into the fray
February 21, 2008
Barak/Hillary breakdown by senate bills. Interesting stuff. I did find most of his comments about First Women to be condescending, and, frankly not necessary for his argument. And it made me think of how ingrained misogyny is, which I can elaborate on in my comments if you wanna dialogue about it.
And what is NYT’s problem with abortion?
Thanks for linking to this.
Elaborate, please. Not that it means misogyny isn’t there, but the author is a woman. This is an issue I’ve been wondering about – I do think that having your spouse do something is not at all the same thing as doing it yourself. At the same time, there is obviously a public leadership role that can be taken by a First Spouse. And I remember Hillary Clinton going to Beijing – it’s obvious she’s been an advocate for important causes, but that’s still vastly different from actually heading the executive branch. Neither of them has that experience and there are reasons to question whether either will do it well.
My own views of Hillary’s skills as a manager were influenced by an account of working under her on the Health Care reform project written by the progressive economist, J Bradford Delong. He found her an awful leader – and the descriptions of how she works ring true today when you look at her campaign. She uses misleading attacks to damage her opponent instead of relying on her own merit.
hey pep. to be honest i didn’t even notice it was a woman who posted. what does that mean about my own male gaze? misogyny was the wrong word. i think there was a catty quality that got under my skin when she ended the paragraph on first ladies with Might as well argue for Barbara Bush because of her efforts on family literacy, or Nancy Reagan and the War on Drugs. i think it especially bothered me because i found her overall argument to be pretty persuasive. but it also made me think about the how women’s access to leadership roles is so restricted, and how we might need a different model for evaluating women’s capacity to lead. i’m thinking out loud here.
please engage more here if you want. i’d love to tease this out.
I’ve had that same experience of getting a little irked at the tone taken by some supporters in the primary (though my complaints have been about clintonite critiques of Obama – so many of which seem silly and grasping to me). Yet I find myself making the same sort of undermining comments aimed at someone I’ll end up voting for (if she’s the nominee) – which feels a bit hypocritical.
But your point is more to do with how a woman gets evaluated – I’m curious to see how that’s going to change as we move into a world where women play a far larger role in leadership (political, corporate, creative & so on). My sense of it, perhaps rosy-eyed, is that we’re in a middle of a big shift as women are a larger percentage of college and law school and other professional program graduates. A female president will speed the process, but I think demographics will have the biggest impact. In the meantime, the rhetorical power of subtle sexism is still going to be powerful. Perhaps having this issue fully discussed could help make it less viable, but I guess I think the main shift will be generational as women take more power. It’s like you never win an argument with history, the people involved just change as the generations progress and their concerns shift.