Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters (22 page)

Plus, women are pretty consistently told that they don’t know what they’re talking about, and their opinions are often dismissed. Add to that a general self-consciousness about all things political, and we have a problem. But of course, this is just my little theory.

There’s also the fact that many young women don’t feel like politicians speak to them and the issues that matter to them—we’re talked about more than we’re talked to. But we can’t expect lasting change on behalf of women’s rights without political action.

So it’s really just time to suck it up.

Despite gains made through the years, women still only make up 15 percent of the seats in Congress, 14 percent of the one hundred seats in the Senate, and 15 percent of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives. And of those eighty-one women serving on Congress in 2006, only 24 percent of them are women of color.

In state executive positions, like governor and lieutenant governor, women make up 24 percent of available positions.
¹
And we’re not making much progress, either. A report from the Center for Women in Government & Civil Society at the
University at Albany found that from 1998 to 2005, the percentage of women in state government leadership positions only rose from 23.1 to 24.7. Not very impressive.
²

So on all counts, we’re not even close to equal.

But it’s not just political representation that’s poor for women in the United States—it’s participation as well. Apparently, we’re not big on voting.

According to Women’s Voices. Women Vote., fifteen million unmarried women were not registered to vote in 2004 and almost twenty million unmarried women didn’t vote in 2004; if unmarried women had voted at the same rate as married women, there would have been more than six million more voters at the polls
³
(and maybe we wouldn’t be stuck with Bushie right now!). If you’re married, I’m not trying to leave you out of the equation—I just think it’s interesting that so many younger women (we tend to be the unmarried ones) aren’t participating in politics. It’s fucking terrible, really.

Remember the headband treatment of Hillary I mentioned? Well, that’s pretty much par for the course when it comes to women politicians.

While all women are subject to being judged by their appearance, women in leadership positions get it like crazy. There’s something about a woman in power that makes people feel like they need to put her in “her place.”

Take this story, for example. Former governor of Maryland and current (as of 2006) State Comptroller
William Donald Schaefer told a
Washington Post
reporter that his 2006 opponent, Janet Owens, is a “prissy little miss” who wears “long dresses [and] looks like Mother Hubbard—it’s sort of like she was a man.” He said in an interview, “She’s got these long clothes on and an old-fashioned hairdo. . . . You know, it sort of makes you real mad.”
⁴
Uh huh. Can you imagine someone talking about the hairdo and clothes of a male candidate? Yeah, not gonna happen. By the way, Schaefer is kind of a known douchebag. He harassed a twenty-four-year-old administrative aide by watching her ass as she brought over a cup of tea and instructed her to “walk again.” (He later said that “this little girl” should be “happy that I observed her going out the door.”)
⁵
Ah, sexist politicians.

And judging women politicians on their looks isn’t limited to their opponents—who clearly have something to gain by going on the attack. The media does it as well. The White House Project (
www.thewhitehouseproject.org
), a nonprofit dedicated to getting more women in politics, did a study researching the media coverage of Elizabeth Dole’s
presidential campaign compared with that of then-Texas Governor George W. Bush, Arizona Senator John McCain, and publisher Steve Forbes; they examined 462 articles and what they found wasn’t pretty.

Dole, shockingly, received more “personal” coverage (comments about her personality and the way she dressed) than any of the male candidates. Thirty-five percent of the paragraphs on Dole were personal, compared to 27 percent for Bush, 22 percent for McCain, and 16.5 percent for Forbes.
⁶

Shit, even when
The New York Times
covered a dinner honoring women in the government, they ran it in the “Styles” section with a pink purse graphic!

Some women have found, well, interesting ways to fight back. One 2006 Alabama gubernatorial candidate, Loretta Nall, was pissed when a local newspaper ran a picture of her cleavage and went on to comment on her breasts. So Nall countered (quite sassily, I might add), “I don’t approve of political reporters who are titillated by my breasts while ignoring the serious issues which affect a whole lot of poor and disenfranchised Alabamians,”
⁷
and went on to create a new campaign slogan: “More of these boobs [hers] and less of these boobs [incumbent politicians]!!” Hysterical.

But of course, it’s not just appearance that women politicians are attacked for. It’s their personalities. The most common insults? “Ballbuster,” “bitch,” and the like. Because clearly, all women who work in politics are “unfeminine” and annoying. Never mind that perseverance and an ability to get shit done are generally thought of as
good
qualities in
male politicians. But as a woman, you can’t win. ’Cause if you’re not a “bitch,” you’re too “soft” for politics.

Conservative columnist John Podhoretz actually tried to argue on Fox News that calling Hillary Clinton a bitch in his book
Can She Be Stopped?
was actually a compliment. You know, because it means she’s like a guy.

Right, ’cause feminine and, you know, someone who is a woman would be unfit for the presidency.

By the way, he also called her “flat” and “unwomanly.”
⁹
Sweet.

This kind of sexist stereotyping about who is fit for power is pretty (depressingly) common. Sometimes folks even try to use “positive” stereotypes.

A 2006
New York Times
article reported that the Democratic party was looking to run women candidates as outsiders against a “culture of corruption.” Because women are never corrupt, apparently.

Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in the piece, “In an environment where people are disgusted with politics in general, who represents clean and change? Women.”
¹⁰
We’re so pure and good and all. Barf.

What’s truly sad is that women candidates probably
do
have a better chance of winning elections based on what people think of their personal lives over their actual politics. As my coblogger Ann Friedman wrote about the article, “The public loves women politicians whose personal lives adhere to the stereotypes (devoted wife, mother, etc.), but has a much harder time stomaching women whose political positions are actually pro-woman.”
¹¹
No joke.

But that’s not to say that women aren’t kicking ass when they are in political office.

Okay, getting more women in office is definitely important. But not just anyone. Let’s get some pro-women women in there.

New York Representative Carolyn Maloney introduced legislation that would regulate the advertisement of “crisis pregnancy centers” that aim to convince pregnant women against having abortions.
¹²

Democratic Senators Patty Murray of Washington and Hillary Clinton of New York blocked the confirmation of Bush nominee Andrew von Eschenbach to head the FDA until the agency stepped up and made emergency contraception available over the counter.
¹³

In 2005, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius vetoed a bill that would have required state abortion clinics to adopt
more rigorous guidelines, saying she won’t get behind legislative action that singles out abortion.
¹⁴

Maxine Waters, in addition to having an awesome record on women’s rights, cofounded the Los Angeles-based organization the Black Women’s Forum.
¹⁵

Former Texas Governor Ann Richards: “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.”
¹⁶

Former Congresswoman Bella Abzug: “We are coming down from our pedestal and up from the laundry room. We want an equal share in government and we mean to get it.”
¹⁷

Former Congresswoman Pat Schroeder: “When people ask me why I am running as a woman, I always answer, ‘What choice do I have?’”
¹⁸

But don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we should be electing women just by virtue of their having ovaries.
Women politicians have definitely been known to fuck over other women.

Democratic Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, for example, signed a sweeping abortion ban in her state that made all abortion illegal—even in cases of rape and incest. Not cool.

The important thing is that we’re participating—whether it’s by running, voting, or supporting (financially or otherwise) candidates who make a difference for women. Don’t leave shit up to others, ’cause that’s how we get fucked over.

The 2004 presidential elections were all about women, in a way. We were told “it’s up to the women”
¹⁹
to make sure that George W. Bush wasn’t reelected.

Single women were all the rage during that election—yet, of course, they called us
Sex and the City
voters. Charming. And not at all condescending. (It kills me that even when we have potential power, the media chose to pretty much dismiss us with that name.)

You see, back in 2004, polls showed that single women favored Kerry over Bush by almost 26 percent, while married women preferred Bush.
²⁰
But unfortunately, twenty million unmarried women didn’t vote. This isn’t to say we fucked up the election—after all, the Supreme Court picked the president, not us—but it goes to show you the power we had that we
just didn’t use
.

And why in the world not? Chris Desser, codirector of Women’s Voices. Women Vote., said in 2004 that “one-third of unmarried women polled said their main reason for not voting is that they believe their lives will not improve, no matter who is elected.”
²¹

Kind of sad, but I can see where that trepidation comes from. What have politicians done for us lately, really? Sure, they’ll throw us a bone on repro rights every once in a while, and I definitely love me some VAWA, but it’s hard to feel connected to a political system that generally pays you no mind.

But the thing is, we can’t let the fact that politicians don’t care about us (for the most part) translate into our not caring about politics. It’s just too damned important. Because it’s really fucked up that laws affecting our lives, at the most personal levels, are being decided overwhelmingly by men.

When Bush signed the “partial birth” ban into effect, someone took a snapshot of him and all the supporting politicians as they hovered around him while he essentially signed
away our rights. Guess what? The picture spoke a thousand words—it was all men. Now that’s fucked up.

This isn’t to say that male politicians can’t be allies in women’s rights—Representative Henry Waxman has put out reports on fake abortion clinics and exposed abstinence-only education as ineffective and dangerous; Senator Joe Biden was one of the original authors of VAWA.

I just think that there’s something particularly ironic about men legislating our rights away—and we’ve got to stop letting it happen.

When I was in grad school, I interned at a great international women’s organization called the Women’s Environment & Development Organization (WEDO), where I would later go on to work full-time. While there, I worked on a campaign in its Gender and Governance program called the 50/50 Campaign.
²²
The campaign seeks to increase women’s representation and participation in all decision-making processes worldwide, with an emphasis on national parliaments.

WEDO reached out to women on local and regional levels, and almost three hundred organizations and eighteen national and regional campaigns were launched. The priorities of the campaign include “political party reform, which includes adopting gender balance strategies” and campaign finance reform.
²³

Basically, the idea is that most campaign finance systems favor incumbents—and since most incumbents are men . . . well, you get the idea. The political party reform is a bit more controversial. The 50/50 campaign advocates establishing quotas as a way to increase women’s representation in decision-making positions.

So this means that a certain percentage of candidate or political office seats are reserved for women. Controversial? Yes, definitely. Americans don’t like the word “quotas,” that’s for sure. But it’s proven way effective. All countries achieved critical mass (30 percent) of women politicians after implementing party or legal quotas.