Walmart Once Banned This Shirt About A Woman Being President For A Crazy Reason
On September 23, 1995, The Tuscaloosa News published a story that has just now caught the public eye.
In it, they report on a Miami Walmart, which pulled a T-shirt from its shelves because it featured the phrase “Someday a woman will be president.” They explained that some shoppers found this message “offensive.”
A Walmart spokeswoman, Jane Bockholt, said, “It was determined the T-shirt was offensive to some people and so the decision was made to pull it from the sales floor.”
The woman who actually designed the shirt, a 70-year-old psychologist named Ann Moliver Ruben, said, “Promoting females as leaders is still a very threatening concept in this country.”
Ruben went on to explain that one of Walmart's representatives told her that the shirt “goes against Wal-Mart's family values.”
These family values, presumably, can being summed up as “boys rule.”
A professor at Rutgers University brought the article to public attention on Twitter on Tuesday night with this tweet:
He also found what the original T-shirt looked like.
Yes, this T-shirt was considered offensive to family values in 1995.
With all the vitriol being flung at Hillary (some of it entirely justified, some much less so), and liberals focusing all their attention directly at Trump like he's a gun pointed at them, there has been almost no acknowledgement of the magnitude, historically, of Hillary officially becoming the democratic candidate for president.
The United States is one of the only developed nations never to have elected a female leader.
Look, you can feel however you like about Hillary — you can think she's a fire-breathing sea monster that sinks cruise ships with her venomous tentacles, or just a “moderate democrat” (which many of us consider more shameful than ship-gobbling leviathans) — but the fact of the matter is that, in part, the president is not just a person whose job it is to run the executive branch — the president is also a powerful symbol.
And, as a symbol, a woman possibly being at the helm of this country for the first time is huge.
I mean, Jesus Christ, until 1993, it was literally legal to rape your wife in certain states, and until 1975 it was legal in every state.
I'm not making that up, and that's not one of those fake laws no one would actually invoke. Donald Trump's own lawyer brought it up last year, saying “You can't rape your spouse,” when The Daily Beast asked him about the 1989 allegation that Trump violently sexually assaulted his ex-wife Ivana.
“It is true,” his lawyer explained, “You cannot rape your spouse. And there's very clear case law.”
So this is all to say that having female president bears extreme historical significance in this country, and will have a powerful impact, regardless of her politics, on the future of the nation.
For one, if Hillary is elected, girls will grow up in this country never having to see a T-shirt like this again because they will never have known a time when there was even a question about a woman being able to be the president.
And that's big.
