Didja hear about Wendy Davis? Remember her? She was the woman who filibustered that awful Texas abortion bill and a became a national political celebrity overnight. Then, she ran for governor of Texas. She had a very catchy story: divorced teenage mom living in a trailer park overcomes the odds to work herself through law school and becomes a politician to fight for the rights of women like her. Well, it turns out that she’s a great big liar.
Wendy Davis was never a single teenage mom. She didn’t get divorced until she was 21, at which point she lived with her mom for a short while before getting an apartment.
Wendy Davis didn’t work her way through law school, but married a rich guy who spent all his savings on paying for her education, who she then apparently divorced a short time after she graduated (some dubious Republican sources suggest she filed a week after his last payment went through).
Here’s a fun one: Wendy Davis was a Republican up until 2008 when an opportunity to run for state senate presented itself and she switched parties. That fact was never really covered up, but it was never highlighted either, but in the wake of all these other lies coming to the surface, I feel like it calls into question whether or not Wendy Davis is just a career politician.
Wendy Davis is falling back on the whole “I wasn’t as a clear as I should’ve been” excuse. To be honest, a career politician who stands up for women’s rights is better than a Republican on any day of the week, but I was under the admittedly cautious impression that Wendy Davis might signal a change in Texas politics, a state that has seen a great deal of lies and shallow political theater from its electorate. Oh well.
You know what? No, Dion. I can’t let you buy this. You’ve taken what the Right has said about Wendy Davis, and you’ve swallowed it, hook line and sinker.
She still left home when she was 17, got married when she was just 18, and she was 21 when she was divorced, not 19. Big deal. 21 year-olds are just as terrified about life as 19 year-olds are, and 21 is incredibly, incredibly young to be on your own like that. She lived in a trailer when she got out. Not as long as she said initially said she did, maybe, but she still lived in that damn trailer. Her mother may not have had a 6th grade education, she had a 9th grade education.
What a fucking liar, amirite?
The fact is, Davis still came from nothing, and rose to be something. Davis was a teenage bride, and a young single mother, living in a trailer. That is true. That is admirable, and anyone who can’t see that because of a few fuzzy details? I just don’t know, man.
Now we get to the fun stuff; how Davis managed to pull herself out of poverty and how she managed to pay for law school. Davis’s ex-husband says she milked him for every bit of cash he had. He says he paid for her education and she left him the very next day. Davis’s husband is one hell of a sad country love song.
Several points.
1. The article that broke this story only interviewed Davis’s husband on his side of the story. Now, ex-husbands generally don’t have the best impression of their ex-wives. Maybe it’s my experience that is going to tell me this, but ex-husbands, especially ex-husbands that complain about their money being gone, are generally full of shit. There’s a reason she left him, and it is simply wrong (not to mention misogynistic) to not extend the benefit of the doubt to her and assume she’s a money-grubbing whore. There’s another side to this story, that is glaringly obvious, if you have any kind of experience with families that have broken up.
2. It is sexist to criticize Wendy Davis for moving on up in this world through marriage. The pay gap is real. The WEALTH gap is real. Women have few tools available to themselves to gain ground for themselves — their chances are even less, if they’re a) starting out poor, and b) live in a state as unforgiving towards the poor as TEXAS, and c) are young single mothers that by definition don’t have the support needed to really sink oneself into one’s career or education. So she got married, and in doing so, propelled herself into the middle class. She got her child out of that trailer park and she made a life for herself. Go her.
3. It is sexist to claim that she was using HIS money to pay for her law school degree, that he’s a victim here. Money, in a relationship, is generally a joint affair. A woman who does not contribute to the real income of a household but spends all her time educating herself so that she can prepare to have a better future than the one they have now — she is not a silent partner in this relationship. She is not a dependent. That money he earns as the primary breadwinner? It’s half hers. Childcare and home-making (as well as the investment she was putting into herself for their future) are forms of unpaid labor. To suggest that he’s a victim here, instead of a husband, is misogynistic.
To conclude: you have been hoodwinked by conservative, sexist smear-mongers who want nothing more than to paint Wendy Davis as a greedy, bitchy ex-wife who’s after nothing but her hard working ex-husband’s money. They want to do this to her especially bad since Davis has built her political career on defending women’s reproductive rights. They’re just itching to put her in her place. And you’ve allowed them to spread their message, with this post.
They don’t CARE about the fact that women are most likely going to rally around Wendy Davis, because women’s votes, in Texas, don’t matter any more. This is a blatantly sexist attack on a female politician who has done what she needs to do in order to rise through life. The path to success for a woman looks different than the path to success for a man. That’s not the woman’s fault — that’s society’s fault.
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