16 Ways of Looking at a Female Voter
By LINDA HIRSHMAN
New York Times Magazine
1. The Female Thing
FOR MONTHS before the presidential primaries began, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was widely held to lead among women voters. That she would naturally appeal to her own sex accounted in no small part for her front-runner status. By the end of last year, national polls showed not only that Clinton was ahead but also that women supported her by 8 points more than men did.
But in the Iowa caucus her lead turned out, to use a Clinton phrase, to be more talk than action: 35 percent of female Iowa Democrats went for Senator Barack Obama while only 30 percent stood up for Hillary — and Obama won. Was Iowa an isolated case? Or had women voters turned their backs on Hillary?
Various explanations surfaced. A WNBC television reporter suggested that “somewhere along the line she lost the narrative of the first female president as a huge change.” A blogger on The Huffington Post decided that what women needed wasn’t change; it was the whole truth and nothing but the truth: “Women are too smart, informed and astute at reading between the lines to back a presidential candidate who isn’t being straight with them — especially when she is a woman.” The snarky Washington-based blog Wonkette proposed that maybe Hillary lacked a certain something and that Barack Obama, well, had it. “I think Chris Matthews said,” the post read, “that we’re all voting for Obama because we want to date him, but they were showing a picture of Obama at the time, and I heard birds singing and bells ringing and missed it.”
Then in New Hampshire, things suddenly changed: 46 percent of women in the Democratic primary voted for Hillary compared with 34 percent for Obama, giving Clinton the victory. Was it the welling up? Was it the specter, three days earlier, of those male candidates piling up on her during a debate? Was it because the debate’s moderator questioned how likable she was? The Times columnist Gail Collins briefly summed up the theories for Hillary’s victory — “Do women Obama’s age look at him and see the popular boy who never talked to them in high school? Did they relate to Clinton’s strategy of constantly reminding her audiences that she’s been working for reform for 35 years?” — and then added her own. Hillary, she wrote, “was a stand-in for every woman who has overdosed on multitasking.” As Collins saw it, women simply wanted to get their own back: “They grabbed at the opportunity to have kids/go back to school/start a business/become a lawyer. But there are days when they can’t meet everybody’s needs, and the men in their lives — loved ones and otherwise — make them feel like failures or towers of self-involvement. And the deal is that they can either suck it up or look like a baby.”
(Continued here.)
New York Times Magazine
1. The Female Thing
FOR MONTHS before the presidential primaries began, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was widely held to lead among women voters. That she would naturally appeal to her own sex accounted in no small part for her front-runner status. By the end of last year, national polls showed not only that Clinton was ahead but also that women supported her by 8 points more than men did.
But in the Iowa caucus her lead turned out, to use a Clinton phrase, to be more talk than action: 35 percent of female Iowa Democrats went for Senator Barack Obama while only 30 percent stood up for Hillary — and Obama won. Was Iowa an isolated case? Or had women voters turned their backs on Hillary?
Various explanations surfaced. A WNBC television reporter suggested that “somewhere along the line she lost the narrative of the first female president as a huge change.” A blogger on The Huffington Post decided that what women needed wasn’t change; it was the whole truth and nothing but the truth: “Women are too smart, informed and astute at reading between the lines to back a presidential candidate who isn’t being straight with them — especially when she is a woman.” The snarky Washington-based blog Wonkette proposed that maybe Hillary lacked a certain something and that Barack Obama, well, had it. “I think Chris Matthews said,” the post read, “that we’re all voting for Obama because we want to date him, but they were showing a picture of Obama at the time, and I heard birds singing and bells ringing and missed it.”
Then in New Hampshire, things suddenly changed: 46 percent of women in the Democratic primary voted for Hillary compared with 34 percent for Obama, giving Clinton the victory. Was it the welling up? Was it the specter, three days earlier, of those male candidates piling up on her during a debate? Was it because the debate’s moderator questioned how likable she was? The Times columnist Gail Collins briefly summed up the theories for Hillary’s victory — “Do women Obama’s age look at him and see the popular boy who never talked to them in high school? Did they relate to Clinton’s strategy of constantly reminding her audiences that she’s been working for reform for 35 years?” — and then added her own. Hillary, she wrote, “was a stand-in for every woman who has overdosed on multitasking.” As Collins saw it, women simply wanted to get their own back: “They grabbed at the opportunity to have kids/go back to school/start a business/become a lawyer. But there are days when they can’t meet everybody’s needs, and the men in their lives — loved ones and otherwise — make them feel like failures or towers of self-involvement. And the deal is that they can either suck it up or look like a baby.”
(Continued here.)
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1 Comments:
Interesting article especially when the NY NOW chapter decries Kennedy as for ultimate betrayal when he endorsed Obama. The activists may not be in sync with the average woman but they get the headlines and attention.
The article’s comment concerning women’s interest in local functions over national functions might explain why women can be elected to school boards and city councils but once they stretch to the county and state levels it gets a little more difficult. Coya Knutson (DFL) was elected to Congress in 1954 and it wasn’t until 2000 that Betty McCollum was elected.
I wonder what chances a woman would have to be elected to a federal office without having been elected to any position yet we see men consistently taking the leap to House, Senate and Governorships.
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