Women, Gender and the Campaign

By David Epstein

I cannot but agree with Brigitte's last post on Charlotte Allen's execrable column in the Washington Post. How does this get by the editors? What in the world were they thinking? And despite the avowed target of emotional Obama supporters, her anti-female rant boomerangs on Hillary, who must prove herself different and more competent than her, apparently, incompetent sisters.

I've said it before, but being a female candidate is still much harder than being a black candidate. For men, there's a clearly delineated path of how you can act in order to become president. You can show some emotion, but not too much, and you can't get angry or out of control. (As an aside, one corollary of this is that I don't think there's a traditional double standard at work here: there are emotions that are OK for men and not women, and vice-versa.) You put yourself forward as a self-confident leader who understands the people and can relate to their hopes, desires, wants and needs. And you know your policy, but not to a too wonky degree.

For women, there's still no clear path or set of rules to follow. You can be simultaneously blasted for being too emotional and too robot-like. You have to walk a fine line because you'll have extra work to do convincing people you're tough enough for the job, but you can't be tough all the time. And so on.

So of the two candidates, Hillary is the one really blazing a trail this year. Obama is following the tried and true formula for men to become president, and then hoping that the amount of racism in our society has declined to the point where he can win. But day to day, he looks like previous male candidates. It's Hillary who gets all the questions about her marriage, clothing, purity of emotions, and so on. If she wins, she'll write the rules for what it takes to succeed as a woman in national politics. Until then, she'll keep taking lumps from morons like Allen and Maureen Dowd.

Comments

[Tony]

I repeat: Amendment XV was ratified FIFTY years before Amendment XIX. (It is not a coincidence that XIX was ratified 18 months after the Prohibition amendment was ratified.)