Column: Women's issues — we decide them

This weekend, I took advantage of the new-semester lull — or, probably more accurately, the calm before the storm — to explore some towns around Chapel Hill.

And as I navigated the unexpectedly crowded aisles of a rural antiques shop Saturday afternoon, I took a look at a few vintage magazines.

While the old news magazines were a natural draw, I found myself reaching for a 1959 edition of a lifestyle magazine called “McCall’s,” billed as “the magazine of Togetherness.” Capital T togetherness.

An odd slogan, I thought, for a lifestyle magazine; I took a look inside.

Clearly intended as a women’s magazine, its cover featured a fair-skinned woman lounging on a gondola in a prim dress and heels.

Stories touting hypnosis as a weight loss technique, warning that “honeymoons can be a menace" and advertising “new delight in window treatments” stretched across the cover.

And I thought about what it meant to be a woman in 1959 versus 2016. How alien those experiences and exclusions were, speaking through those pages to a woman in 2016.

In one short and surprisingly reflective moment later, the absurdity of that idea checked me. Of course, women were no different.

But the people who crafted the images, edited that magazine, wrote the laws — those who drew the lines of what a woman “was” — were a different set. And it is that power, to define womanhood and therefore personhood, that pervades our lives.

It’s that power that makes gender political.

Since “Women’s Equality Day” was last week, I had been thinking a lot about what defined “women’s issues” in politics.

In celebrating the 96th anniversary of the 19th Amendment through this holiday, we remembered how many women were excluded from that progress in 1920, were left disenfranchised until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

We think of the women who were left outside the vote, left outside the political definition of womanhood.

And with that, we ruminate on a host of “women’s issues” past and present, the boundaries of which are blurred in the political sphere.

The precise point where gender identity becomes a driving factor for public debate is tricky to pinpoint, the place of “women’s” dialogue in demands for fundamental human rights is variable, and the implications of intersections of identity must be more fully addressed.

But that driving question — “Who draws the boundaries of womanhood?”— remains precisely as relevant today as it did in 1959.

We face another year where much of state politics hinges on precisely that question; debate over House Bill 2 continues while communities grapple with the reality of a female presidential nominee. And the struggle over who gets to define those rights and who polices those gender identities continues.

In an election cycle with a race for state governor and for president that are both almost in dead heats, and a senate race with a margin of three points, the voters on our campus hold immense power. And with that, politicians' treatment of gender identities could, and perhaps should, make or break their election.

So let’s celebrate Women’s Equality Day as we were intended to — at the voting booth this November.