My morning reading: women who run for president

Avedon says Katie Couric asked Hillary Clinton a creepy question: “Why do you think Sarah Palin has an action figure and you have a nutcracker?”

But Lance says the question is more telling than creepy.

I do think the question was a waste of time, under the circumstances. There was no way Clinton was going to answer it seriously. She was there to talk up Barack Obama’s performance in the debate and if there’s one thing Hillary Clinton is good at it’s staying on point.

But under other circumstances it could be an interesting and important question and I’d like to hear Clinton answer it. Couric might want to ask it again a decade or two down the road when Clinton’s coming to the end of her political career and the focus of an interview can be Hillary herself as a person and a personality and a personage exiting the public stage and entering the history books, when her feelings matter as much as her actions.

Because the way I took the question it was a playful way of asking why does one strong, intelligent, ambitious woman get treated by the Media and half the public as a castrating shrew and another embraced as warm, safe, lovable, and cuddly?

Put another way, why is Hillary Clinton hated and vilified and feared for doing what other politicians do as a matter of course?

…

The nutcracker is ugly but ridiculous and ultimately without power or threat. The action figure—the doll—isn’t as vicious, but it’s far from flattering because it too is ultimately without power. Both the nutcracker and the doll reduce the women in question to toys and jokes.

I urge you to read all of this post. It’s astute, and I’d like to hug him for this part, especially given that my husband likes to talk fondly about my own “Hillary cackle:”

So Couric might as well have saved the second question for another day.

Still, I’m glad she asked it.

It gave Clinton an opportunity to do something she does even better than stay on point.

Laugh.

But then I like her laugh.

We know what other people think of it. And we know what that means.

But after I read Lance’s posts, in one of those odd little serendipity things that happen from time to time, I decided to go have a look at some Powell’s book reviews that have been sitting in my in-box for well over a year waiting for me to get time to read them. And the one I happened to open was Christine Stansell’s review, originially in The New Republic, of Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President (in 1884). It begins like this:

Women’s biographies are the pre-eminent form of popular women’s history, and the only nonfiction books that female readers will dependably buy. In the past forty years, the genre has flourished, nourished by an unending curiosity about women’s lives that feminism generates. Famous men’s wives and sisters turn out to have amazing stories of their own (Vera Nabokov, Alice James, Zelda Fitzgerald). Sagas of sisters, spun from strands of rivalry and adoration, are mesmerizing (the Peabodys, the Mitfords). Writers, their struggles for art and life in equal measure inevitably complicated by their sex, are an endless store of plots (Virginia Woolf, Margaret Fuller, Colette). Family relations, marriage, motherhood, isolation, sex, social opprobrium, anger, friendship, and creativity: all are explored in the study of such women’s lives.

The same cannot be said about political power. Biographies of Jane Addams and Eleanor Roosevelt illuminate the achievements of women at the edges of formal politics. Of those who wielded institutional power, only Eleanor Rathbone, one of Britain’s first female members of Parliament, has merited a significant book. True, there are any number of biographies of queens and aristocrats who practiced politics in oblique and unusual ways; and true, there are many studies of women in protest politics, beginning with the great feminists of the nineteenth century (Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Stanton, Angelina and Sarah Grimké) and running through the civil rights movement (Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer). But it is undeniable that most biographies of women concern love, creativity, and the search for self, rather than ambition and the scramble for the nomination.

The obvious reason is that women have been barred from politics for so long that there are few figures of importance to observe and to study. Yet the absence of biography redoubles the difficulties in understanding the lives of those women who have gone into politics. From a distance, they seem a little dull. It is easier to haul them back into the familiar plots of modern womanhood — thwarted ambition, struggle for self-esteem — than to imagine what they mostly do and mostly care about: winning elections, lining up votes, passing bills, making policy.

This long and informative review also deserves to be read in full. Lockwood seems, in some ways, quite Clintonesque (and indeed it is interesting to see the way this essay addresses the Clinton candidacy, in that it was written before the primary and all the sexism and misogyny used against Clinton):

A story of Lockwood’s disappointments and sorrows winds through the book, but Norgren gives it short shrift. It wasn’t the woman’s nature to dwell on sadness. She struggled for money most of her life, saw the small fortune in fees she won in the Cherokee case dissolve in legal action with the clients, and lost both her children. At eighty-four, she also lost her home — then, as now, a premier measure of dignity for an aging woman. Yet she remained nonplussed: involved in world affairs, interested in younger friends, indifferent to the handicap of old age, and very proud of herself. At eighty-six she regaled reporters with the story of her feats. She died shortly after, in 1916.

Norgren has the great discernment to see Lockwood’s life as large and anticipatory rather than eccentric and half-realized.

The review also provides some insight into the split between African-American men and the suffragists:

The prewar movement, comprising men and women whose feminism was born of deep anti-slavery commitments, had gone into abeyance during the Civil War. It revived in the mid-1860s, only to split bitterly over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which guaranteed full citizenship and voting rights to the freedmen but not to the freedwomen, or to any other women. One group of suffragists endorsed the Republican Party’s judgment that the freedmen’s situation was so dire that it required immediate action, and that an attempt to institute universal suffrage would doom the entire enterprise. The other group, led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, saw universal manhood suffrage as the Republicans’ capitulation to exigency and a betrayal of democratic principle. They denounced their old Republican allies and demanded a Sixteenth Amendment to enfranchise women.

And it also reminds me that I wanted to draw your attention to this radio diary at All Things Considered of Victoria Claflin Woodhull, the first woman to run for president (in 1872), of whom Stansell says:

The charismatic, scandalous Victoria Woodhull, the bad girl of women’s suffrage, had entered the presidential race in 1872, running on the imaginary ticket of the People’s Party (sprung unbidden from the mind of Woodhull). But she staged her bid as an outré performance piece, a one-woman show.

and also Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to run for president (in 1972).

I’ll close this post with Stansell’s closing paragraph, written in April, 2007:

In 1914, when Lockwood was eighty-four years old and still lacked the right to vote, she spoke to reporters about American women’s political prospects. She was typically optimistic and even-handed. Women would be elected to the Senate and the House, she predicted with confidence. (In fact, Jeannette Rankin’s election to the House from Wyoming was only three years away.) As for president, that, too, was within reach. “If [a woman] demonstrates that she is fitted to be president she will some day occupy the White House. It will be entirely on her own merits, however. No movement can place her there simply because she is a woman.” Is Hillary Clinton “fitted to be president”? The question will be answered over the next year, as she will be scrutinized for “her own merits.” But whatever voters decide, we owe her, and Nancy Pelosi, and the other female pols across the spectrum gratitude for devising a new plot. The biographies of these women will be composed of the workaday, disenchanted materials of political lives — perseverance, competence, canniness, and, yes, a facility for the quick grab — that Belva Lockwood cultivated and prized.

Where will nutcrackers fit in? Time will tell, I guess.

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