Though Obama is so ready to talk
about “responsible fatherhood” on the stump, the video doesn't contain a single
word about breeding this “guilt gene” into the male of the species. Instead,
the video serves up a primer on “difference feminism,” which holds that women
deserve to be involved in politics less because they are inherently equal to
men than because they’re different--more nurturing, less warlike, and more
intuitive, in the ways mothers are supposed to be.
“Women will often prioritize
issues differently,” says Illinois Representative Jan Schakowsky in the video.
Schakowsky, who has endorsed Obama, represents Chicago’s affluent suburbs--neighborhoods
filled with the type of women the campaign needs to reach. Call it the Whole Foods
vote: the half of all college-educated Democratic women, most of them liberal
and upper-middle-class, who are skeptical of Hillary Clinton, in large part due
to her late arrival on the antiwar bandwagon.
“Women are interested in not
sending their children of to war,” Schakowsky continues in the video. “Not that
men aren’t. But I think [women] are more likely to look at personal
consequences of what war is all about.”
But the truth is that retailing
in stereotypes of femininity has never been a very successful way for women to
get their voices heard in politics. In the run-up to World War I, a delegation
of roving (self-appointed) lady ambassadors traveled the Western nations to
implore world leaders, for the sake of mothers, not to send the boys to war. We
know how that turned out. The most modern of the American suffragists, such as
Alice Paul, understood this--that’s why they built their demands on human and
civil rights, not women’s role as mothers, a position men in politics neither wanted
nor respected.
As the Hillary Clinton campaign gathered steam over the past
year, feminists, often in spite of past misgivings about the candidate, were
excited by what seemed to be a unequivocal message that women’s political
leadership--not motherhood, or peace rallies, or high-profile female surrogates
like Oprah--could change women’s lives. Feminist messaging of a particular,
second-wave vintage became a defining characteristic of the Clinton primary campaign. “Make history with
Hillary!” was one early slogan. At her alma mater, Wellesley
College, Clinton told students her election would help
American women “shatter that highest glass ceiling” of what she called the
“boys club of presidential politics.” The theme was not feminine difference,
but gender equality, as represented by the symbol of one woman reaching the
highest heights of power.