While I was snoozing on the plane, Hillary Clinton surprised everyone (well, all the pollsters and everyone who read them) by winning the New Hampshire Primary. I'm glad of it, both because it keeps the Democratic race open and because it's Hillary. I wouldn't have said that even a week ago (I guess you're seeing that I just wasn't engaged with any side in this race until there were real stakes) but I smarted at the ease with which the press wrote Hillary off after Iowa, and wondered at how one could thrill (as I thrilled and thrill) at Obama's success in a historically racist country without at least acknowledging that Hillary's candidacy was epoch-making for this historically sexist one. To be honest, I smarted at the ease, the
Schadenfreude, with which I had enjoyed her humiliation in Iowa.
Gloria Steinem hit a whole bunch of nails on the head in an Op-Ed piece in the
Times:
Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House. This country is way down the list of countries electing women and, according to one study, it polarizes gender roles more than the average democracy. That’s why the Iowa primary was following our historical pattern of making change. Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women ...
[W]hy is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what.Brava! Whoever ends up the Democratic candidate, we'll be a better nation for a longer and more soul-searching discussion of the merits of these candidates and all they bring and represent.
