{"id":544,"date":"2014-04-10T08:37:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-10T08:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/04\/why-no-woman-president-a-highly-speculative-post.html"},"modified":"2014-04-10T08:37:00","modified_gmt":"2014-04-10T08:37:00","slug":"why-no-woman-president-a-highly-speculative-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/04\/why-no-woman-president-a-highly-speculative-post.html","title":{"rendered":"Why no woman president? (A highly speculative post)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

(Some more thoughts on a post from February, added at the bottom.)<\/p>\n

What do Angela Merkel and Margaret Thatcher have in common? <\/p>\n

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\u2019t know much about her.) <\/p>\n

But I think it\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

And\u00a0that\u2019s not to say that no elected world leaders are ever from left-leaning parties.\u00a0 A quick perusal of Wikipedia<\/a> shows Julia Gillard as the Prime Minister of Canada, for example, from the Labor Party (though in terms of governance, she doesn\u2019t look much like what we\u2019d think of as Left, supporting fiscal restraint and a balanced budget).<\/p>\n

And I don\u2019t have a good answer for \u201cwhy\u201d \u2014 and we can\u2019t 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.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Why did Hillary Clinton fail to get the Democratic nomination?\u00a0\u00a0There\u2019s no simple reason, but it\u2019s not because the \u201cvoters\u201d failed her \u2014 if I recall\u00a0(though I haven\u2019t looked this up) she did far better in the primaries than in the caucuses.\u00a0 Was it because Obama out-fundraised her?\u00a0\u00a0Out-organized her?\u00a0 Because supporting a black man was more appealing than supporting a woman?\u00a0\u00a0I certainly don\u2019t think it was any political stand, or assessment of political abilities, that swung things Obama\u2019s way (and that comes, by the way, from a conviction that both were\u00a0equally unqualified, not equally qualified).<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s one difference between the US and\u00a0countries such as England and Germany:\u00a0 abortion is not a contentious issue there.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

In Germany,\u00a0pre-reunification, abortion was banned in\u00a0West Germany (to the point of restricting the\u00a0travel abroad of\u00a0pregnant women),\u00a0and fully-available in East Germany.\u00a0 As a\u00a0part of the negotiations around unification,\u00a0an agreement was struck that abortion became legal for the first twelve weeks, with a requirement that a woman receive counseling beforehand.\u00a0 And, so far as I know, there is not a big concern about abortion as a political issue.\u00a0 \u201cPro-life\u201d 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).<\/p>\n

In England, abortion is much more widely available, and the pro-life movement, so far as I can tell, hasn\u2019t had much success in the political arena, but equally, so far as I can tell, pro-life sentiment isn\u2019t associated with either political party.<\/p>\n

In the US:\u00a0 not only is being pro-life a part of the Republican\u2019s platform, and abortion rights, the Democrat\u2019s, but, among Democrats, it\u2019s an article of faith that to be pro-life, or, rather, \u201canti-choice\u201d in their parlance, is to be anti-woman, and, hence, for a woman, it makes one a traitor to womankind.\u00a0 And this means that Republican women of prominence (e.g., Sarah Palin) are the subject of particularly vehement attacks.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

I\u2019m not saying that this is the entirety of the explanation,\u00a0but I suspect that this is some part of the reason.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: \u00a0with Hillary Clinton in the news so much lately, with speculation swirling about whether she\u2019ll run in 2016, I thought I\u2019d re-visit this. \u00a0On the one hand, I really don\u2019t understand what the appeal of Hillary is (and I say \u201cHillary\u201d because she\u2019s the second Clinton to have prominence, chronologically, not because she\u2019s a woman), but, then, I didn\u2019t see why everyone went ga-ga over Obama, either. \u00a0The 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\u2019t have a \u201cfarm team\u201d of governors and senators and congressmen. \u00a0(She will be 69 on election day \u2014 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.) <\/p>\n

Will she be able to pull over independent voters for whom the opportunity to elect a woman is a motivator? \u00a0Will she be able to make the pitch that \u201c2008 was black America\u2019s turn. \u00a02016 is women\u2019s turn\u201d? <\/p>\n

Or will there be something of an \u201conly Nixon could go to China\u201d at play? \u00a0In 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\u2019ll be peacemakers, compassionate when it comes to the Less Fortunate, etc.) will mean that they\u2019ll 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\u2019 decisions, it\u2019ll be see as a balancing factor?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(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\u2019t know much about her.) But I think […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy no woman president? (A highly speculative post)<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"(Some more thoughts on a post from February, added at the bottom.)What do Angela Merkel and Margaret Thatcher have in common? 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