It's Equality, Stupid

The Hillary Clinton presidential campaign has me thinking about and noticing sexism is ways I haven't in recent years. And it's not just me: two newspaper commentaries today echo my concerns:

The New York Times Magazine has a piece by Peggy Orenstein called The Hillary Lesson ruminating about what our daughters are learning from her candidacy. Is it "We've come a long way, baby" or "We've got a long way yet to go?"

Her statistics point to the latter: Only 16% of governors and 16% of members of Congress are female, and only 24% of state legislators are female. Only 12 out of 500 of the top executives of Fortune 500 companies are female - less than 3%.

Sigh.

Lori Sturdevant, in a political commentary piece in the Strib today called "Dont Despair", takes the opposite tack with the same info - stats in MN are better than the national average, so we have much to be proud of. Our current legislature is 34% female, with a female house speaker. She also cites several significant legislative accomplishments that happened because a woman or women were in power.

Amen.

But interestingly, it's not just the women writing on this issue: George Will, who we can always count on to make the sexist position sound practical and reasonable, writes about Clinton's run in "The Prize Clinton Isn't Owed" (reprinted in the Strib as "The Other Part of Equality is Losing".) The second half of the article is boring Clinton-bashing, but the first part is interesting. He makes the point that you know you're equal when you're treated badly:

When, in 1975, Frank Robinson became major league baseball's first African American manager, with the Cleveland Indians, that was an important milestone. But an even more important one came two years later, when the Indians fired him. That was real equality: Losing one's job is part of the job description of major league managers, because sacking the manager is one of the few changes a floundering team can make immediately. So, in a sense, Robinson had not really arrived until he was told to leave. Then he was just like hundreds of managers before him.

Thus, he asserts, Clinton should take the calls to bow out of the race as a compliment. I don't agree, but I am always impressed by his ability to make sexism (or racism - or whatever he's peddaling at the moment) not only palatable, but even seem logical.

Gee thanks - not much there to advance the discourse. Orenstien, on the other hand, gives us genuine food for thought as she points out that framing gender as something to be "overcome" is not necessarily in a young girl's best interest:

Right now, my daughter doesn’t know about the obstacles she may face someday, and I’m not sure of the wisdom of girding her in advance. Even the supposedly “girl positive” picture books, designed to address this very issue, pose a dilemma. Take “Elenita,” a magical-realist tale, given to my daughter by a family friend, about a girl who wants to be a glass blower. Her father says she can’t do it: she’s too little, and besides, the trade is forbidden to women. The lesson, naturally, is that with a little ingenuity girls can be glass blowers or stevedores or [fill in the blank]. Nice. Still, I found myself hesitating over the “girls can’t” section. My daughter has never heard that “girls can’t be” or “girls can’t do.” Why should I plant the idea in her head only to knock it down?

Indeed, I think this relates to my concerns about how we kids teach about slavery in America - even telling the stories of overcoming, we are still laying out the paradigm of inequality as the base from which all else grows. What would happen if we quit framing our culture in those terms and just taught our kids what it takes to get ahead?

Food for thought!