Gloria Gets It Wrong

Gloria Steinem’s rant in yesterday’s New York Times, apparently written over the weekend, may have been the second most popular op-ed piece in the Times this week, but not because she was right–or accurate. Except for the brief few days of post-victory bounce enjoyed by Senator Barack Obama between the Iowa caucus and yesterday’s New Hampshre primary, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has been the front runner in nearly every national and local poll of likely Democratic voters. Forget her high negatives; never mind nagging voter concerns about “electability;” Clinton has been the top choice of the plurality, if not majority, of self-identified Democrats for many months. So Steinem’s tirade about women “never” being “front-runners” rings false, and sounds whiny.

Steinem also misses the mark with her attack on Senator Obama’s biography. In the guise of a thought experiment interrogating the role of gender, Steinem huffily demands whether a woman with an identical c.v. might claim the “biography of someone who could be elected to the United States Senate?”

Has Steinem now forgotten that in long-ago 1992, the same year Bill Clinton won the Presidency, the good people of Illinois elected an African American woman to the United States Senate? Remember Carol Moseley-Braun? Senator Moseley-Braun, a lawyer and former state legislator, was born and raised and made her political base on the South Side of Chicago. Unlike Steinem’s fictitious “Achola Obama,” Mosely-Braun boasted no Ivy League degrees, although she graduated from the top-ranked University of Chicago Law School. Also unlike her fictional counterpart, Moseley-Braun hailed from an intact, African-American family. Moseley-Braun was, however, divorced–from a white ex-husband, with whom she had a son. During her senate term she forged an exceedingly a close attachment to her chief of staff whose first name, Kgose, was at least as exotic as either “Barack” or Steinem’s made-up moniker, “Achola.” Finally, if memory serves, Moseley-Braun in 2003 formed an exploratory committee as she pondered a run for the presidency.

Neither race nor gender “restricted” Moseley-Braun in her race for the U.S. Senate. In fact, she was the beneficiary of widespread feminist and civil rights-activist based outrage at incumbent Senator Alan Dixon’s judiciary committee vote in favor of Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court. And, yes, her presidential trial balloon fell absolutely flat. No one ever touted Moseley-Braun for her charisma, but look how far she went nonetheless? No goose-cooking there.

No question, 20th century American voters traditionally discounted women seeking high political office, strong or not. I vividly recall the late Harriet Woods describing her 1982 campaign against [the phlegmatic] John Danforth for the U.S. Senate seat in Missouri. Her polling revealed that the majority of Missouri voters would never elect “a woman” at the head of a ticket, irrespective of “qualifications,” “charisma,” “experience,” or even party identification. By 1982 Woods was already an elected Lieutenant Governor, a post she had handily won, and had served with distinction in St. Louis county politics. Still, the voters had a visceral reaction against elevating her to the top. And Danforth, who was Missouri’s incumbent Attorney General (where he mentored a young Yale Graduate named Clarence Thomas; see above), sailed to victory.

So who now holds that very U.S. Senate seat in Missouri? A woman, former Missouri Auditor/Attorney General/Jackson County Prosecutor Claire McCaskill, elected in the Democratic sweep of 2006. McCaskill is one tough cookie, an ambitious, savvy, career politician who was already in the Missouri State House of Representatives back in 1982.

Like Missouri’s Democrats, millions of American voters act ready to knock back the phantom “sex barrier” Steinem divined in the Iowa results. Together with her friends and allies, Steinem, a fearless second-wave feminist foremother, achieved so much in the latter third of the 20th century. She rallied and organized and exhorted and cajoled women and men alike, to name, and then resist the sexism, patriarchy, and gender oppression that held women back and prevented a just society. Look how much we’ve gained! Here we are, with a woman front-runner! I just wish Steinem would step back and take credit for the successes her movement achieved.

Smart Girls

Glenn Greenwald made this observation today in his roundup of press reports of and blogger reactions to an otherwise minor Iowa campaign trail snippet:

Just contrast the frosty, petulant reception they gave Hillary when she entered their bus with the way White House press reporters at the President’s news conferences, for years, cackle at his every attempt at humor and light up with glee when he deigns to engage them in his insulting frat-boy repartee. But in contrast to George the Popular Jock to whom they’re grateful for any attention, Hillary is the overly competitive, know-it-all girl at the front of the class with all the answers, and so instead of acting like professionals and just treating like her like a candidate running for President, and taking the opportunity to ask questions when she entered the bus, they instead band together like they’re in eighth grade and give the mean, unpopular girl the cold shoulder.

Is it any wonder that Hillary never boards the press bus? Personally, I’d rather be in Siberia than be in Iowa around all of that.

Hoo, boy, does that trigger rotten memories of my Ozarks grade school, junior high, and high school years in the 60s and 70sl! Like Glenn, I don’t have to support Hillary to be pained and disgusted by the story. (We know-it-all Seven Sister grads still need to stick together!) I’m disgusted to see that pack anti-intellectualism still reigns supreme, and pained to be reminded of behaviors I’d hoped to escape when I left Missouri more than 30 years ago.

Unlike Glenn, I don’t conflate “mean” with “smart.” A brainy girl who knows the answers was bound to be unpopular in 1960, but not necessarily because she was “mean.” I still recall, vividly, the hatred directed across the classroom toward my eagerly waving hand. The meanness came at me, not from me. Our freshman civics teacher, Coach Roweton, chided three of my female classmates who equaled or out-scored me on pop quizzes: “Donna, Peggy, you’re hiding your intelligence,” he’d say. Donna and Peggy were no dummies. Coach was right about that. Each shrewdly kept her light under a bushel, knowing full well the key to popularity was an apparently empty head. I can’t speak to classroom dynamics in Park Ridge, Illinois, but I have to imagine that it wasn’t far ahead of Parkview High School a decade later. Like Hillary, I fled the hostile middle west for an all-women’s college out East where achievement from young women was expected, not resented.

And, like Hillary, I’ve had to learn the hard way that, no matter how far we flee, lots of folks still dislike gals who know stuff. Having been chided at Washington dinner parties for my command of “facts,” I know all too well the malice aimed toward the female, gifted, and smart. “Walking dictionary” is still an epithet, not an accolade.

There was an internet joke circulating a few years back, calculating the comparative dollars/per/second earned by Michael Jordan versus Bill Gates. “Nerds rule!” they chortled. But smart, confident girls? Rule? Remains to be seen.

Experience

United States Senator and former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton touts herself as one of the most “experienced” candidates in the Democratic field. Dana Milbank’s quote in today’s Washington Post profile of her campaign is typical: “Her ‘35 years of experience’ make her ‘the best-qualified and experienced person to hit the ground running.’” Here’’s the link to the full story:href=”http://http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/08/AR2007120801442.html”>

In addition to her own formidable accomplishments–Yale Law, Watergate Committee, children’s advocacy with Marian Wright Edelman, partner at Rose Law Firm, ABA committee work–Senator Clinton heavily underscores the “experience” she gained through opportunites created by her marriage to an elected official–the Governor of a small southern state turned two-term President. More practiced pundits have tried to puncture that balloon by noting that former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson wins the resume sweepstakes, and that Senators Dodd and Biden both have logged far more years in Congress than Senator Clinton.

Well, of course she’s no Lurleen Wallace, pushed stumbling into the Alabama governorship her term-limited husband could no longer fill, and widely viewed a pawn or puppet of George Wallace’s political machine. Nor is Senator Clinton comparable to Missouri’s Jean Carnahan, who also touted experience from her long marriage and active political partnership with her late husband, Governor Mel Carnahan, but was also pushed forward to fill in for a husband tragically killed before he could complete his own Senate campaign. No one doubts Senator Clinton’s very own and very real drive, ability, policy smarts, ambition, and discipline. No one drafted her on short notice to fill someone else’s shoes.

So why does it stick in my craw that she claims credit for, and “experience” based on the happenstance of being (or, perhaps more accurately, staying) married to Bill Clinton? I finally put my finger on the source of my unease as I revised my own resume in connection with recent job hunting.

I’ve been married nearly 20 years to a finance professional. For nearly 18 of the 20 years he has advised and educated pension fund trustees. More recently he has worked with pension funds on the “sell” side, setting up a US office for an overseas company that makes investments on behalf of its union-owned pension funds. I’ve read my husband’s speeches, met his colleagues, attended conferences, edited his research papers, followed pension fund stories in the business press and popular press, and developed a pretty good, albeit not particularly sophisticated, understanding of some of the issues, strategies, and concerns facing Taft-Hartley jointly trusteed pension funds, public employee pension funds, and other similar institutional investors.

And, if I tried to apply for work in the pension fund industry, based on my so-called “experience,” I guarantee you I’d be hooted out of the room. I might have been by his side, but I wasn’t the one hired for those jobs. And while Hillary Rodham Clinton sat through cabinet meetings, set up shop in the East Wing, and traveled on taxpayer-funded trips all over the world, no one “hired” her for or “elected” her to the job.

And herein lies the feminst’s dilemma. On one hand, a major part of the feminist struggle was to put a stop to derivative status and identity. Calling oneself “Mrs. John Smith” went out with Black and White TV. We middle class, Seven Sister college-educated professionals marched forth to create our own identities, build our own resumes, take credit for our own achievements, and not rely on “some man” for any of that. Senator Clinton has plenty of achievements, for many of which she deserves full–and sole–credit.

Yet another component of feminism was to assign value and meaning and worth to the very real, but also often invisible, unpaid “work” of being the supportive spouse. Years ago the wife of the former president of the University of Massachusetts created quite a stir when she refused to take on the formerly unpaid duties of the president’s wife unless given a title, a salary, and the ability to limit the hours she was expected to be on call as hostess, fund-raiser, and all around assistant to the President.

Our First Lady drew no salary for her very real work in that role, but she wouldn’t have been in that position but for being “Mrs. Bill Clinton.” I have a friend from law school who is married to a six-term member of Congress, but my friend is also a partner in a major U.S. law firm. Under the Hillary Clinton model, my friend could run for Congress when the spouse retires, claiming “experience” from 20 years of marriage to the Member. Somehow I don’t think the voting public in their district would buy it. Regarding Mrs. Bill Clinton, I’m not ready to buy it, either.