| Greg Anderson |
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| In 2007, Georgia Duerst-Lahti was invited to take part in the U.S. Department of State Speaker Program in Serbia and Albania, serving as an expert on women and gender politics. |
You may love her. You may hate her. You may feel strongly ambivalent. But whatever your party affiliation, whatever you think of her, there’s no denying that Hillary Clinton has made it farther down the road to the White House than any other woman in U.S. history.
We asked Georgia Duerst-Lahti, professor of political science and a faculty member of the women’s and gender studies program at Beloit, to lend her insights to this moment in history. Duerst-Lahti is a well-known author and speaker who has spent the better part of her career researching gender and politics. She is a frequent guest commentator on Wisconsin Public Radio and a regular contributor to online and print media outlets. She is active in several professional organizations focusing on gender and power and has been elected president of the Midwest Women’s Caucus for Political Science and president of the National Women’s Caucus for Political Science. We spoke to her in the days leading up to Super Tuesday.
Shannon Luckey: I was surprised to learn that the first woman campaigning for U.S. president ran as the candidate of the Equal Rights Party in 1872. That’s almost 40 years before the 19th Amendment guaranteed American women the right to vote.
Georgia Duerst-Lahti: Women have always been in and around politics, and we sometimes overlook or forget that. Abigail Adams was advisor to her husband and was probably the reason that Jefferson and Adams reconciled. Then there’s Martha Washington, who was most influential in bringing the leading politicians together after the American Revolution. Historically, it was quite common also in the Senate to appoint the widow to replace her husband. Having said that, the political process has been overwhelmingly dominated by men. Now, we actually have women running for the biggest prize of all when it comes to elected positions. What’s key about this culturally is that we tend to think of the president as hero, and we tend to think of the ‘great man’ model, one of the key elements of which is that ‘the great man stands alone.’ Culturally, we don’t let women stand alone. We always see the husband, father, or children. What mitigates it for Hillary is that she has been First Lady and people know Bill Clinton. So there’s a little less doubt because, whether or not we recognize it, we have this belief that women have to be attached. It’s so ordinary as to be invisible. She gets credit for having Bill for backup, but I think she can run it on her own. She graduated ahead of Bill in law school, and she is more disciplined than Bill ever was.
SL: Hillary Clinton is smart, hawkish, and tough. Women running for office have to be tough—but not too tough—or they may be branded “unlikable.”
GDL: It’s really a catch-22. What we are talking about here is sex, which is biological, and gender, which is sociological. What Hillary has to do as a presidential candidate is modeled on masculinity, and she has to be tough. At the same time, she is walking around in a woman’s body. We expect femininity from women, but we expect to see masculinity in our presidential candidates. I’ve done a lot of research that looks at the major theories on masculinity, and the point is to dominate. There’s really a competition for hegemonic masculinity between technical expertise and the dominating academic jock-type male. Think Bill Gates and Michael Jordan.
SL: Where does a woman fit in?
GDL: Exactly. They don’t.
SL: And yet women are gaining more and more power at all levels of American government. We have Nancy Pelosi, Condoleezza Rice, Janet Reno, and Madeleine Albright in the previous administration. At the beginning of 2008, America had eight female governors, 10 lieutenant governors, and 86 women serving in the House and the Senate. Nearly a quarter of state legislators are women.
GDL: Expertise is what women have used to open doors politically—technical expertise—knowledge, contacts, information. What I think is happening is that experience is becoming a surrogate for expertise. I think women are using experience as a surrogate for masculine expertise.
SL: How is that different for a woman seeking the presidency?
GDL: We get wrapped up in our belief that we are the greatest nation on earth, and the president is the leader of the greatest nation on earth. We can’t have a woman be the greatest of the greatest. Post-World War II, we also have the biggest military, so the commander-in-chief is always called into question. I actually mapped all of the news articles about women and being president from 1980 till 2005. Culturally, in news and op-ed accounts, the articles basically agree that a woman can be an expert in everything, except as—you got it—commander-in-chief. Can a woman lead the military, or do we turn to ‘the great man’ hero?
SL: We think of the United States as being this great meritocracy, where everyone is equal and anyone can make it with hard work, but no woman has ever been our leader. So if Liberia, Rwanda, Senegal, Bangladesh, Indonesia, South Korea, Pakistan, and Nicaragua (to name a handful) have had women presidents and prime ministers, why haven’t we?
GDL: Many other countries have quotas. They use proportional representation and have multi-member districts, in which women have a better chance of winning. If you have one person, and you are worried about sexism, that’s different than if you have five people you can vote for. You won’t “waste” your vote if one in five faces discrimination, but if you only have one, you face a different rationality.
SL: So are you saying that some people may be reluctant to vote for Hillary—or Barack Obama—because they think those candidates can’t win in a general election due to discrimination, and they are afraid to ‘throw their vote away’ and end up with someone they really don’t agree with? And when people can vote for multiple candidates, they are more likely to vote for women and minorities because they will still end up with at least a few candidates in the bunch who represent their views?
GDL: Exactly. When the structures of contemporary government mandate it, you get used to having women in office and have more experience with them. In some ways, we have actually had to come further than other countries because we never had a Queen Elizabeth I. We never had a whole class of ladies and lords. We don’t have a historical tradition of women leaders.
SL: Is America ready for a woman president? Can we overcome our deeply embedded cultural stereotypes?
GDL: Stereotypes are enacted in all types of social structures, and social structures carry power. And, power does not just fade away. We have not yet surmounted the gendered distribution of power. There has been tremendous gender transformation, so it’s not either that we’ve come a long way, or that we have a long way to go. It’s both.
SL: So is Hillary Clinton the first truly viable woman presidential candidate in U.S. history because of her experiences and qualities, or is she coming on the scene at the right time?
GDL: It’s certainly a moment in history. She would not have been seen as viable 20 years ago. If you tried to come up with a list of other women who would be viable, it would be short. In fact, I don’t know if you can come up with one other woman. Hillary’s time in the Senate is a legitimate path to the presidency. Her time as First Lady gives people comfort that she at least has a clue what the presidency is about. And there is the star power. She, as most recent First Ladies, has taken on a star quality. People really get excited about her being around.
SL: If she were to become the Democratic nominee and then win in the general election, what do you think would be the effect on American politics?
GDL: If she wins, I think things will change instantaneously, and they also will stay the same. I know that is about the most equivocating answer you could get, but I am serious. We will forever be changed because we—as a people—elected a woman to the office of the president, which we hold as being the greatest leader of the greatest nation on earth, and if we believe that even one woman can do it, it will change everything. There will be other areas—marriage, family, religious institutions, sex segregation in the workplace—that aren’t changed, but the national imagination will have changed when it comes to women in power.
Shannon Luckey’92 is an Emmy award-winning journalist and freelance writer. She and her family reside in Sheboygan, Wis.
