My 82-year-old mother is bereft. Mom was born just six years after women got the right to vote in this country, and she thought for awhile there that she might live long enough to see a woman become president. Now it looks as though that won't happen.And, though I personally will be happy to see Barack Obama follow the catastrophic George Bush into the highest office in the land, I, too, am disappointed that Hillary's bid for the presidency is floundering and likely to fail. As the father of two daughters, I know a Hillary Clinton victory would have had enormous symbolic and psychological significance for younger women. It would have been "empowering," in the true sense of that perniciously overused word.
Years ago, I taught at a college up in Washington State, an institution that prided itself on its pre-med and dental-assisting departments. I routinely faced classes with large numbers of young women who were seeking certification to become dental assistants or LVNs. Once in awhile, when one or another of these students would turn up during office hours, I would ask why they hadn't considered becoming doctors or dentists. Their answers made it clear that such an idea was virtually unthinkable because of images of women they'd inherited from popular culture. If you'd talked to them about "a woman's place," they would have bridled at the thought, but they'd been trained to keep their place, nonetheless, and the training was encoded with such subtlety that it was virtually invisible. They were groomed to be dental assistants, not dentists.
Like those young women whose horizons were artificially narrowed by culturally-instilled sexism, our entire nation continues to incubate attitudes toward women that severely handicapped Hillary Clinton's bid to lead us. In fact, sexism may prove to be even more intractable than racism. For starters, let's not forget that black males were afforded the right to vote some 50 years before the wives and mothers of the white males who held the power over who would vote, and who wouldn't.Political punditry surely has been driven by culturally-encoded sexism, from the rantings of Chris Mathews to the steadily negative commentary from just about everyone that made Hillary unlikeable if she was forceful ("too shrill," "too aggressive," "too pushy"), and equally unsuited to be the commander-in-chief if she was not forceful enough ("weak," "unable to hold her own against other world leaders," "unsure of her own positions").
It was a classic Catch-22 situation, a catch that seems to apply exclusively to women, a catch that ensures they will be damned if they do, and damned if they don't. They are harridans if they act as men are thought to act, and they are weak if they don't. That catch virtually defines the glass ceiling. There was just no possible response to the endemic sexism still festering in the nation's psyche. No tough foreign policy posturing would do the trick, and neither would a department store full of pantsuits.
Subtract her gender from the equation and the intensity of hatred for Hillary Clinton becomes inexplicable. Listen to right-wing talk radio or read any of the right wing blogs and you'll soon discover a vile and venomous river of filth and fury directed at this former First Lady. Rush Limbaugh has been at the sport of Hillary bashing longer than most, and his hate speech even slopped over to young Chelsea when she was a mere 13-year-old girl. Rush, the bully boy of the right, described that teen-age girl as "the White House dog."
Limbaugh, you'll recall, invented the term "femi-nazi" to describe women who sought equal rights with men. How deep must male insecurity go to find a comparison between the least powerful people among us and Hitler's legions of oppression? But the insecurities of threatened and underachieving males is surely one source of Hillary hate, the fear far too many men have of intelligent women. Bertrand Russell once observed that most people would rather die than think, and in Bush's America, that observation has been borne out.
If you don't think we have a cultural bias against brains, then you probably didn't go to high school in this country, where showing signs of functioning gray matter was nearly always cause for derision. Intelligence isn't particularly popular for either gender, but to be a bright girl where I went to school was cause for scorn. If you were a poor kid, it was even more unacceptable to show signs of smarts because to do so suggested you were putting on airs, or that you were trying to "rise above your raisin'. For women, the social pressures to hide or suppress intelligence are powerful. It takes character to persist against such pressures.
Over a long career as a teacher, I saw this dynamic at work just about every day I entered a classroom. Any overt display of interest in learning or a willingness to ask questions was viewed with suspicion by most students, and the snide whispers were often directed at young women intent on doing well. Intelligence and a desire to learn were paths to unpopularity.
In one of their final debates, Barack Obama rang in on the subject of his opponent's likeability," by saying "you're likeable enough, Hillary." But she wasn't likeable enough, when all was said and done. She had committed three sins that remain unpardonable in the minds of far too many Americans. Hillary Clinton was born female, she was born bright, and she had ambitions beyond those that are culturally-sanctioned for people of her gender. In a word, she was "uppity."
Those qualities made her hard to like for far too many people, male and female. For that reason, as much as any other, my mother will probably not witness the triumph of women that began when she was six years old.
