Democratic Wings: Gender bias remains strong: "Subtract her gender from the equation and the intensity of hatred for Hillary Clinton becomes inexplicable"

March 23, 2008

Gender bias remains strong: "Subtract her gender from the equation and the intensity of hatred for Hillary Clinton becomes inexplicable"

I got a math degree/computer science degree and trust me, I know. There would be 5 women in a class of 60. The male professors would buddy with the male students. Mr. This, Mr. That. The professors would never meet my eye, even when handing out test papers and it turned out I got the best grade in the class. In the good ole boys clubhouse, I could only look in the door from the outside. I persevered but it wasn't easy - the boys helped each other, and they always seemed to always be a step ahead of me. One professor even said I only had my high GPA because I was clever, not because I understood. Many is the time, since I discovered I was really good at math in grade school, to the time I graduated, that I wanted to give up. But I was too damned stubborn to quit. And it didn't end when I got work as a computer programmer - I saw it was just the beginning of a life-long struggle. I often wished I could put on a "man suit" before walking in the door to work. We haven't come a long way, baby. We haven't come far at all.

From Jaime O'Neill at Smirking Chimp:

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. 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.

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.

"Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?" ~ Rose Kennedy

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"Probably, hanging onto the past brings more destruction than any other single cause. ...It's the Muslim fundamentalists who worship the past and ignore the reformist spirit with which Muhammad viewed women. It's the backward-looking Christian literalists who interpret religious teachings in a way that consolidates their power..." ~ Gloria Steinem

"'Inherent differences' between men and women, we have come to appreciate, remain cause for celebration, but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for artificial constraints on an individual's opportunity." ~ Ruth Bader Ginsberg

"As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, my country is the world." ~ Virginia Woolf

"...remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors... If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation." ~ Abigail Adams

"Bloody treason, murderous act
Not by women were designed.
Bells o'erthrown nor churches sacked
Speak not ill of womenkind."
~ Gearoid Iarla Fitzgerald

"Too often the great decisions are originated and given form in bodies made up wholly of men, or so completely dominated by them that whatever of special value women have to offer is shunted aside without expression." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

"If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse gift will find a fitting place." ~ Margaret Mead

"Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?" ~ Zora Neale Hurston

"Eventually, all things merge into one; and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs..." ~ Norman Maclean

"There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example - where had they gone?... It was a spring without voices." ~ Rachel Carson

"If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men." ~ St. Francis of Assisi

"I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men." ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

"God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but He cannot save them from fools." ~ John Muir

"How quickly nature falls into revolt when gold becomes her object!" ~ William Shakespeare

"The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders." ~ Edward Abbey

"We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it... Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love." ~ George Eliot (Marian Evans)

"When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world." ~ John Muir

"The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood of ideas in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people." ~ John F. Kennedy

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." ~ James Madison

"When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion." ~ C. P. Snow

"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth." ~ Albert Einstein

"Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." ~ William Pitt

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"If somebody tells you you ought to quit, it's because they're afraid you won't." ~ Bill Clinton

"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." ~ Robert F. Kennedy

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me? But the good Samaritan reversed the question: If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?" ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

"No matter how big a nation is, it is no stronger than its weakest people, and as long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you might otherwise." ~ Marian Anderson

"We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth in a few hands, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis

"The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life." ~ Jane Addams

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself." ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

"O, it is excellent to have a giant's strength; But it is tyrannous to use it like a giant." ~ William Shakespeare

"I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it." ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

"When men talk about defense, they always claim to be protecting women and children, but they never ask the women and children what they think." ~ Patricia Schroeder

"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

"What difference does it make to the dead whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?" ~ Mohandas Gandhi

"One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one." ~ Agatha Christie

"Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind... War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today." ~ John F. Kennedy

"Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God." ~ Jesus

"Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

"When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

"And thus I clothe my naked villany with odd old ends stol'n forth of holy writ, and seem a saint when most I play the devil." ~ William Shakespeare

"And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing... in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men... But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret..." ~ Jesus

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, ... legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Persecution is not an original feature in any religion, but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law." ~ Thomas Paine

"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!" ~ Albert Einstein

"True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else." ~ Clarence Darrow

"When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism." ~ George Washington

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." ~ George Orwell

"To (say) that we are to stand by the president right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but it's morally treasonable to the American public." ~ Theodore Roosevelt

"In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take." ~ Adlai Stevenson

"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives." ~ John Stuart Mill

"I don't give 'em hell. I just tell the truth, and they think it's hell." ~ Harry Truman

"I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat!" ~ Will Rogers

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Democratic Wings is dedicated to Gloria Steinem, whose courage, wisdom, and selfless devotion to the cause of equality for women has inspired us to believe in ourselves and to believe in our dreams.

Democratic Wings honors the tradition of Senator Paul Wellstone, who liked to say, "I represent the democratic wing of the Democratic party."

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March 23, 2008