In the years before World War I, progressives supported women’s suffrage by arguing that giving women the vote would clean up corruption in politics.
Jane Addams generalized from women’s traditional function of making “her dwelling place both clean and fair” to assert that, if women could vote, American cities would no longer “lag behind in those things which make a City healthful and beautiful.”
When Woodrow Wilson endorsed women’s suffrage, he predicated his argument on the sacrifices that women had made in the war effort and also on women’s ethical superiority, telling the Senate, “We shall need their moral sense to preserve what is right and fine and worthy in our system of life as well as to discover just what it is that ought to be purified and reformed.”
While opponents of women’s suffrage argued that giving women the vote would corrupt their purity and make them mannish, supporters retorted that it was precisely the moral sense that women possessed that would improve society.
Sen. Robert Owen, a progressive Democrat from Oklahoma, observed in 1910 the results in the states where women had gotten the vote: “Both political parties were induced to put up cleaner, better men, for the women would not stand a notoriously corrupt or unclean candidate.”
I teach high school American history and just finished studying the women’s suffrage movement with my students. And this year, as has happened every year I’ve taught this subject, the students, particularly the girls, are struck that the proponents of women’s suffrage based their arguments on women’s moral superiority more than they did on fairness and equal rights.
These modern girls find it quite humorous that people believed back then that women were more moral than men. Today’s girls have fully absorbed the arguments of feminists from their mothers’ generation that women were completely equal to men in all ways; not better, but equal. They find it rather insulting to regard women, as they were in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as the guardians of civilization.
However, few in the media seem to agree with my students. The recent celebrations of Nancy Pelosi’s ascension to Speakerof the House coupled with Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency have unleashed a torrent of excitement about women in politics.
Suddenly, being a political mom is the new hotness. Hillary Clinton went on “The View” and trilled that “We’ve never had a mother who ever ran or was elected president.” Hillary was so excited by her own status as a mom that I guess she just forgot about Patricia Schroeder and Carol Moseley Braun.
Clinton is clearly packaging herself as the mommy candidate, from her first post-announcement appearance holding the hand of a little girl to the reissue of her book on raising children, “It Takes a Village,” with a cover of her surrounded by children.
Nancy Pelosi literally flexed her muscles as she took the gavel in the House, triumphantly crowing that women had now broken through the “marble ceiling.” Female journalists sighed in contentment at the thought that a grandma was now wielding the gavel.
All this hoopla about moms and grandmas in power seems to imply that they care more about children. Don’t fathers love their children and want to make a better world for them? Are male politicians now going to have to surround themselves with their adoring children and cute grandchildren to establish their political credentials?
And if women are going to use their status as mothers as a qualification for higher office, should voters then ask about their parenting skills and which candidate raised better children? After all, running as a mom means that their mommy skills are now part of the political calculus.
Why should gender matter in politics today? Have we returned to the arguments from a century ago that women are more moral and will clean up politics? In the 2006 campaign, Pelosi argued that it might take a woman to clean out the House of Representatives, unconsciously echoing a 1912 cartoon showing a giant woman voter sweeping away corrupt politicians. Whathappened to all the feminists’ slogans about how there was no difference between women and men? Wasn’t it questioning just this idea that got Larry Summers into trouble?
Women can’t have it both ways. Either men and women are essentially the same, or each gender has certain strengths that the other lacks. If women are going to claim that they bring special gender-based skills to politics, men can start claiming that they, too, have particular strengths as leaders.
Of course, no male politician would be so crass as to say that openly, but you can bet that voters, faced with a woman candidate for president, will be wondering exactly that. And, in a time of war, do women really want to start that discussion?
Betsy Newmark is a member of The Examiner Blog Board of Contributors and blogs at Betsyspage.blogspot.com: http://Betsyspage.blogspot.com
