I am super in favor of many of Bernie Sanders' policies, and in some areas I think he doesn't go far enough. Also, I am a woman, and I am on the fence about voting for Hillary Clinton if she gets the nomination.
(Yes, Hillary, you still have to earn my vote. You don't just get it because we both are women. Fun fact: I also didn't vote for Sarah Palin.)
I am exhausted by women telling me that I must vote along gender lines. Why isn't the same focus given to men if they are deciding not to vote for Hillary and they are Bernie supporters? We all believe in gender equality, right? Shouldn't this be an equal responsibility thing?
So why does this responsibility fall so squarely on my shoulders?
More exhausting still are the people who tell me that I don't understand the ramifications of my decisions, because I didn't grow up without the rights that women have now.
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Let's be clear: The rights that we are talking about are the rights of white middle-class and upper-middle-class women - not all women.
So, for second-wave feminists rushing to give me a history lesson on women's rights movements, not only are Virginia Woolf's collected and much-beloved works on my bookshelf, so is Gail Collins's history, When Everything Changed.
To this growing list of feminist literature, I would also like to add a few of my favorites, including Janet Mock's Redefining Realness; Audre Lorde's collection of essays and speeches, Sister Outsider; and Angela Y. Davis's new work, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement.
But back to the history.
It is correct that throughout my lifetime I have had the right to vote; it is also correct that I have been able to choose the career that I want. But to tell me that my hesitancies with Hillary Clinton are because I don't understand history undercuts my own valid experience as a woman in the 21st century.
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I know sexism is real. I have lived it. I have been on college campuses to listen to my friends' stories of rape and sexual abuse, and I have been given the quick responses like “Rape isn't real. We live in a post-feminist world,” “She was asking for it,” and “Did you see what she was wearing?”
I have been a woman during the age of the internet, where women get death threats and rape threats daily for just existing in those kinds of spaces.
I have seen Roe v. Wade hacked at my whole life, to the point where now in some states abortion is mostly illegal.
I have lived a life of being harassed in public spaces and being hit on at work.
And, I am a white, college-educated, employed, able-bodied, cisgendered woman living in the blue state of Vermont.
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I understand that my experience as a woman has been significantly bettered by the work done by feminists before me. My bigger point, however, is that my experience is hardly the experience of all women in this country, and the sentiment behind that statement goes right to the heart of understanding the values of my feminism and how that intersects with this primary and overall democratic election.
In second-wave feminism, white middle-class and upper-middle-class women left other female demographics behind to achieve their goals. Queer women and women of color were not included, and these groups are still working on forging their own paths to civil rights and political power.
Because of both Hillary and Bernie's roles in this primary, the agency of Democratic and independent female voters has been cut down and spit upon over and over. (Feels great, doesn't it?)
However, my idealist and youthful support for Senator Sanders is not based on my lack of feminist history, but much more so on how I have come to understand my feminist ideals. The feminism that I have most closely identified with is defined by the intersectionality of all women, not fostered by their separation.
As Angela Davis has said, “Feminism involves so much more than gender equality and it involves so much more than gender. Feminism must involve consciousness of capitalism and racism and colonialism and ability and more genders than we can even imagine and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name.”
Considering how important this sentiment is to me, I cannot, in good conscience, support making bargains or voting choices that leave out other marginalized groups in our society so that I, as a white woman, can continue to have my rights.
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The Clinton brand of feminism does not represent these values of intersectionality that I believe in.
Hillary Clinton's financial and personal ties to Wall Street unnerve me, especially with how those ties relate to her future plans for regulating banks and financial markets.
Her funding from private prisons is glaring evidence of her potential to ignore prison reform as a real issue, and her lack of advocacy for gay rights in this country, let alone trans rights, does not give me any more confidence in her.
And these are just a few of my concerns about her as a candidate.
Considering these facts and policies, perhaps I, and other millennial feminists who are hesitant to throw our vote to Clinton, might be realizing that the power of a single vote is more than it seems.
Casting our ballot to the lesser of two evils does not feel like a democracy. It feels like another disgusting entrapment. The vote, which so many women and people of color have fought and died for, is now being used to serve the ideals of the wealthy elite and their candidates.
If you don't mind voting for those goals on a Clinton ticket come November, then by all means support her. And if I can bring myself to do so as well, I will.
But with this vote, we align ourselves to repeat history by undercutting millions of women and marginalized groups that will be left out of some much-needed forward-thinking political policies that will not take place during her presidency. Let's stop fooling ourselves that this vote will have any bearing on furthering feminist ideals or promoting gender equality.