Still 2 steps behind

Still two steps behind
How can women in public office gain popularity?
TODAY Weekend • October 18, 2008
Constance Singam
news@newstoday.com.sg

THE question I was asked: " Why are both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin disliked by women?" And my response is that women and men are influenced by gender stereotypes: There are also many women, and men, who think that Hillary Clinton would have made a good President, just as there are men and women who like Sarah Palin. They may pray that she doesn’t become President!

Women political candidates cannot escape being seen through the pervasive lenses of gender stereotypes. Politics, like most public office, is a male bastion, whose standards of behaviour, style, speech and culture are dictated by a male culture.

For instance, in a report published in a local newspaper recently, the headline, above the photographs of Mrs Sonia Gandhi and Ms Mayawati (the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and described in the story as an "upstart spinster") — screams "CATFIGHT". Had the political opponents been two men, would the headline have read "DOGFIGHT" and the candidate described as an ‘upstart bachelor"?
The label "bachelor" (describing someone who is male) doesn’t even convey the intended "sting" that "spinster" does.

Media coverage of women, such as the one quoted above, reinforces rather than challenges the dominant culture, thereby contributing towards women’s marginalisation in public life.

As a political system, democracy — from ancient Greece to the 21st century — has built on the public-private dichotomy and excluded women from public life. Women had been kept outside the public domain of politics as most of the political thinkers and philosophers had maintained that there was no place for women in politics. Women’s place was in the home. That attitude has not changed much although the reality is quite different as more women enter public life.

It is a tricky business being a woman in a man’s world, as Mrs Clinton and Mrs Palin are finding out. Men and women either like the duo, or dislike them intensely. An increasing number of women, a report claims, are favouring Mr Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate, not because they are the supporters of Mrs Clinton but because they dislike Mrs Palin.

Women cannot be seen as being too ambitious. Ambition is perceived as a male characteristic. Both Mrs Clinton and Mrs Palin are obviously ambitious. That was also the issue for Mrs Cherie Blair (wife of Tony Blair, former British Prime Minister). Mrs Blair was determined to show that she can be her own woman, pursue her own career, maintain her own political views and do the wife and mother bits as well — everything women are told to aspire to. But she was not popular.

Women can be clever, but not too clever. As a British journalist wrote recently, a woman must project both feminist and anti-feminist principles. It helps if she’s smart, independent and career-oriented, but she must be similarly happy and fulfilled in her domestic life.

Mrs Clinton is a feminist andMrs Palin projects the traditional view of women, except for her ambition.
Generally, women (unless one is a feminist), even when they support feminist goals and have benefited from feminist advocacy work, shy away from associating themselves too closely with feminists and feminism. This is why many women, brought up in patriarchal ways, stay away from Mrs Clinton. She behaves too much like a male politician.

Everybody, even the anti-George Bush camp, likes Mrs Laura Bush. The difference is that she has found a way to accommodate feminism with the expectations of a male world. She gave up her surname, she gave up her career and she has made her role as wife her priority. In other words, metaphorically speaking, she walks two steps behind her man.

The message is we don’t mind clever women, (just be modest about it) but they have to play by the rules — patriarchal rules. This is clearly the way Singapore women in public life operate.

Mrs Clinton and Mrs Palin, benefactors of the feminist movement, Mrs Gandhi and Ms Mayawati, from traditional India and Singapore’sMrs Yu-Foo Yee Shoon and her fellow women MPs, come from a context of democracy which hands out privileges to men more than it does to women. And many women subscribe to the value system that gives men a head start. They judge women in politics through apatriarchal lens.

When women enter politics within this patriarchal context of modern democracies, they are unable to play a role to radically change the sexual politics. Rather, they largely play political roles on male terms.
But whichever way a woman plays it, she is going to be criticised — for the way she dresses, for the colour of her lipstick, for the make of her glasses, for being emotional, for not being emotional enough.

She can’t win, can she ... unless she walks two steps behind her husband — metaphorically speaking, that is!

The writer is a social activist