Hillary Voters on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
You don't have to be a "shoulder-pad feminist" to cast a gender-driven vote. Laura McKenna looks at why many women have chosen Hillary.
With so few real policy differences between the two Democratic presidential candidates currently slugging it out, unusual issues are motivating voters. I’m not talking issues in a policy sense, but issues in the therapy couch sense. Democratic voters are turning out in record numbers, because they are ticked off about race relations, the party establishment, or status-quo politics.
But let’s not discount the power of age and gender.
Just before the Ohio primary, my husband called his folks in Cleveland. My father-in-law said he would vote for Obama; my mother-in-law — part of Hillary’s core demographic, older and middle-aged white women — was voting for Clinton.
Maureen Dowd
stereotypes die-hard Hillary voters as “shoulder-pad feminists” — women who came of age in the era of shoulder pads and still see sexism everywhere. They are ticked off about injustices in their own lives. They relate to Hillary who jokes about her wrinkles. Their hatred of Obama is intensifying as his success grows: a slick young guy takes the spotlight again.
Dowd claims that younger women think the old bats are crazy.
Perhaps. Personally, I have my issues with shoulder-pad feminists, but I don’t want to get into our differences: I want to point out our commonalities.
Yeah, there is sexism out there. It takes a slightly different form than old school sexism, but it’s a huge problem that hasn’t gone away.
While the gender differences aren’t as stark in political science as in the sciences, they are still pretty bad. Take my profession — academic political science, presumably a bastion of political correctness. Our big annual convention is dominated by men. The leading journals prefer quantitative research over qualitative research. And no surprise, men do the quantitative work. The numbers of women with PhDs have increased dramatically over the years, yet the departments at universities are fraternities. Women get the degrees, but not the jobs. Many schools don’t offer family leave time or child-care centers on campus, something that might help mitigate the situation.
Most women — myself included — don’t experience these forms of soft sexism until later in life. We’re sailing through school work, out pacing men in the classroom. It’s only when the hard realities of family and work hit that women understand that they get the short end of the stick.
As a result, women are mad. And they are carrying that grudge into the voting booth. Dan Drezner found an item in Slate that shows where Hillary’s support is coming from.
Back in January, I discussed women voters and Hillary for here
in which I pointed out the backlash of sympathy from female pundits and bloggers that Hillary received about the image problem that women leaders face.
Most women — of any age — have had the “shrill and strident” label smacked on their forehead at one point or another and they know what it feels like when the young, handsome, Harvard-educated golden boys like Barack Obama take home all the prizes.
Megan McArdle, who is much too young for the shoulder-pad era, wrote,
But it’s far from clear to me that in this race, the benefits of being married to Bill are outweighing the drawbacks of being punished for things that would pass unnoticed in a man. And it’s pretty damn frustrating to think that you may lose a job you want because you’ve got twice the "normal" number of X chromosomes.
Taking a grudge to an empty voting booth may be passive aggressive, but that’s sometimes how we work.
Is a vote for Hillary is really a vote for women? I’m not sure. After all, she was given the early nod from Democratic party leaders, which is essentially an old boys’ network. She hasn’t made women’s policy interests a cornerstone of her campaign.
But the truth is that the shoulder-pad feminists are too angry to care.
This primary season, which has been remarkable for so many reasons, will be remembered as one that shone a bright light on the low but steady levels of anger in women. Older women may be channeling that into a vote for Hillary, but younger women get it, too.
Politicians take note: those issues aren’t going to go away after the Democratic convention.
Laura McKenna is a political science professor who lives in New Jersey. She blogs at 11D.
 |
 |
 |
Podcasts |  PJM Home |
Pajamas Media appreciates your comments that abide by the following guidelines:
1. Avoid profanities or foul language unless it is contained in a necessary quote or is relevant to the comment.
2. Stay on topic.
3. Disagree, but avoid ad hominem attacks.
4. Threats are treated seriously and reported to law enforcement.
5. Spam and advertising are not permitted in the comments area.
The clause regarding "hate speech" has been deleted because readers criticized it as being too loosely defined. We agreed.
These guidelines are very general and cannot cover every possible situation. Please don't assume that Pajamas Media management agrees with or otherwise endorses any particular comment. We reserve the right to filter or delete comments or to deny posting privileges entirely at our discretion. If you feel your comment was filtered inappropriately, please email us at story@pajamasmedia.com.
36 Comments
1. Sjoerd van Heck:I was actually closest to Hillary on electoral compass. This is a fascinating website to discover your position in US political landscape.
check http://www.electoralcompass.com
Mar 12, 2008 - 2:08 am 2. Sissy Willis:It isn’t that she’s a woman of a certain age. It’s that she’s Hillary Clinton, with all the thuggish political baggage that implies. Just think Margaret Thatcher. That should clear out the cobwebs of the minds of these sadder but not necessarily wiser girls.
Mar 12, 2008 - 3:28 am 3. Tony Ryan:I’m with Sissy on this one.
There are plenty of examples of strong powerful women in politics over the years so please let us drop the feminist rubbish.
Hillary Clinton is just not good enough as a person nor as a politician to be president of the US. Gender has nothing to do with it no matter how much the “interest groups” like to blab on about it. Put a woman of integrity and ability up for election and the majority wont care a jot about her gender.
Mar 12, 2008 - 5:42 am 4. AJ:another meaningless win in a red state for obama
Mar 12, 2008 - 6:09 am 5. Wacky Hermit:Personally, I think voting for someone because she’s female is as sexist as voting for someone because he’s male. I like to choose my candidates based on what’s between their ears, not what’s between their legs. And I resent being called a sexist because I’m not choosing the candidate with the v*gina.
Mar 12, 2008 - 6:51 am 6. TRUMAN:Wow Laura McKenna – are you way way behind the times. Where you been living – in a cave? Watching too much Sex and the City reruns?
Clinton herself coined the term “post modern feminism”, a sharp jab at the militancy of the 1960-70s feminist rhetoric.
Post modern feminism is simply this – judge a person by what lies between his/her ears, not between their legs.
Your article is so lame.
Mar 12, 2008 - 7:54 am 7. TRUMAN:Maureen Dowd – Shoulderpad feminist
Hillary Clinton – the creator of post modern feminism, or as I refer to it – Post modern feminism is simply this – judge a person by what lies between his/her ears, not between their legs.
Mar 12, 2008 - 7:57 am 8. TRUMAN:Ferraro is correct. The reason Barak Obama has won the caucuses is due to his being black, and that 49% of the party leadership of the Democratic Party is black. Obama has used that card in order to set within the Democratic party a fifth column that intimidates and threatens those non black leaders, elected officials, and potential candidates with no endorsement by the black voter unless they endorse Obama. In Iowa he immediately used that card successfully in the caucus process where he undoubtedly succeeds time after time. That is called tyranny.
Obama created SLICE AND DICE. It also disenfranchises all non African American from participating in leadership unless approved by the African American leadership, thus SLICE AND DICING his opposition from gaining political access to leadership. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) is a perfect example, for without the African American vote in St Louis and Kansas City, she would not be a Senator. Peope like Sen. McCaskill, a shoulder pad feminist, is running scared and speaks and supports out of fear.
Mar 12, 2008 - 7:59 am 9. Insufficiently Sensitive:Personally, I think voting for someone because she’s female is as sexist as voting for someone because he’s male. I like to choose my candidates based on what’s between their ears, not what’s between their legs.
HEAR,HEAR. And voting for skin color without consideration of the candidate’s actual record is similarly racist.
One of the major flaws of democratic government is the dependence of the voters on the pictures of the candidates presented by the ‘news’ media. In the case of this election, so much hype has been attached by said media to the race/gender tags affixed to the Democratic candidates that one can see that the fight promoters of the media are revelling in the theatrical battle between racists and sexists.
It’s about time for media to kick out those fight promoters and horserace touts, and get some reporters to do some serious examination of the candidates’ records and proposals for governing if elected. There are some probing questions which we voters seriously need to see and hear answered, without the platitudes that the fight promoters and horserace touts accept to fill in their racist vs sexist narratives.
Mar 12, 2008 - 9:01 am 10. Robin:As a 58 year old successful business women, I think Hillary defines all the things I dis-like in women in the work-place. She is shrill, self-cebntered, nasty, devious and could care less about her fellow workers.
I’m far too smart to vote for someone just because they are a woman. I hope other women are as well!
Mar 12, 2008 - 9:27 am 11. rj:This primary season, which has been remarkable for so many reasons, will be remembered as one that shone a bright light on the low but steady levels of anger in women.
The biggest effect of this anger is on young boys, who catch the full force of that sexist anger from their overwhelmingly female public school teachers.
Mar 12, 2008 - 9:48 am 12. Jason:As a fellow political scientist, I’m not entirely sure what you’re getting at with the quantitative/qualitative distinction. There’s nothing stopping women from doing quantitative work. In fact, most of the job candidates my department brought in this year were women doing quantitative work.
Mar 12, 2008 - 9:55 am 13. booner:Let’s be honest here. Where would Hillary be if she wasn’t the wife of an ex-president? You could certainly apply Geraldine Ferraro’s logic to Hillary too. Without marrying Bill she would have been corporate lawyer Hillary Rodham and we wouldn’t be having this discussion. And just how does Geraldine Ferraro square her comments about Obama with herself? Why does she think she was picked for V.P.? The feminist gang lost their credibility when they didn’t take Bill to the woodshed. We are now finding out that the “big tent” of the Democratic party is just a bunch of picnic tables where people sit with their own kind. They just think they’re better than the Republicans.
Mar 12, 2008 - 10:08 am 14. Brad:This is bunk. I am in academia too, and there is such an excess of “diversity” cr*p that favors women that it is not soft, or any other kind of sexism that limits the number of women faculty. What are the reasons? I don’t know precisely, but using inequality of outcome arguments for what one perceives as an inequality of opportunity is juvenile at best, mindless at worst.
Mar 12, 2008 - 10:42 am 15. Hope Muntz:I left the Democrat party when they drummed Joe Lieberman out. It was obvious even then that after 8 years of Henry VI, the best the Dems could come up with would be a choice between Lady MacBeth and Othello–with Prince Hamlet grown too fat and lazy to even be waiting in the wings.
Face it: 51% of US voters–like me–will never vote for either, regardless of their race or gender.
Mar 12, 2008 - 10:42 am 16. Assistant Village Idiot:Laura, I have frequently expressed the similar thought that feminism derives its emotional juice from women who succeeded in school under its rules, and are ticked off when those rules turn out to be only half the rules of the real world. The rug is pulled. There is real unfairness and sexism in the world, but it is put into sharper relief by an educational system that creates false expectations. Women have the impression they have done better than others according to the important measurables, such as grades, and thus deserve better.
Women should first wonder why girls take 75% of high honors slots G5-12 to begin with; only second why the girls with high honors don’t similarly dominate after schooling is done.
Senator Clinton is an odd recipient of sororal sympathy in this light, as she is an excellent example of someone who doesn’t have stellar credentials but has gotten where she is via the unwritten rules.
Men learn earlier that life isn’t fair. They learn it from other males who discover earlier how to adapt to the unwritten rules, and from female teachers who prefer the behavior of young women. Boys learn that fixing things, selling things, and building things are just as remunerative or more than what schools stress. Knowing that is an advantage often denied girls.
Mar 12, 2008 - 10:53 am 17. Brian:Why aren’t more female political scientists doing quantitative work? Isn’t it possible that the causality is a little different than you suppose – that more attention is paid to quantitative work not because there are more men involved, but because it is tacitly considered more objectively valuable? The sexism may play out in the fear of expressing this sentiment (that quatitative is simply superior to qualitative research) because of not wanting to give offense to women or feminist power blocks, with whom qualitative work is strongly associated.
This would certainly be my intuition after an undergraduate degree in Sociology from a very liberal school. I certainly came out of it with (1) the belief that quantitative work was objectively more valuable (more reproducable, less malleable to pre-existing researcher biases, etc), and (2) the impression that this judgment should not be expressed for fear of offending a power block.
Mar 12, 2008 - 10:54 am 18. Sam:Shoulder pad feminists? Aren’t those the women that wear colorful scarves draped over their shoulders? And the shoulder pads keep the scarves from sliding off. Or am I mixing fashion decades?
Mar 12, 2008 - 10:56 am 19. rosignol:It’s only when the hard realities of family and work hit that women understand that they get the short end of the stick.
Women didn’t get the short end of the stick, they were sold a bill of goods- the idea that it was possible to ‘have it all’ and not make sacrifices.
Welcome to life.
Mar 12, 2008 - 10:59 am 20. Moe:We’re sailing through school work, out pacing men in the classroom.
WOW all the women outpacing all the men, and yet when push comes to shove the men still produce a higher standard of work in their domains.
You’re right sweet heart – it’s all a big conspiracy – against glib tendentious ‘qualitative’ research. Too bad you weren’t looking for academic work in the 90’s when this was all the rage. It’s that experience that has marginalized your style of research – because most of it was piss poor and still is. Poli-Sci is not therapy.
Mar 12, 2008 - 11:07 am 21. Dishman:Most women – myself included – don’t experience these forms of soft sexism until later in life. We’re sailing through school work, out pacing men in the classroom. It’s only when the hard realities of family and work hit that women understand that they get the short end of the stick.
It’s not sexism that’s the problem. It’s “sailing through school work” which fails to prepare you for the fact that life is hard.
Mar 12, 2008 - 11:44 am 22. Dennis:Could it be that you were sailing through school because your teachers were mostly female and feminists who did their level best to handicap the boys? Maybe you really did not sail through school because you were actually smarter, but because your teachers ensured that the boys did not present a problem to your over inflated ego.
Mar 12, 2008 - 12:30 pm 23. Richard Cook:Ask yourself a serious question, Boys were doing fine in schools and progressing well in the education system then all of a sudden they cannot compete. What happened? Did they just get dumb over night or was it some other cause? Just maybe Boys and men are not as dumb as you seem to think they are and you are no where near as smart as you think you are.
Oh come Sissy…don’t even mention Clinton in the same breath or sentence or book with Maggie Thatcher. If Shrillary was like the Iron Lady in any way I would vote for her. As the Shrill she is Maggie’s antithesis.
Mar 12, 2008 - 1:03 pm 24. Maggie:I spent the first 10 years of my academic career being very concerned about sexism and how it was impeding my career. Here’s the funny thing, though. When I stopped worrying about it (long story), all the obstacles just fell away. I’ve found that when you stop worrying about these things you work more effectively, you carry yourself with more confidence, and things just tend to fall your way. FWIW
I’d also say that losing that anger was a *huge* weight off my shoulders. It used to consume so much energy.
And, happily, it keeps me from being even tempted to vote for a woman who has campaigned with as little integrity as has Sen. Clinton. As far as I am concern she has thoroughly earned her loss of this nomination. It would be ashame for a weird kind of sexism to deprive her of it.
Mar 12, 2008 - 1:14 pm 25. Jimmy:You have the casue and effect backwards. “Soft sexism” is the “soft bigotry of low expectations”. The bigotry was what came before and it was biased in womens’ favor, what comes after is unprejudiced reality.
Mar 12, 2008 - 1:20 pm 26. mike:Hillary is like many angry American women. They are angry because they feel they have something coming to them for being born. Hillary thinks she has the presidency coming to her for being her. Likewise her angry sisters.
Mar 12, 2008 - 2:14 pm 27. Sissy Willis:Richard Cook: That was my very point about Mrs. Thatcher, the antithesis of Mrs. Clinton.
Mar 12, 2008 - 4:09 pm 28. s sommer:As a 60 year old white businesswoman, the mother of a son & a daughter, I observe sexism working both ways.
I am concerned about both women AND men being “liberated” from expectations & stereotypes.
Both sides are pressured in countless ways & short-changed in life, due to the messages we receive growing up and later at work.
As someone who has been a stay home mom AND a working mother, I know that neither role is easy or ideal. Neither is being a father & a worker.
I long ago tired of feminism beating up on men. The attitudes of the shoulder pad feminists, my generation, seem so out of date, such old news.
Hillary is the worst-case, old style woman who made it based on her husband’s connections. Phuleeze!
I lost all interest in her when she tolerated Bill’s indiscretions & defended him.
In similar circumstances, I went out & made my own way in life. Out of self-respect!
Voting for Hillary out of some sense of “voting for the female” is about the dumbest thing yet.
Her campaign is not impressive at all.
Give me a really GOOD woman leader, and I will be thrilled to support her, but no way am I voting for someone just because it is a “she.”
I do have many friends who are doing just that, and I am shocked by their shallowness.
Mar 12, 2008 - 4:18 pm 29. AST:I’m with Sissy.
I’m looking for a woman running because she knows foreign policy, economics and how to run a bureaucracy, not because she wants to be the first woman president or because she has a grudge toward society and wants to re-engineer it to suit herself and other feminists.
The idea that the unfairness of the past can be erased by reverse unfairness will only make for more unhappiness and more grudges.
Women are in a difficult position trying to compete in most professional careers, but wanting to have families, as well. It’s really a failure of our country that so many families have to have two incomes to survive. I know that I wouldn’t go very far in a law firm, or company that based my advancement on the time I could commit to the firm, because I consider that an excessive demand.
I don’t know much about the over all differences in earnings, but I have noticed that many of the women lawyers I’ve known were single, usually divorced several times, hard to work with and not particularly happy. They tried to out-man the men, and it hasn’t seemed to be very fulfilling for them.
For better or worse, the business world was built primarily by men who compete in the same way they compete in war and sports. Women could change that paradigm by competing the way women do rather than with the testosterone-laced attitudes and behavior that seems to apply everywhere, but I don’t know how effective that would be.
The best way for women to work out their grudges, I think, would be through starting their own businesses, and putting truly feminine principles to work. For all the criticism of Martha Stewart, she has done very well for herself, and I feel that she really enjoys what she does.
Mar 12, 2008 - 4:37 pm 30. sharkjumper:From Ms. McArdle:
“beause you’ve got twice the “normal” nuber of X chromosomes.”
Men have 45 X chromosomes. Women have 46. 46/45 does not equal 2.
This is why being qualitative isn’t good enough.
Mar 12, 2008 - 4:45 pm 31. Captain Hate:It’s really a failure of our country that so many families have to have two incomes to survive.
Why is that a failure of the country. When we had children my wife stopped full-time work and we lived on my at-the-time-not-so-great salary. Of course we didn’t have a trophy house, a pair of Beamers, a vacation cottage and other essentials for young upwardly-mobile suburbanite trash. We sucked it up and really didn’t suffer. Maybe more people should try it. There was absolutely no way we were going to subject our children to day-care.
I’ve worked in IT for quite a while and the women I’ve worked with have usually done very well. We’re really all in the same boat, both good and bad.
Mar 12, 2008 - 4:56 pm 32. JustMe:“The leading journals prefer quantitative research over qualitative research.”
Ummm… maybe because it’s quantitative?
I’m a person who’s worked in the sciences and engineering (mostly academic, but also in the real world). Given my background, I’m amazed why anyone thinks the qualitative is more valuable than, or even equal to, the quantitative. That’s like saying we should prefer circumstantial evidence over facts in a court of law.
(Oh, and in case you were thinking otherwise, I’m also a woman.)
Mar 12, 2008 - 7:09 pm 33. John Samford:Not a problem. If the females don’t get serious about support for the War on Terror/Islam, they will be in Burkkas, NOT voting booths. Think you have problems now, wait until the Mullahs start lining up all females with degrees and machine gunning them.
Mar 12, 2008 - 9:35 pm 34. bandit:One thing fersure – apparently no one in the Dem electorate votes based on whom they think is the best candidate – it’s exterior paint or no stick shift
Mar 13, 2008 - 6:29 am 35. MikeT:Huh. I wonder why they prefer quantitative research. Could it have anything to do with the fact that if you want to call your profession a science, that it must focus on quantitative research because that is the research to most likely produce reproducible results?
This attitude is precisely why women are often not taken seriously in the sciences. Qualitative research rarely has much lasting value to it. If you want to play with the boys, you have to play the same sport, and that’s not what you’re talking about here.
Mar 14, 2008 - 3:50 am 36. tanstaafl:The idea of women of a certain age (or any women, for that matter) being significantly or substantially for Hillary (mostly for the XX chromosome) is very disheartening.
There are other women out there, women who didn’t stay married to the jackass, women whose experience with crisis is other than Travelgate, Cattle Futures Gate, Monicagate, BimboSgate, Trooper gate, Rose law firm billing records gate, White House furniture gate, Healthcare reform gate, Vince Foster gate…and so on, into the night, ad nauseam, ad infinitum…
Hillary, claiming to be ready (unlike her opponent) to take the reins of government at Day One, hasn’t even managed staff and finance issues within her own campaign particularly well.
If you want to know where Hillary “stands” on an issue, look to where those to whom she feels indebted stand (perhaps those who support her, financially) and you will be able to figure out her position before she utters it.
It might very well change with the wind the next week, depending on what she feels is most expedient and self-serving at the time.
The notion that a President of the United States should have the power to redistribute income through taxation would be abhorrent to every single individual who conceived this Representative Republic in the 18th century.
The notion that a President of the United States should have the power to attach your salary if you don’t purchase her mandated version of “health care” would make Thomas Jefferson turn over in his grave.
Mar 16, 2008 - 1:56 pm