With the dust finally settling over whether Senator Clinton and her staff invoked the "gender card" as a cover for her lackluster performance during the latest presidential debate I am reminded of a question former Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder had to persistently confront when she ran for U.S. Senate. When asked whether she was "running as a woman," Schroeder, always witty and wise, would reply, "Do I have a choice?"
Political campaigns where women, or any candidate who is the one and only representative of difference, are full of "double binds" and contradictions. The 'one and only' candidate is forced by virtue of that difference to behave in certain ways that acknowledge that difference and yet also act as if it is not there at all.
What does it mean to be the 'one and only' woman? It means being forced to both live with the continuing stereotypes of being a woman while simultaneously defying them. It means being "tough" without losing your appeal as a woman. And it means being an "insider" (one of the boys) while also demonstrating that you have the freshness of an "outsider."
And for women voters it carries a special added attraction of being "perfect" because you are a "stand-in" for all women whether you like it or not.
In 2000, my organization, The White House Project, studied the effect of numbers in how the press treated women when they were the 'one and only' candidate. That was a year when a record number of women were running for governor and Elizabeth Dole ran for the Republican nomination for president. We called our governor's study affectionately our "Hair, Hemlines and Husband" study.
What we discovered is that if there was only one woman in the race, she was always looked at more personally and less substantively by both male and female reporters. The media was more apt to look at her appearance than her positions on issues. Two candidates were usually a catfight or a comparison (one wore a light blue suit, one a dark blue). Obviously, this slanted coverage diminishes authority in a sector that has been largely devoid of women in leadership.
These studies confirm what social scientists who studied the effects of tokenism in the 1970s found when companies were integrating women into management: If you want women to have a level playing field where they can be themselves and not struggle to blend, to be "man enough for the job" or to be a mascot, then you must have numbers.
Critical mass is the key, and that means a third or more. In the 2008 presidential race, for instance, none of this would be an issue if there were three or more women running. If you had Governor Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Governor Katherine Sebelius of Kansas competing alongside Senator Clinton, we would see the debate move beyond gender and focus on the agenda each candidate, man or woman, would bring to the race. After all, isn't that the point?
Until that day, Senator Clinton has to walk a gender tightrope, acting as if she's walking on solid ground.
There is no "gender card." And it's not like the deck is just stacked against or for any woman. It's about a myth that we live in a meritocracy.
This question about whether Clinton should be treated differently is a false one. The real question is when will there be as many women as men, as many people of color as whites, standing side by side on the cornfields of Iowa canvassing for primary voters to win their party's presidential nomination?
Follow Marie Wilson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/twhp
because being a democrat or republican have become just another identity instead of being a believe system that could be chalanged.
wake up..... vote for the politician that reach for the sky that reach for the other half. that aims to "unite the house".
What her campaign did was very conciously and deliberately use words and imagery evocative of male bullying, at best (and gang rape at worst), to try to provoke a sympathetic response from a certain demographic segment of the female half of the electorate.
In an earlier debate, the other six all hit Obama because they thought he was vulnerable. He responded with grace and humor and they all backed the hell off. The possibility that he would claim they were doing it because of his race did not exist--if nothing else, he knew he would lose more support than he'd gain.
Prior to the last debate, Hillary made a calculated decision to embrace her "frontrunner" status and demand to be the focus of attention in this race. Apparently, she assumed that this meant she'd get only positive attention. When that turned out not to be true, she responded with defensiveness and evasion, thereby ensuring it would continue for the rest of the night.
Having screwed the pooch in the debate, her campaign then cynically played the "all those mean men were victimizing her" card, while simultaneously having Hillary herself say the exact opposite. They thought she'd get a pass for it from men, that the feminists who found it grating would hold their tongues and that other women would rally to her. They stupidly failed to see that responding to charges of trying to always have it both ways by having it both ways would backfire.
Is that "strength?" Would an "experienced" candidate make such a massive political blunder?
Why aren't they running? They both are better candidates than Hillary or a majority of the Democrats.