Day 25
Day 25 brings an essay.. Why? Because I was thinking today. Yes, okay, I think every day, but not every think generates the urge to write an essay. That’s probably fortunate, because like most everyone else, I sometimes think things that are not appropriate for an essay. But tonight I was thinking about anniversaries. Specifically, the anniversary of the 19th amendment to the US Constitution, making women’s suffrage federally mandated. Women able to vote everywhere, not just in those select states that decided to permit it. So how do we fare now? Better, much better. We can vote. We can own property. We can get credit. We have the right to control our own reproduction. But most of that came much later, and most of it was from the courts. There is still a lot of work to do. And since I was thinking this, I decided to write about it. So here is my rambling, possibly coherent essay. Forgive me. It is late, it’s been a long day, and I have written, read, edited, and otherwise worked all day. So this column is my second shift. Third, if you count cooking dinner and cleaning the table.
Tonight, my five women will all be political leaders, in keeping with my essay.
Ana Barnabić, Prime Minister of Serbia
Bidhya Devi Bhandari, President of Nepal
Tasai Ing-Wen, President of Taiwan
Kersti Kaljulaid, President of Estonia
Simonetta Sommaruga, President of Switzerland
NEVER A WOMAN
This year, the 100th anniversary of woman’s suffrage, we saw the spectacle of several women running for president, and losing out early to old white men. The race started out exciting. Elizabeth Warren. Amy Klobuchar. Kamala Harris. Kirsten Gillibrand. Tulsi Gabbard. Marianne Williamson. The excitement quickly gave way to the usual. She’s too shrill. She’s too educated. She’s too mean. She’s too haughty. What it translated to, when the dust settled, is she’s too female. She’s too…she.
Currently, fewer than 15% of the world’s countries are ruled by women. In spite of the small percentage, that is higher than most of history. Only 2019 was higher, with one more woman leader than now. Europe tends to be the best at electing women. Countries with female leaders include Germany, Bangladesh, Switzerland, Norway, Nepal, Myanmar, Taiwan, Estonia, Serbia, Singapore, New Zealand, Iceland, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Ethiopia, Georgia, Slovakia, Denmark, Belgium, Bolivia, and Finland. Among those countries that have not had a female leader (which is over 100 countries), you can include not only the United States, but also Russia, China, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia. If you look at that list, you can see one thing: most of those countries have a highly defined definition of masculinity that would likely be threatened by the presence of a woman leader.
It is a national disgrace that we can’t achieve gender equality in our governance. Many of the laws that govern women’s bodies are made by men. Why is this? Only 15 countries have achieved anything close to gender equality. Scandinavian countries have, not surprisingly, taken the lead in this. Rwanda and Nicaragua make the top ten list for best gender equality, topping the United Kingdom, famous for having been ruled by women as early as the sixteenth century, which comes in at number 15. The United States, you ask? Home of democracy? (If you believe all the hype, that is. I actually think Greece and Rome were doing that before we did…it isn’t an American invention.) Well, the United States comes in number 51 in gender equality.
This isn’t to say that the picture is universally (or even globally) grim. All nations have achieved at least 60% gender equality on the World Economic Forum (WEF) index, which measures countries based on progress toward women having the same economic, survival, education, and political opportunities as men. Wow. Sixty percent. So women get six goodies for every ten goodies the men get.
If you read the American media, it would be easy to get the idea that women are not only equal in opportunity to men, they are actually in a superior position. We see rosy reports about companies run by women, about how many women are graduating college with advanced degrees, and how women are actually getting goodies denied to men. Well, you know what? It’s always easy to cherry pick the news, show it from the most positive angle. Let’s pick this apart a little.
I will agree that women are getting more college degrees than men. This has been the case for some time now. But men are still getting preference for the jobs. I have been working for (ahem) years, and nearly all my bosses have been men. Every female boss I had has been memorable, partially because they have been so rare. My worst boss ever was a female…so was my best boss ever. All the rest fall along the spectrum, just like my male bosses, with my second worst ever boss tied between a male and a female. But there are many male bosses I wouldn’t remember if they walked up and rammed their hand up my skirt (sorry, bit me…I went off on a tangent, and used a phrase more likely to resonate with women).
Women make up the bulk of the physical therapists and occupational therapists; most of the supervisors, usually promoted from those positions, are men. Women outnumber men in some medical specialties – family medicine, psychiatry, pediatrics, and OB/GYN. See any pattern? Yeah, caring fields. The men like the more traditionally macho fields, and many of those are hard for women to get a foothold, because they are seen as men’s fields.
And when I look up the percentage of males in the OB/GYN field, I find articles that proclaim a declining percentage of men in the field…and for some reason, that’s bad. I find female medical students going into that field explaining that they think we need more men in that field. They claim to like the perspective men bring to the field. What exactly perspective is that? I actually don’t really want to know. But I don’t find the same thing when I discover there are few female proctologists. Women are not valued for their perspective on men; men are valued for their perspective on women. Why is that? What could a man add to the conversation about my reproductive health that an equivalently trained woman could not handle? To be honest, there is nothing.
This is the overall problem, I think. The world has so long been set up around men, for men, by men, that when men decline in a field (even in small percentage points), it is seen as a crisis. When women increase in a field (even in small percentage points), it is seen as a crisis by some, a cause celebre by others, but in general, a single percentage point is seen as such a major advance that we feel we can sit back on our duffs and pat ourselves on the back for all our hard work…while those who find this a crisis will get moving, get motivated, and write article after article about the horrors that face men in the world today…in spite of the fact that they are still the leaders of industry, of academia, of sports, of entertainment…they make the most money, they get the best and the most jobs, they get the most promotions, and they make the most laws. And most of them get to do it without having to do the dishes when they get home, though of course there are those who “help” their wives with the housework…the assumption being that the work belongs to the wives (the majority of whom are also working), and it is the man’s prerogative to choose to help if he desires.
So, bring this back to suffrage. For 100 years, women have gone to the polls in every state, at every level, election after election. For most of that time, they have been allowed to choose from a slate of men. Eventually we began to get some women to vote for, and one time…one, brief, shining moment…we had the option to vote for a woman for the highest office in the land. We voted for her in record numbers. She won the second most votes of any candidate in history…and the number one vote getter was not her opponent. Thanks to a series of loopholes in our clunky, antiquated, and rigged electoral system, she is not sitting in the White House, taking us out of that list of countries never led by a woman. She is in retirement, while her opponent, he of the fewer votes (3 million fewer – there are several states that don’t have that many people in them), is running the country.
So we try again. During the last election cycle, as progressive people shook their heads over Hillary Clinton (she’s too ambitious; she’s too old; she’s too cold; she’s too…Hillary), they vowed they would vote for the right woman. That nice Elizabeth Warren, for instance. They would vote for her. They wanted to vote for her. They ached to vote for her. Right up until she declared her candidacy. Then her support disappeared. It went to Bernie Sanders, who apparently isn’t too old, even though he is older than she is. He apparently isn’t too shrill, even though he has the most claim to being shrill of any candidate on the stage. He isn’t too haughty, though I fail to notice a lack of haughtiness on his part. He strikes me as haughty plus. That doesn’t mean I would never consider voting for him. Those are not the qualities that bother me about a presidential candidate, male or female.
So what will it take to get a female president? I suggest the answer will be a nightmare of unfathomable proportions. My husband believes, and I am inclined to agree with him, that when we get a female president, it will be a conservative Republican. Sarah Palin. Michele Bachmann. You get the picture. Why? Because they pretend to be traditional women. Even while working in high powered fields, making gobs of money, and running for elective office, they tell women the proper function of women is to be the wife, the mother, the submissive partner in a traditional marriage. Everyone can clearly see that these women are nothing of the sort. (Mama Grizzly? Seriously? Not traditional, not submissive.) And, they are willing to act the ditz.
Meanwhile, skilled, talented, strong women progressives will be dismissed by their progressive colleagues as too old, too young, too smart, too dumb, too cold, too emotional, too haughty, too folksy, too…woman. Unable to beat a man, especially one like Donald Trump. Okay, yeah, I sort of believe that, too. Because I don’t believe any Democrat can beat Donald Trump at this time, though I suppose the current situation could change the equation.
As for me, I will still have the opportunity to vote for Elizabeth Warren in the primary, because the ballots were already printed before she dropped out. I will cast my vote where I believe it should go…after 100 years, I think it’s about time. Meanwhile, I think I’m going to go off and have a selfie with her dog…yes, a woman so cold, so haughty, so too-educated, so very out of touch with voters (all of these I have heard), who allowed her voters to take selfies with her, and when she wasn’t able to stay for selfies, she allowed them to have selfies with her dog. Now that’s a selfie I would love to have.