Obama, Clinton, Palin

Making History in Elections 2008

Liette Gidlow, Liette Gidlow

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780252093654
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Election 2008 made American history, but it was also the product of American history. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Palin smashed through some of the most enduring barriers to high political office, but their exceptional candidacies did not come out of nowhere. In these timely and accessible essays, a distinguished group of historians explores how the candidates both challenged and reinforced historic stereotypes of race and sex while echoing familiar themes in American politics and exploiting new digital technologies.

Contributors include Kathryn Kish Sklar on Clinton's gender masquerade; Tiffany Ruby Patterson on the politics of black anger; Mitch Kachun on Michelle Obama and stereotypes about black women's bodies; Glenda E. Gilmore on black women's century of effort to expand political opportunities for African Americans; Tera W. Hunter on the lost legacy of Shirley Chisholm; Susan M. Hartmann on why the U.S. has not yet followed western democracies in electing a female head of state; Melanie Gustafson on Palin and the political traditions of the American West; Ronald Formisano on the populist resurgence in 2008; Paula Baker on how digital technologies threaten the secret ballot; Catherine E. Rymph on Palin's distinctive brand of political feminism; and Elisabeth I. Perry on the new look of American leadership.

PART I

REPRESENTATIONS

Is Hillary Man Enough?

Is Barack Black Enough?

Is Michelle the New Jacqueline Kennedy?

CHAPTER 1

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, THE RACE QUESTION, AND THE “MASCULINE MYSTIQUE”

Kathryn Kish Sklar

How can we best place Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign in historical perspective—what were its precedents, and what might unfold from it?¹ Of course, it’s impossible to speak about her candidacy without also thinking about Barack Obama’s—and once you start thinking about gender and race, can class be far behind?

Future historians might agree that Clinton’s campaign revolved around three questions.

First, on the “woman question” Clinton’s candidacy built on the gradual change that took place over two generations since 1930; she consolidated those changes into a permanent base for women presidential candidates in the future.

Second, on the “race question” Clinton’s campaign built on the historic precedent of 1869 in which white women competed with Black men for the right to vote. Her example shows that future women candidates for president—Black or white—need to seek an alternative precedent for white feminists’ history on the race question.

Third, Clinton’s campaign prompts us to ask the “gender question” as well as the “woman question” and the “race question”—and ask questions about the relationship between gender and class. Why has gender remained so prominent in American politics and class so submerged in the past half century? How might the gender question be answered differently in the future?

On the “woman question,” I agree with Katha Pollitt, who wrote in The Nation on June 6, 2008, “Thank you, Hillary, for opening the door for other women.” Pollitt thought that “because [Clinton] normalized the concept of a woman running for President, she made it easier for women to run for every office, including the White House. That is one reason women and men of every party and candidate preference, and every ethnicity too, owe Hillary Clinton a standing ovation, even if they can’t stand her.”²

Jo Freeman charted changes in public opinion polls from 1930 to 1990. In 1937 only a third of respondents were willing to vote for a woman for president. By 1945 that figure grew to 50 percent. In 1972 (elevated by the Second Wave) it grew to 70 percent. And in 1990 it reached 90 percent, where it has stayed.³

So when Hillary Clinton’s candidacy emerged in 2006, it built on seventy years of gradual change in public opinion with regard to women candidates for president.

But, of course, her candidacy was about more than “the woman question.” Race, too, was deeply involved. And on this question Clinton failed to establish a path for future white women candidates. Her claim that more hardworking “white” Americans were voting for her exemplified her effort to use race to her advantage in ways that forever tarnished her reputation.⁴

What was she thinking?

Perhaps the historic precedent of 1869 was in her mind. That iconic moment shaped the woman suffrage movement for decades thereafter and has usually been interpreted as pitting the suffrage of white women against Black men. But if we step back and look at the broader context of that moment, we see that its origins in 1837 offer a more usable past for future women presidential candidates.

In 1869 the woman suffrage movement tried to find a place in the politics of the post–Civil War era. After a bloody Civil War accomplished the abolition of slavery, the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution was debated. Adopted in 1870, it declared: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Suffragists were divided over this revolutionary amendment, which for the first time created a “national” citizenship. One group, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, decided not to support it because they wanted “sex” to be included in the protected categories. In 1869 they formed the National Woman Suffrage Association in New York and launched a periodical called Revolution. Feminist historians have generally seen them as radical in their insistence on women’s rights. Another group, headed by Lucy Stone and Elizabeth Blackwell, supported the amendment and in 1869 formed the American Woman Suffrage Association in Boston. Feminist historians have generally seen them as more conservative.⁵ Yet new views of these groups see them as quite similar, more mainstream than radical or conservative. If we measure radical change as the willingness to welcome the participation of Black women, neither group qualifies. Famously, from 1869 forward, Black women formed their own suffrage movement in local groups separate from these white national organizations.⁶

Yet these suffrage groups grew out of a moment of revolutionary change in 1837—when the women’s rights movement first emerged to claim an equal place for women in American public life. A good way to measure their radical impulse is to notice that these 1837 white women condemned racism. Indeed, they generated a social justice legacy that American feminists have drawn on ever since.

Why was 1837 a more innovative moment than 1869 for white women’s political achievements related to racial justice? Gerda Lerner answered that question forty years ago. Angelina Grimké led women in the antislavery movement to claim equal participation in American public life—as public speakers and movement leaders. Raised in a wealthy South Carolina slaveholding family, Grimké moved north in 1829 and became a fabulously popular antislavery speaker who, when attempts were made to silence her, insisted on her right to speak in public, declaring that “whatever is morally right for a man to do is morally right for a woman.”⁷

Grimké’s revolutionary leadership came out of a context in which antislavery women were courageous and well organized because they had to be. They and their male colleagues were seen as threats to the social order in the North as well as the South because that order depended on the profits generated by slavery. Their lives were constantly at risk. William Lloyd Garrison was dragged around Boston by a mob that placed a noose around his neck in 1835.

But rather than be silenced by this context, antislavery women spoke out. They held three unprecedented national conventions, beginning in 1837, when they asserted women’s rights and condemned racism. Especially noteworthy is the way they drew on spiritual traditions to frame their revolution. They needed all the help they could get, and they drew on a higher law to assert women’s rights and condemn racism.⁸

At the 1837 convention, their women’s rights resolution declared: “The time has come for woman to move in that sphere which Providence has assigned her and no longer remain satisfied in the circumscribed limits with which corrupt custom and a perverted application of Scripture has encircled her.”⁹ Their antiracism resolution declared: “This convention do firmly believe that the existence of an unnatural prejudice against our colored population, … is crushing them to the earth in our nominally Free States … and … we deem it a duty for every woman to pray to be delivered from such an unholy feeling.”¹⁰ Thus in this antiracist moment women were challenging entire patterns of the social order—the rule of white over Black as well as the rule of men over women—and they did so by asserting a higher law.

Women took the lead in this campaign against racism. Antislavery men did not meet in multiracial groups; it was too dangerous. In 1838, the second time women met in a national convention that drew white and Black women together, a mob estimated at ten thousand men burned the hall where they were meeting to the ground. They escaped with their lives by walking through the mob, white women on each side of every Black woman.¹¹

The suffrage movement grew out of these social forces. The first women’s rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, was convened by women who had met each other in the antislavery movement.

Yet the women’s rights convention movement did not continue the campaign against racism that had begun in the antislavery movement. We know it did not, because we have the printed proceedings of about fifteen women’s rights conventions held between 1848 and 1869.¹²

A search of these documents reveals only a single trace of the 1837 sentiment against northern racism, a resolution discussed at the women’s rights convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, which supported “equality before the law, without distinction of sex or color.” No similar resolution appeared in any subsequent women’s rights convention in the 1850s and 1860s, and the Worcester resolution unleashed a postconvention debate in which one convention leader declared, “The convention was not called to discuss the rights of color; and we think it was altogether irrelevant and unwise to introduce the question.”¹³

Although former slave Sojourner Truth spoke at some of these women’s rights conventions, nothing like the 1837 resolution appeared after 1850. Why not?

The best answer, in my view, is that because the women’s rights conventions focused on secular, political issues, like married women’s property rights, rather than the large moral issue of slavery, they did not need to cultivate the spiritual strength that informed the antislavery women, and, lacking that strength, they took the easy route of not challenging racism. Instead, they set their sights on non-utopian goals.¹⁴

Nevertheless, other groups of women did draw on the 1837 revolutionary legacy of challenging racism. For example, Josephine Griffing led a group of women in Washington, D.C., in the 1860s, which mobilized material support for recently freed slaves. She stood up to male reformers who insisted she was creating dependency by providing clothes, schooling, employment, and food.¹⁵

The legacy of 1837 is all around us today in the coalitions that feminists built across race. That legacy offers a foundation for future presidential candidates and allows us to see coalitions that are not visible when we focus on 1869. Hillary Clinton’s ignominious missteps on race might have been avoided if she had taken to heart the brave example of 1837.

Another broader historical perspective might help future women candidates navigate another minefield in American politics—the gender question and its relationship to class. If Clinton did superbly on the woman question, and poorly on the race question, how did she fare on the gender question?

One doesn’t have to be postmodern or Maureen Dowd to question Hillary’s identity as a “woman.” Many of her supporters within the political establishment viewed her as a surrogate for Bill. But since she self-identified as a “woman,” and many of her grassroots supporters thought she represented “women,” we can take her at her word and conclude that despite her imperfect record on women’s issues, she demonstrated that a woman can stand the heat of our grueling political process and “perform” as well as any man.

In fact we can say that she “performed” especially well as a woman pretending to be a man. However, in that regard, her candidacy reminds us of the dominance of what we might call “the masculine mystique” in our political discourse.

Since at least 1964, that mystique has been aggressively asserted by the right wing of the Republican Party as part of their effort to obscure their class agenda. The “masculine mystique” has been crucial to their success in shifting wealth upward and in privatizing and impoverishing our commons. Beginning with Goldwater in 1964, and continuing more successfully with Ronald Reagan, Bush the father, and Bush the son, the masculine mystique has become a staple characteristic of American presidential campaigns. Dukakis and Kerry crucially failed masculinity tests, Dukakis with headgear in a tank, and Kerry windsurfing. Dukakis failed to appear fierce enough. And Kerry revealed his elite perspective on sports.

Hillary Clinton sustained the masculine mystique when she tried to discredit Obama as too feminine to be president. She campaigned as a woman, but she consistently made passing the masculinity test her top priority. When she entered the Senate in 2000, she sought a place on the Senate Armed Services Committee. When she supported the invasion of Iraq and refused to acknowledge the error of her judgment, she chose muscle flexing over reality testing. And when her campaign emphasized her capacities as a commander in chief who could answer the red telephone better than Obama and “obliterate” Iran, she proved her willingness to use muscle flexing as an electoral tactic.

Yet Clinton’s embrace of “the masculine mystique” and militarist priorities left her behind the new curve that Obama created when he championed antiwar opinion. And her stance made many feminists realize that they couldn’t support her just because she was a woman.

Hillary answered the “woman question” by showing that women can compete, but she failed the “race question” by choosing competition over coalition. And she failed the “gender question” by allowing the masculine mystique to distort her political agenda and obscure the class agendas of right-wing Republicans. She couldn’t make a “gender” speech equivalent to Obama’s “race” speech because she was herself playing a game of gender deception.

Thus the challenge for the next woman candidate—especially one who campaigns as a progressive—will be to demonstrate more than endurance and competence. She will need to meet the race question by drawing on the legacy of cross-race coalitions that enriches the history of women of all races in the United States. And perhaps her greatest boost to progressive agendas will be to expose the “masculine mystique” as dysfunctional and show us how to champion priorities based on human rather than macho values.

NOTES

1. An earlier version of this essay was presented at “Two Historic Candidacies,” Berkshire Conference in Women’s History, June 14, 2008, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

2. Katha Pollitt, “Iron My Skirt,” The Nation, June 5, 2008.

3. Jo Freeman, We Will Be Heard: Women’s Struggles for Political Power in the United States (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 102–3.

4. Kate Phillips, “Clinton Touts White Support,” New York Times, May 8, 2006.

5. Ellen Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999).

6. See Gaylynn Welch, “Local and National Forces Shaping the American Woman Suffrage Movement, 1870–1890” (PhD dissertation, State University of New York, Binghamton, 2008) and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Discontented Black Feminists: Prelude and Postscript to the Passage of the Nineteenth Amendment,” in Lois Scharf and Joan Jensen, eds., Decades of Discontent: The Women’s Movement, 1920–1940 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983).

7. Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters of South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition, updated and rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Taking the Long View of Election 2008
• Part I. Representations: Is Hillary Man Enough? Is Barack Black Enough? Is Michelle the New Jacqueline Kennedy?
• Part II. Historical Precedents, or How Election 2008 Began before the Civil War
• Part III. Legacies: Democracy Undermined? Feminism Redefined?
• Conclusion: The Difference that “Difference” Makes
• Historical Timeline
• Contributors
• Index