"A Female President of the United States: A Hope?" by Leonardo Boff

 This weekend I received the following article from my friend in Brazil, theologian Leonardo Boff. I have cut it some to fit our format. Matthew Fox in his Daily Meditation from August 19, 2024

The real possibility that a woman, Kamala Harris, will become president of the imperial power, the United States of America, would represent a novum in the history of that country, and perhaps a step forward in the new relationship between genders. 

The USA, independent since 1776, has had 44 presidents, all men and none women.  Many see the president exclusively in military terms, more as the head of the Armed Forces--the one who holds the red telephone and the button to launch a nuclear war--than as the promoter of the common good. 

That's why they keep fighting wars everywhere.  Virtually all presidents, including Obama, are imbued with "manifest destiny," the belief that the United States is anointed as "that new people of God with a mission to bring (bourgeois) democracy, (individual) human rights, and peace (of the market) for the world".

Under the patriarchy that has lasted for ten thousand years, since the Neolithic era, with the formation of villages and agriculture, women have always been relegated to the private world.  Even knowing that a historical era existed, twenty thousand years ago, of matriarchy forming egalitarian societies that integrated with nature and was deeply spiritual.

Patriarchy, the predominance of the male (machismo) was one of the greatest mistakes in human history.  The type of State we have is attributed to patriarchy, including war and violence as a way of solving problems, the private appropriation of land, and the generation of inequalities and all types of discrimination.  

In capitalism, in its various forms, it gained its most expressive configuration, with the rate of social inequity it brings with it.  

Throughout this process, the main victims were women, along with those deprived of strength and power.  Since then, the destiny of women, in historical-social terms, has been defined based on the man who occupied every public space. 

But slowly, starting in the United States, in the 19th century, women became aware of their autonomous identity.  The feminist movement grew, became active in practically all countries and occupied public spaces.  Entering universities and then into the job market, women brought their unique (non-exclusive) values as women:  more given to collaboration as opposed to competition from men, more care, more flexibility, more ability to deal with complexity, more human sensitivity and heart, finally, more open to dialogue against sexist and patriarchal authoritarianism.  

In a word, they brought more humanity to a rational, rigid, competitive, efficient world, marked by the will to power as domination:  the world of men.  They, by their nature, represent rather the will to live and to relate.  

Even so, the fight for gender equality is far from being fully won.  It was only in 1920 that women gained the right to vote in the United States.  In Brazil only in 1932.  Today 52% of the electorate is female.  

Empowering women's identity and relational autonomy will generate a new paradigm:  that of reciprocity, of cooperation between men and women....

Politically, the best way to express this civilizational advance would be participatory, socio-ecological democracy, in which man and woman cooperatively and in solidarity would build a dream world that responds to the deepest desires of the human psyche.