In the past week or so, there have been a spate of articles amping the discussion of sexism and feminism in the presidential race, from Gloria Stienem's op-ed Women are Never Frontrunners, replies to the same, discussion of Hillary's sniffle, disappointment at the same, and discussion of the age divide on how feminism is framed. All of which leads me to wonder about the present state of feminism and how we construct gendered narratives. To put it this way, would the triumph of feminism be the election of a woman to the most powerful office in the world, or the defeat of a woman on the basis of her record?
For me, I would argue the second. The idea of electing a woman with an ostensibly inferior record appears to be as much about punishing patriarchy as about elevating women, and while that might be nice symbolically, it comes at the cost of leadership and competence to the highest office of our government, to make no mention of restarting a cycle of inequality, not ending injustices. So unless the differences in record are slight enough that the opportunity cost to America is negligible, it seems as though we empower one woman at the expense of the nation, despite the symbol we create for other women.
Rather, a better symbol would be justly fair treatment of a women on the basis on the pragmatic, not the biases of sexism. If we can say a woman lost the vote because she was less competent that her opponent, and not because she was a woman, then it seems as though we've progressed. We will have entered a place where, while we acknowledge her femininity, we are more concerned with her efficacy than her gender.
Of course, her gender cannot be neatly parsed away from her competence. Two issues immediately spring to mind that would explicitly mandate her gender to be a core question of her competency: the argument that women would be kind, gentler, and more collaborative; and the ways in which others would respond to her, such as Arabic leaders. There are myriad more subsurface issues here, but in the end, I think feminism can claim a purer victory to have a woman legitimately lose than to have one illegitimately win. Of course, the purest of all would be a legitimate victory, but that doesn't give us many chances to explore conflicting values, now does it?
2 comments:
It has been said that feminism will have achieved equality when an incompetent woman will be held accountable just as an incompetent man would be.
I have always believed, and hopefully have demonstrated, that everyone should be judged on merit, gender notwithstanding, and consequently have named my children in a fashion that indicate gender neutrality as opposed to Patriarchy.
This afternoon I heard an interesting discussion with a woman, Jenna Levin, who is a novelist and a theoretical physicist (PhD from MIT) , astrophyicist and mathematician at Barnard College in NY, who was discussing the "nature of truth" and cosmology. She was discussing the Mathemetician and logician Kurt Godel, who essentially postulated that there were truths that could not be mathematically proved (Godel's theorem). I looked up Godel (sort of an Austrian, but maybe a Czech ) and found that he was a member of the Institute of Advanced Physics in Princeton in the late 1930s along with Albert Einstein, who remarked that, at his age, he had little more to contribute, but he went to the institute daily simply " to have the pleasure of walking home with Kurt Godel". I should note that Jenna Levin was born in the year that I graduated from Macalester with a degree in physics....sigh...
I thought the idea was that femininity will have arrived when an incompetent woman can rise to the same level of mediocrity as an incompetent man. Now, there's a goal! Somewhere in the subtext of what you have written I am getting the impression that you think that, if Senator Clinton is elected, she will somehow have proved that an incompetent woman can be elected. Since I don't see her at all as incompetent, I can't go to the same place as your apparent conclusion. Nor, if she is defeated, would it demonstrate that a competent woman was defeated by a more competent man. The race does not always go to the swiftest, or most competent ... Still, you postulate interesting ideas worth thinking about. m
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