Christine Stansell: What Happened with Women?
[Christine Stansell is a historian at the University of Chicago and author of The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present, published by Random House.]
WHAT HAPPENED with women? One leading indicator, the number of women in Congress, isn’t bad—there was only slight change downward—but that’s only when you stick to the old assumption that more women in Congress means more Democrats. Where there was turnover, it mostly went with the Republicans. Still, the right-wing female bloggers are chortling. Why? Because the Palin effect has for the first time given Republican women some purchase in fielding candidates and appealing to a female constituency in language more sophisticated than the hoary “family values” rhetoric that shaped the right-wing women’s agenda for years.
This means they’re adopting feminist rhetoric to their own uses. Republicans in this campaign hurled charges of sexist treatment—not unjustifiably—at some Democrats and left-wing commentators for the innuendo and ridicule they threw at some of the more obnoxious high profile women—Meg Whitman, Christine O’Donnell, and Sharron Angle. Feminism, carefully parsed, is now an element of right-wing populism. For a taste, go to the FoxNews blog for an article by Kay Bailey Hutchison, “Stop Insulting Female Candidates and Start Playing Fair.” Hutchison came up in politics in the bad old days; she earned the right to protest. As for FoxNews—this is the venue that, during the 2008 Democratic primaries, featured commentary like, “[Men] won’t vote for Hillary Clinton because she reminds them of their nagging wives.”...
Read entire article at Dissent
WHAT HAPPENED with women? One leading indicator, the number of women in Congress, isn’t bad—there was only slight change downward—but that’s only when you stick to the old assumption that more women in Congress means more Democrats. Where there was turnover, it mostly went with the Republicans. Still, the right-wing female bloggers are chortling. Why? Because the Palin effect has for the first time given Republican women some purchase in fielding candidates and appealing to a female constituency in language more sophisticated than the hoary “family values” rhetoric that shaped the right-wing women’s agenda for years.
This means they’re adopting feminist rhetoric to their own uses. Republicans in this campaign hurled charges of sexist treatment—not unjustifiably—at some Democrats and left-wing commentators for the innuendo and ridicule they threw at some of the more obnoxious high profile women—Meg Whitman, Christine O’Donnell, and Sharron Angle. Feminism, carefully parsed, is now an element of right-wing populism. For a taste, go to the FoxNews blog for an article by Kay Bailey Hutchison, “Stop Insulting Female Candidates and Start Playing Fair.” Hutchison came up in politics in the bad old days; she earned the right to protest. As for FoxNews—this is the venue that, during the 2008 Democratic primaries, featured commentary like, “[Men] won’t vote for Hillary Clinton because she reminds them of their nagging wives.”...