(Some more thoughts on a post from February, added at the bottom.)
What do Angela Merkel and Margaret Thatcher have in common?
OK, yes, they were/are undisputably the two most powerful women to have ever held elective office. (Golda Meir might belong in this category, but I don’t know much about her.)
But I think it’s significant that, despite the conventional wisdom that the more left-leaning parties care more about equality for women, these two women were/are from the conservative/right parties in their respective countries.
Is this just coincidence? The Iron Lady was just not right-leaning but quite insistent in her policies. And, as much as Merkel maintains support for the Euro monetary union, she is still the (sole?) voice for fiscal restraint.
And that’s not to say that no elected world leaders are ever from left-leaning parties. A quick perusal of Wikipedia shows Julia Gillard as the Prime Minister of Canada, for example, from the Labor Party (though in terms of governance, she doesn’t look much like what we’d think of as Left, supporting fiscal restraint and a balanced budget).
And I don’t have a good answer for “why” — and we can’t make too many comparisons with the American political system, which relies much more on personality and celebrity than old fashioned coming-up-through-the-ranks.
Why did Hillary Clinton fail to get the Democratic nomination? There’s no simple reason, but it’s not because the “voters” failed her — if I recall (though I haven’t looked this up) she did far better in the primaries than in the caucuses. Was it because Obama out-fundraised her? Out-organized her? Because supporting a black man was more appealing than supporting a woman? I certainly don’t think it was any political stand, or assessment of political abilities, that swung things Obama’s way (and that comes, by the way, from a conviction that both were equally unqualified, not equally qualified).
But here’s one difference between the US and countries such as England and Germany: abortion is not a contentious issue there.
In Germany, pre-reunification, abortion was banned in West Germany (to the point of restricting the travel abroad of pregnant women), and fully-available in East Germany. As a part of the negotiations around unification, an agreement was struck that abortion became legal for the first twelve weeks, with a requirement that a woman receive counseling beforehand. And, so far as I know, there is not a big concern about abortion as a political issue. “Pro-life” groups, such as they exist, are more focused on persuasion than any change in law, due, so far as I know, to an acknowledgement that the law was determined as a part of democratic process (that is, rather than a court decision).
In England, abortion is much more widely available, and the pro-life movement, so far as I can tell, hasn’t had much success in the political arena, but equally, so far as I can tell, pro-life sentiment isn’t associated with either political party.
In the US: not only is being pro-life a part of the Republican’s platform, and abortion rights, the Democrat’s, but, among Democrats, it’s an article of faith that to be pro-life, or, rather, “anti-choice” in their parlance, is to be anti-woman, and, hence, for a woman, it makes one a traitor to womankind. And this means that Republican women of prominence (e.g., Sarah Palin) are the subject of particularly vehement attacks.
I’m not saying that this is the entirety of the explanation, but I suspect that this is some part of the reason.
UPDATE: with Hillary Clinton in the news so much lately, with speculation swirling about whether she’ll run in 2016, I thought I’d re-visit this. On the one hand, I really don’t understand what the appeal of Hillary is (and I say “Hillary” because she’s the second Clinton to have prominence, chronologically, not because she’s a woman), but, then, I didn’t see why everyone went ga-ga over Obama, either. The fact that so many Democrats are speaking of her as the natural 2016 candidate, almost as if the nomination is hers to lose, seems to indicate that the Democrats don’t have a “farm team” of governors and senators and congressmen. (She will be 69 on election day — the same age as Reagan was when he was elected, and younger than McCain when he ran, but there were legitimate criticisms in both instances, in terms of stamina, mental sharpness, and health risks.)
Will she be able to pull over independent voters for whom the opportunity to elect a woman is a motivator? Will she be able to make the pitch that “2008 was black America’s turn. 2016 is women’s turn”?
Or will there be something of an “only Nixon could go to China” at play? In the real world, do liberal women have a disadvantage because people suspect that the end result of the traits that women are supposed to have (they’ll be peacemakers, compassionate when it comes to the Less Fortunate, etc.) will mean that they’ll go too far (give away the farm to their foreign policy opponents, be unable to control spending at home), where, for a conservative woman, to the extent that sex and perceptions of stereotypes plays into voters’ decisions, it’ll be see as a balancing factor?
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