In a year in which one woman came within a hair's breadth of being a major party candidate for President and another is on the ticket, and the airwaves and blogosphere are full of conversations about women's role in the world, you might think that 2008 is the year in which "women's issues" came front and center.
However, you would be wrong. This has probably been the year in which actual women's issues have gotten even less than the minuscule amount of attention normally allotted to women's issues during campaign season.
The weird displacement that took place during this campaign, from the primaries on, is that issues surrounding the women candidates as women took up a lot of the feminist oxygen in the room.
In other words, instead of talking about women's issues per se, the One Big Women's Issue became one or the other female candidate.
When the media looked on their checklist of issues and saw that little, tiny category they save for women's issues, they talked about leadership or horse-race non-issues . Is Hillary too masculine? Is she using traditional "women's weapons" (King Lear's name for tears) unfairly against a male candidate? Can Sarah Palin manage a pregnant teenage daughter, a disabled infant, and three other children while serving as Vice President? Is she too pretty to lead? Is she a "mean girl"? Can a woman face down Ahmadinejad or Putin?
These questions fall into two categories: 1) Irrelevant or 2) None of your business.
These questions in no way address women's issues, which to me, mean issues that affect all women at some point in their lives, or many women every day of their lives.
99.999% of us will never run for office. But a hell of a lot of us work, and need equal pay, equal opportunities for promotion, and equitable treatment in the workplace.
Many of us are or will be mothers. We need safe, affordable daycare for our kids and health insurance for them and for us.
Most of us are or will be sexually active. We need access to the birth control of our choosing, regardless of the "moral objections" of some pharmacist. We need access to safe legal abortion no matter where we live. We need to be safe from rape and domestic violence.
In short, we need true equality, full citizenship, and economic equity. Our one connection to women like Clinton and Palin is that we need to be considered equally for the jobs we would like to do, and respected for the work we do.
Those are the real women's issues, and they are just not getting much attention.
So, bizarrely enough, in a year when we had a serious woman contender for President and an actual woman candidate for Vice-President, real women's issues are really getting ignored.