political campaigns

Yes, folks, she’s a human. DUH. I was actually touched by Hillary’s choked up moment yesterday (see clip above), and impressed by Obama’s response: “I didn’t see what happened … [but] I know this process is a grind, so that’s not something I care to comment on.” And I’m so down with Rebecca Traister on John Edwards’ response. Said Edwards, “I think what we need in a commander-in-chief is strength and resolve, and presidential campaigns are tough business, but being president of the United States is also tough business.” Unclassy, tough guy.

Once again, to cite research from Catalyst, if you’re a woman in leadership, you’re damned if you do, doomed if you don’t. Def don’t miss Gloria Steinem’s op-ed on it all in today’s New York Times, which my mother called to tell me about this morning (thanks, Mom!) and which I am now off to read.

Meanwhile, back in the land of actual issues,
Marc at Feminist Dad notes that when Take Care Net issued a survey to all the presidential candidates with questions about policy support on issues like FMLA, child care, child care workers, other paid and unpaid family caregivers, and victims of domestic violence, only the Dems responded. The Republican candidates didn’t even bother. Say wha? Survey results are here.

Don’t miss Kerry Howly’s op-ed in today’s New York Times, titled “It Takes a Family to Break a Glass Ceiling.” Howly brings an important historical perspective to the issue of Hillary being a politician’s wife–the best I’ve read on this aspect yet.

And while we’re on it, some smart and timely gender – and – election commentary from a few of my favorite bloggers:

Gloria Feldt on Hillary: “You know Hillary is no longer seen as the inevitable front runner in Iowa when Maureen Dowd (almost, at least till she gets to her punch line) writes something positive about her.” Read more. Be sure to check out Gloria’s “memos to Hillary” over at HuffPo.

Carol Lloyd at Broadsheet: “Obama and his mama.” Read more.

And of course, Virginia Rutter here at Girl with Pen: “Mind you, seeing Barack Obama win is great for the election, because it keeps the pressure on all around. But there is something else going on, and commentators keep acting like concerns about gender are baloney.” Read more. (Thank you to all who are linking to Virginia Rutter’s post and helping spread the word. And thank you to those who commented–Virginia will likely be weighing in soon, with her thoughts!)

For anyone near San Diego on February 29, do check out the Eighth Annual Women and the Law Conference and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lecture at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego (via Feminist Law Professors). The topic is, guess what, “Women in Politics: The Role of Gender in Political Decision Making.” I’d be more than happy to have someone who attends guest blog about it here. Any takers?

The answer, writes sociologist Virginia Rutter (pictured left), author of The Gender of Sexuality, may surprise you. Here’s Virginia:

I’m pondering the results in Iowa, thinking about numbers, and continue to feel so troubled by the misogynistic responses to Hillary Clinton. When I got the idea–just recently, listening to Bill Moyers interview Kathleen Hall Jamieson on politics and the blogosphere–of how aggressive the remarks about Clinton are, I had this duh moment that reminded me (not to be too dramatic) of when my husband died.

See, my husband died 9 years ago, but my brother had died 14 years before. When my husband died, I was like, “shit I forgot that people you love can die.” And when I started figuring out what was going on with Clinton, I was like, “duh I forgot just how much people hate women who lead and take charge.” It is that fundamental, I am afraid to say.

The issue is gender identity politics. Not gender politics, like whether a candidate is concerned with family leave, which continues to be a concern of women more than men, for example, but gender identity politics, the politics of feeling like a man or a woman is in a role or status that we’re comfortable with. When Clinton is called “that bitch” that is a good signal that it isn’t about policy, but about identity politics.

Mind you, seeing Barack Obama win is great for the election, because it keeps the pressure on all around. But there is something else going on, and commentators keep acting like concerns about gender are baloney. “Get over it. 35% of women voted for Obama versus 30% for Clinton.” But those numbers do not tell us anything about how voters are responding to gender. They just tell us that the people of Iowa like Obama more than Clinton. What I want to know is what are men doing. Men have gender too, you see.

So the question is this: are men (or women) more likely to vote their gender? The NYTimes provides a profile of caucus voters. I’m a quantitatively oriented sociologist who studies gender, and before I looked in detail at the numbers I thought what I was hearing was that men were voting their gender, and women were voting neutrally–that we women were as likely to vote our gender as not. But the results are a little different: men are more likely to vote their gender, and women vote their gender, too, but less so than do men.

Here’s how it works. First, of course in Iowa men had more opportunity to vote their gender than women did, what with 6 men on the ballot. But if we just compare Obama and Clinton, we see that men and women voted for Obama about 55% of the time and that they both voted for Clinton about 45% of the time. (How did I get this? 34% is what Obama got and 27% is what Clinton got; if you add those two together, 55% is the share that belongs to Obama, and 45% is the share that belongs to Clinton.)

Given that distribution, here’s what we know about “voting one’s gender” in Iowa: Out of all the men who voted for either Obama or Clinton, 60% of those were for Obama–that is men voting for a man. Men voted their gender 5 percentage points more than we would expect if their voting weren’t influenced by their gender. Meanwhile, out of the women who voted for either Obama or Clinton, 46% of those were Clinton supporters–that is women voting for a woman. This means that women voted their gender more than we would expect—but only by 1 or 2 percentage points.

What does this mean? Well these are not dramatic differences, but they are a trend. Gender identity is a factor in this election–and I believe men’s hidden biases (and not so hidden in the crassly expressed attacks on Clinton) against women are playing a role. This doesn’t mean that women are morally superior; it doesn’t mean that Clinton is secretly the better candidate because she is a woman. It means that you should pay attention to what men are doing not just what women are doing. It means that you should speak up and say “not so fast” when commentators or your colleagues or your dinner companions dismiss gender identity politics as a meaningful factor in the democratic primaries. Because it is.

-Virginia Rutter is a sociology professor at Framingham State College (MA). vrutter@frc.mass.edu.

Sorry. Couldn’t resist, after that last post about Glamocracy. It’s just too much fun, the neologisms this season.

Following on that last one, on the historical memory side of things, here’s another Carol weighing in today–Caryl, actually, over at Women’s eNews. Caryl Rivers advises Hillary at this point in her campaign (when the inevitable no longer is) to remember JFK:

People worried that, as the first Catholic president, he’d build a tunnel to the Vatican.

You face the concern that, as a female, you will either collapse in a crisis (the weak woman myth) or run roughshod over everyone (the dragon lady myth). Either way, you can’t be trusted with power.

…[P]lay the “change” card. Don’t let your critics get away with saying you echo the past, and represent the establishment. What would be a bigger change than the first female president in history? Your instinct is to be bold; remember, as a Wellesley student you challenged Sen. Ed Brooke–who had become a hawk on Vietnam–to his face and told him he was dead wrong about that war.

Sometimes, forget the lawyer part of you and channel the young rebel.

Another thing: Ignore the well-meaning advice of your sisters who say you are not feminist enough. We’d all love for the first female president to be Gloria Steinem, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Alice Paul all rolled up into one. It’s not going to happen. Maybe someday, but not now.

No “first president” emerges from identity politics. JFK was as far from the familiar Irish Catholic pol as he could get; he talked Harvard and dressed Brahmin.

It’s not surprising that the first black candidate who is seen as having a real chance, Barak Obama, does not come from civil rights struggles but is seen as transcending race. His father was from Africa, not Selma. Let your feminism emerge in those policy initiatives you support after you get elected.

You don’t need to croon “I am woman, hear me roar.” At least, not yet.

Thoughts?

As those who know me know, I’m all for the innovative intersection of politics and glam, if it helps engage more women in a worthy cause. Like voting. And campaigning. And just the other week, Glamour magazine launched a blog with promise: Glamocracy.

As Broadsheet’s Carol Lloyd notes, “it’s a clever move when an estimated 25 percent of the voters are 18-29 and an increasing number of those younger voters are actively following the presidential elections.” Here’s Lloyd’s assessment:

The idea behind Glamocracy is simple but deft. Five women from different backgrounds (but all within the youngish Glamour demographic) blog weekly on the 2008 elections. Amanda Carpenter, a 25-year-old reporter for conservative Web site TownHall.com, and Asma Hasan, a 33-year-old Muslim-American who describes herself as a moderate and currently registered Republican, fill out the right flank, while Fernanda Diaz, a student from Columbia University and first-time voter, and Caille Millner, a 28-year-old African-American editorialist for the San Francisco Chronicle and unabashed Barack Obama booster, make up the left. Only Rebecca Roberts, a 37-year-old journalist (and daughter of pundit Cokie Roberts), claims journalist’s license and resists showing her political undergarments….Diaz’s post — about the candidates acting as if the youngest voters are “exotic animals” requiring full-time youth-outreach specialists and MTV-style events while regularly ignoring the international issues — taught me something I didn’t know. As might be expected, though, there’s plenty about candidates’ wives and daughters. So far, mercifully, there’s not a single fashion do or don’t.

Personally, I think it’s brilliant. I’ll look forward to watching it maintain its integrity, which, with these five writers behind it, should not be hard to do. They’re off to a great start.

As a follow up to Courseconnections’s comment the other day here about a correlation between the rise in teenage pregnancy and the Bush administration’s support of abstinence-only education, here’s Cynthia Tucker of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, reminding us that the recent rise in teen births stands in stark contrast to more than a decade of decline:

[T]hat stunning drop was by no means mere coincidence. Activists and community volunteers who genuinely wanted to curb adolescent pregnancy — as opposed to those who just wanted to rail against abortion and inflict their rigid moral codes on others — worked hard to find programs that actually worked. They formed clubs for teen girls. They wrote scripts for role-playing, teaching teenagers how to say “no” to sex. (Those activists, too, believe in abstinence, but they’re not naive about its utility.)

High school teachers assigned homework in which students spent a week caring for crying, fidgeting, diaper-wetting baby dolls, so adolescents would learn how difficult and demanding infants can be. They handed out contraceptives, including Depo-Provera, an injection that proved effective with teenaged girls who were unlikely to remember daily pills.

Through the 1990s, that overlapping network of programs was supported and partially funded by the Clinton White House, which believed in a pragmatic response to social problems. While President Clinton supported a woman’s right to choose, he also said abortions should be “safe, legal and rare.” The same pragmatism brought federal support for crime prevention efforts, including federal funds for hiring police officers.

By contrast, the Bush White House has turned back to a conservative ideology that mocks government as the source of problems — unless taxpayer funds can be used to further far-right objectives. So Depo-Provera is out, but abstinence pledges are in.

Maybe it’s just coincidence that more adolescent girls are having babies. More likely, it’s the inevitable result of a raft of foolish policies.

I’ll say. A raft that sure don’t float.

Regardless of which candidate you’re gonna support next November, you’ve got to admit that to wake up and see the word “feminist” on the cover of the New York Times this morning is itself a testament of the effect Hillary’s running is having on the presidential debate. I mean, this beats “soccor moms” and “security moms” hands down. The article, “Feminist Pitch by a Democrat Named Obama,” suggests that the Obama campaign is “subtley marketing its candidate as a postfeminist man, a generation beyond the gender conflicts of the boomers.” In other words, in the eyes of the postfeminist generation, the best candidate for women might be a man.

But the claim that younger women are less interested in Hillary than Boomer women are seems to go against what the polls are saying. As GWP readers know, I’m obsessed these days by the stats showing the generational breakdown of women’s support of Hillary. I posted back in September about how polls were showing younger women supporting Hillary more than Boomer women were. Has anyone seen the recent stats on this one? I’d be curious to hear.

Photo cred.

Alison Bower of Womens eNews has the low down on where the presidential hopefuls stand on the issue of sex education. She reminds us that the U.S. has spent about $1 billion on abstinence-only education in the last decade and the White House seeks $28 million more. Infuriating doesn’t begin to describe it. Read more, here.

I’m a little late to the table on this one, but interesting post by Susan Faludi over at Women’s Voices group blog, on Hillary and the gender card. Says Faludi, tying it all back to her recent book:

Keep in mind: The gender card is always played. It’s even played in presidential campaigns where all the candidates are men….Given the political culture — and for reasons embedded in our history — that card usually involves a morality play in which men are the rescuers and women the victims in need of rescuing….Hillary Clinton’s rescue of women departs from the previous male version. In the old model, helpless women were saved from perilous danger by men. In the new, women are granted authority and agency to rescue themselves. Understanding the distinction is essential to an evaluation of current American politics.

Following the thread of Faludi’s new book, then, does that make Hillary, um, the girlfriend’s own inner John Wayne?

(Photo cred: The Plate Lady)

So PunditMom asks a great question over at HuffPo today: Does Lifetime’s Every Woman Counts poll–which is geared toward increasing the participation of women in the political process by encouraging more women to vote and to increase the national spotlight on issues that are important to women–take women seriously? The poll’s questions include:

1. Which candidate would you rather receive a gift from?
2. Which candidate would you be most comfortable leaving your children with?
3. Which candidate would you most like to have dinner with over the holiday season?

PunditMom writes,

What do questions like this add to the “political dialogue” other than making politicians think that we care more about popularity contests than health care or the environment?…If we really want to count and be counted, let’s not provide any more ammunition for the politicians to think that we’re not serious voters.

And I’m with her. But I also wonder this: Since the pollsters are constantly asking men which candidate they’d rather have a beer with, aren’t questions 2 and 3 above really just the equal opportunity equivalent for women? To be sure, I’ve always thought the beer question was a stupid way to choose a President. I’m not sure the babysitter test is any better.