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Jewish World Review Oct. 11, 2005 / 8 Tishrei, 5766 We've come a long way, baby? By Kathryn Lopez
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
I suspect that I should be having warm, fuzzy "we girls can do
anything" feelings about being a woman this fall.
Just think about the fairer sex's collective accomplishments: Geena
Davis is president of the United States! And didn't President Bush
answer calls to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court, just to meet
some perceived quota rule, when he named his pal Harriet Miers to
the Supreme Court?
In short, instead of being the inspiration to women I'm sure someone
thinks they are, the two events lead me to one solid conclusion:
Blue-staters — in D.C. and Hollywood — do a darn good job making
women look silly.
Take first the lighter of the two fall phenomena: "Commander in
Chief," the new ABC drama about the first woman president. The White
House Project, a group whose purpose is to make sure that a woman
makes it to the White House someday, encouraged women to hold
parties to celebrate this supposedly groundbreaking drama.
Ironically, I watch "Commander in Chief" and just get depressed.
The first message of the show seems to be that women can only be
elected president through a back door. In "Commander in Chief,"
Davis' character only becomes our national leader because she is the
vice president to a president who, as milestone luck would have it,
dies. But before he goes he makes clear that he believes she
shouldn't be president. The Speaker of the House thinks she's a
joke.
The second message I get from "Commander in Chief" is: Women are
silly. "If Moses had been a woman, leading the Jews out of Egypt,
she'd have stopped to ask for directions." Are we really supposed to
take that kind of caricatured dialogue seriously? Most professional
women I know — many of them in the Beltway political world, as it
happens — are not playing juvenile Battle of the Sexes games.
They're just out doing their jobs and proving themselves like
everyone else. And that's how (ideally, anyway) women rise — on
merit. Do the job, measure up on any objective scale, and you'll be
in the pool of the qualified and successful. "Just do it," as the
sneaker commercial advised. Not in a dumbed-down
"well-here's-the-best-the-women-can-do" category. To do otherwise —
to make that separate category — is insulting and unnecessary.
Or that's how I hoped things worked among the serious. But the "Prez
Geena" nonsense seems to have infiltrated my often-beloved Bush
White House. At least this is the message I take from the Harriet
Miers nomination to the Supreme Court.
Whatever the criteria the president used to choose Miers for his
second Supreme Court nomination, there are few who believe she
wasn't picked, perhaps first and foremost, because she's a woman.
There was an erroneous conventional wisdom that the president simply
had to nominate a woman: That the Sandra Day O'Connor seat is a
woman's seat on the court.
And the president surely hasn't done much to debunk the image that
he buys into the woman's seat nonsense. The day after his nomination
of Miers — a nomination met with criticism from many of his usual
allies (like me) on the Right — the president held a press
conference, during which he kept latching onto female things as
evidence that she is Supreme material. First woman member of her
former law firm. Trailblazer.
But couldn't she just be qualified in a pool of potential picks,
male and female? You know, like John Roberts was? Boosting the
self-esteem of white guys wasn't part of his qualifications for the
court. Can you imagine anyone even suggesting such a thing? Never
mind the president of the United States doing so.
As for the White House, the impression "Commander in Chief" may give
you that a woman president is unelectable may, in fact, be fiction.
We won't know until it happens, but according to a May 2005 USA
Today/CNN/Gallup Poll, 70 percent of respondents claimed they "would
be likely to vote for an unspecified woman for president in 2008."
Maybe that's because they see women who can compete in the political
field not because of their sex, but their talent. Who, as it looks
right now, may just have more winning potential than some of the
guys on the list of 2008 potentials.
Condi vs. Hillary? Maybe. Today, women are players on many of the
same fronts as men. And in presidential politics, if they happen to
be the best of the options — the most popular — there we will be.
Not because someone gave the American people a lecture that it was
time we gave the girls a chance to throw the ball. But because the
girls took the ball and ran with it and did just as well or better
than anyone else. That's the only fair way. Be it in the White
House, on the Supreme Court, in the military — or just about any
other professional front. Anything less is insulting.
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