The XX Factor: What women really think.

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  My Post-Partisan, Gender-Free Enthusiasm for Voting

  Posted Tuesday, November 04, 2008 2:16 PM | By E.J. Graff
  Oh my gosh, how I love to vote! I stood in line for two hours this morning in a dense urban area right outside Boston waiting to vote. The lines were literally around the block and then another block back—hundreds of people, maybe more than 400 in line at a time. It's a bright, chilly day up here; when we turned the corner onto a windy street, my fingers went numb and didn't fully stop tingling until an hour after I'd voted. None of us had ever seen anything like it. Mine is a mixed-class, mixed-age neighborhood, and it sure did look like everyone in town was in line: white working-class (especially Portuguese and Italian, who used to be called "ethnics" only a generation ago), college students, parents (some brave souls with babies or toddlers in tow), elderly folks, and Certified Liberal Elites (professors, journalists, lawyers, doctors, scientists, and the like). I did get some use out of the time in line: The preschool teacher behind me gave me some suggestions for managing a child's tantrums—very useful, since I am spending more and more time with a 5-year-old. Then the 80-year-old woman in front of me insisted that I vote ahead of her since she didn't have to go to work and I did, so that cut a minute off my time. The cheerful line was still curled around the block when I left at 11 a.m., all happy at being part of democracy.
  
  I suspect I wasn't the only one who felt especially virtuous because of the wait. Social science suggests that yes, in presidential elections, people vote as much for that feeling of moral virtue as for a sense of affecting the outcome—and that people tend to value something more highly or believe in it more firmly if they had to work harder to get it. Here in the Boston area, the sense of cheerfulness and friendliness in line could be linked to the probability that most people were voting for a candidate they believed would win—and felt that they were accompanied by those who agreed with them. Like Emily, I am giddy with relief that this 100-year campaign is almost over. But for today, whatever the outcome, I just love that feeling of having my say in hiring our commander in chief. Voting makes me especially love my country!!
  Filed under: election '08, voting

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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