| When Hillary Clinton ran against President Trump in 2016, much was made about the fact that if she won, she'd be the first female US President. There were the "I'm With Her" shirts. The white pantsuit. Her campaign had even planned for her victory speech (never delivered, obviously) to be held under a literal glass ceiling. For the most part, Harris has avoided this kind of messaging. That doesn't mean she's avoiding talking about gender—she talks about it quite a lot. But this time, the focus is less on having a female candidate and instead on the women she's trying to convince to vote for her. As you may have heard, this week the Vice President sat for an interview with Alex Cooper, host of the podcast Call Her Daddy. Call Her Daddy has the second largest audience of any podcast on Spotify, second only to The Joe Rogan Experience. In a 2021 profile of Cooper, TIME reported that her listeners were mostly between the ages of 18 and 26 and overwhelmingly female. The show is ostensibly nonpartisan although Cooper often touches on topics — mental health, reproductive rights, misogyny, female autonomy and the catch-all term "empowerment"— that can feel political. Still, according to Edison Research metrics as reported by NPR, a third of Cooper's audience lives in the South and a quarter identify as Republican.
Unsurprisingly, the bulk of Cooper's interview with Harris focused on abortion. It's an issue about which Cooper is passionate; after Roe v. Wade was overturned, she traveled to North Carolina to document the effect the ruling had on a Charlotte clinic and its patients. Harris, of course, has made access to reproductive healthcare a cornerstone of her campaign. And for good reason; a recent American University poll found that abortion has become the top issue for female voters and that more than two-thirds of them, regardless of party, think abortion should be legal in most or all circumstances.
But the most interesting exchanges, I thought, came in the smaller moments. At one point, Harris observed that women, especially those with kids, were more likely to stay in abusive relationships when they couldn't support themselves financially. "Most women will endure whatever personal, physical pain they must to make sure their kids have a roof over their head or food," she said. At another turn, she spoke directly to survivors of domestic and sexual violence. "Tell someone you trust. Don't quietly suffer. You have done nothing wrong and don't let anyone convince you you have," Harris said. The Call Her Daddy interview was clearly a political strategy, a Presidential candidate's attempt to put herself in front of a politically diverse audience of millions of young women, some of whom had not paid much attention to her campaign before this. (After the interview, Call Her Daddy's extremely active Reddit community erupted into heated political debates with no overwhelming consensus, which makes sense considering the podcast's ideologically purple audience.) But it also felt like a pointed response to all the recent political hand-wringing over whether American women are behaving correctly these days. In the last few months women have been subject to a torrent of judgements, largely but not exclusively from men: Why aren't they marrying as often? Why don't they want children? If they do have children, is it the right number? Are working mothers to be praised or condemned? Do they use the right kind of child care? Should we make it harder to seek a divorce? Are they humble? These questions and comments stem from the same fundamental debate that America has been having since at least the 19th century. The specifics of the argument have changed over the years — we're no longer fretting, for example, over whether women's feet are too "delicate" and their knees too "peculiar" to allow them to stand for long periods of time at a job (yes, this was once an actual concern cited in a now famous Supreme Court brief) or if higher education rendered them infertile — but the gist is the same. What is a woman's place?
Of course, the first time the US had this debate, American women couldn't vote. These days, they frequently outperform men in voter turnout. Nearly twice as many women between 18 and 29 identify as liberal than conservative. The most recent Times/Sienna poll has 56% of women supporting Harris, compared with just 40% for Trump. How much this so-called gender gap will influence the election depends on how many of them decide to vote. | 
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