Sir, – Maureen Dowd states that “women boosted Biden into the White House” and that now “women have to rescue us again” from Donald Trump and the Republicans (“Just as women boosted Biden into the White House, now women have to rescue us again”, World, Opinion, August 29th).
As a US political commentator, Maureen Dowd is surely aware that Mr Trump’s support among women has in fact increased, and not decreased, since he arrived on the political scene?
Mr Trump received 39 per cent of the female vote when he was first elected in 2016, but increased this share to 45 per cent in 2020. The notion that women are an amorphous mass which votes entirely for Mr Biden and the Democrats is deeply insulting. If a male writer made such an assumption, it would rightly be decried as deeply sexist.
Maureen Dowd also refers to “the amazing” Jacinda Ardern, but goes on to attack Justice Amy Coney Barrett as a “religious zealot” and a “handmaid” of a “tyrannical” religious group. This again reflects the almost daily pattern in your newspaper whereby left-wing female public figures are routinely praised, and right-wing female public figures are vilified.
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Ms Ardern currently has 30 per cent approval in her own country, a level to which even Mr Biden has not sunk, so clearly the voters in New Zealand don’t have as high an opinion of her as Maureen Dowd and her colleagues in the American media. – Yours, etc,
SARAH-ANNE CLEARY,
Strokestown,
Co Roscommon.