June 2008

Girl Power

When I was in college in the mid-Seventies, I took a course called “Women in American History” that, as its title suggests, examined American history from the Puritans to what was then the present by focusing on women. Nowadays a course like this might be called “American History,” but back then, the central assumption, even in academia, was that men constituted some kind of default setting from which women were an aberration. History was by definition the history of men, who at that time ran the world.

Although it has been 33 years since I took this course, its material was so fascinating that I still remember enough to do reasonably well on the final exam today. (Thank you, Professor Fishbein.) One salient point about the nineteenth century that we studied was the long pas de deux between the women’s rights movement and the Abolitionist movement.

In class, we learned that women’s rights advocates like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton got their chops, so to speak, from working to end slavery, and that the two movements existed side-by-side for decades until just after the Civil War, when Anthony and Stanton voiced opposition for the Fourteenth Amendment because it contained the phrase “male citizens.” They were told to wait for a more auspicious time to pursue female suffrage by some abolitionists who chided, “This is the Negro’s hour.”

Surely among Hillary Clinton’s remaining supporters are some history buffs who have seen the 1868 shift away from a focus on equal rights for women as a tragic error that they have vowed not to repeat. Perhaps this explains the intensity of their devotion to Clinton and the conviction of some that Barack Obama should not be the Democratic nominee no matter how many delegates he has.

Some of Clinton’s supporters, on the other hand, clearly have a less scholarly analysis: they want her to be president because, and I quote my friend’s 20-something daughter, who voted for her, they are in favor of “girl power.” Another friend’s daughter, who is seven, urged her mommy to “vote for the girl” in Maryland’s primary, which her mommy did. For them, Clinton’s candidacy is all about having a female Chief Executive.

The history of women in America, with its profound absence of Girl Power, certainly does cause one to wish that women held more high political offices so we could share with the world our propensities for peace, negotiation, compassion, understanding, and fashion sense.

Unfortunately, however, women do not inherently possess these qualities. As someone who lived for six years in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, I can assure Hillary’s young supporters that Girl Power in action does not necessarily look any different from Guy Power, except that the word “strident” is used more often than “bellicose” to describe it. Anyone who thinks that women will be more humane than men on the international stage need only examine the career of Condoleezza Rice. Sure, she wears fancy shoes, but apart from that, she is just as short-sighted and devoid of diplomatic skills as any Bush-appointed man.

At several points in my life, I have worked for organizations that were almost exclusively female in which I dealt with some women who would have felt right at home in a tank of piranhas. I never noticed that these organizations were any kinder or gentler than those run by men.

There is an obvious reason for this. While perhaps at some time in the distant past, men and women had such different societal roles that they embodied vastly different traits, the experiment in equality of our time has begun to demonstrate that these differences were primarily a product of nurture, not nature.

As Clinton’s role in the presidential race dies a slow death, a number of commentators have attributed her failure to sexist reactions to her gender. “Is it about her womanhood?” Libby Copeland asks in the Washington Post. Jodi Kantor in The New York Times ponders whether Clinton’s defeat is “a historic if incomplete triumph or a depressing reminder of why few pursue high office in the first place.” Kantor’s article quotes a Clinton supporter saying, ““Women felt this was their time, and this has been stolen from them,” and adding that “[s]exism has played a really big role in the race.” Kantor also quotes from Clinton supporters who are not planning to vote for Obama in November. “This was supposed to be the woman’s hour,” they seem to be saying.

Yes, of course, it will be wonderful when a woman finally shatters the “glass ceiling” by becoming president. But by the same token—as it were—isn’t it going to be just as wonderful when an African-American does that? Either will be a historic first—so really, don’t considerations of gender and race cancel each other out?

In any case, it seems to me that to vote for a female candidate purely on the basis of her sex implies a belief in “essentialist” notions of gender. And to reduce someone as complicated as Hillary Clinton to “the girl” is a far more virulent form of sexism than, say, calling someone “sweetie.”

After the Civil War, there is little doubt that the women’s rights movement suffered a setback from which it took decades to recover. But this is a vastly different world. Despite recent attempts to race-bait him, Barack Obama has positioned himself as a candidate who is post-divisive politics. The fact that he is of mixed race is a metaphor for his multiplicity; race does not define him. Of course, African Americans support him in record numbers, just as numerous women have come out for Hillary, and volatile old people of short stature and gnome-like countenance no doubt favor McCain. But Obama himself seems to hope that this is the hour to transcend identity politics.

What we probably need to celebrate at this point is that in the course of this election, while some people may have supported a candidate purely because s/he was female or African American, most American voters won’t judge candidates by the color of their skin or their gender, but by the content of their character. In other words, as the saying goes, or went, we’ve come a long, long way.

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