Harriet Ellenberger: What's a woman?

I can honestly say I was not particularly surprised by the question Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., posed to Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson at her confirmation hearing: “Can you provide a definition of the word ‘woman’?”

I am not perplexed because it is obvious to me certain members of Congress and the Pennsylvania Legislature are more concerned about making points with their radicalized political base than actually knowing or caring about what or who a woman in America is today.

In an effort to answer the question newly confirmed justice Jackson did not have the time to address, I would like to offer the following:

• A woman is a working, single mother who was extended a lifeline in the American Rescue Plan with the Child Tax Credit, only to have it cruelly yanked away when Congress refused to support its extension.

• A woman is a stay-at-home mom, recently divorced and struggling to return to work after pausing her career to raise children in a system that does not have universal family leave benefits or adequate support for child care which could enable her to work while raising her family.

• A woman is a professional, clerical or tradesperson who earns 86% of what a man earns for the same work, a gap that expands even more as women get older.

• A woman is a 23-year-old Dreamer brought to America when she was too young to remember and now faces potential deportation because opportunistic anti-immigrant members of Congress will not allow her to become a citizen.

• A woman is a 14-year-old girl in Texas who was impregnated by an incestuous uncle and cannot get access to an abortion because exploitive politicians in her state profess to believe she has no personal autonomy and must live under the thumb of others deciding her life for her.

• A woman is a nurse who just finished her third 14-hour shift in a row without hazard pay and often lacking the PPE she needs to stay safe because the majority in the Pennsylvania Legislature put several billion dollars of pandemic relief money in a rainy-day fund, doing nothing to help people now.

• A woman is a teacher who uses her own money to buy school supplies for her students because the Legislature in our state will not fully fund public education and flirts with charter school investors who seek to divert public school funding into their pockets.

• A woman is a retired, aging grandmother who will not be able to stay in her home because the funding is not available to provide home health care workers because anti-union members of our Legislature refuse to provide the funding that helps pay the union workers who provide the services.

• A woman is a barista or retail clerk who wants to form a union in her workplace for purposes of collective bargaining, only to be fired for her union activity.

• A woman is a cancer patient, diabetic or other ailing mother, sister or daughter with traumatic health issues who does not have adequate health care or access to affordable medication and treatments because of injustices in our system.

Blackburn and, unfortunately, most of her Republican colleagues at all levels of government pretend they want to protect women but in reality only want to stoke the fires of divisive culture wars for their own political gains. Perhaps Blackburn and her party need to stop pretending they are protecting us from some imagined existential threat to femininity, motherhood and the X chromosome.

It is time to stop asking stupid questions and get to work doing things that truly make a difference in the lives of millions of women that apparently Blackburn and her like-minded Republican colleagues do not see or seem to care about.

Harriet Ellenberger is a member of the Pennsylvania Federation of Democratic Women, founder of the Democratic Women of Westmoreland and treasurer of the Greater Westmoreland County Labor Council — and a woman!