The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Rachael, Melinda,

 

1. I agree that Hillary would have a hard time getting away with the speech I want her to make. As Rachael says, abortion and workplace policies and matters of that ilk remain white-hot and divisive among women, not to mention in the general population. It is hard to wrap one's mind around  a speech that bluntly addresses these issues and is uplifting and unifying to boot. Nonetheless, these are (I believe) the fundamental issues: control over one's body and workplace policies that level the playing field for women, despite women's child-bearing and mothering functions. They seem essential if we're to achieve a truly egalitarian society. (Yes, I still think we should seek an egalitarian society, even though I also think that it's unlikely, for biological and possibly linked social reasons, that women will ever be able or even willing to give up certain primary caregiving functions. The job of feminism today, as I see it, is to create a world in which we get to remain members of society in equal standing while raising our children in a serious, loving, attentive way. In this possibly idiosyncratic sense of the term, then, feminism isn't just for women anymore. It's for fathers as well as mothers. Maybe it isn't even feminism any more.)

 

As for the presidential race: It also seems evident that a woman seeking higher office faces obstacles that a man does not face, no matter what the color of her skin. Check out Mike Kinsley's hilarious piece on the time-cost to a female candidate to meeting female standards of presentableness—roughly two-and-a-half weeks more spent primping during the average campaign cycle. Women operate under countless other double standards. You know which ones: They sound  "overemotional" or they seem "calculating"; they're too sexy or not sexy enough; they made choices in the "Mommy Wars" that half of all American women disagree with, or else lack children and thus are't people American women can identify with. I don't see Obama taking any heat for having left the child-rearing to his wife. I wonder how a woman running for office would play to the public if she had left the child-rearing almost entirely to her husband.

 

In short, it seems as if we have arrived at something of a consensus, albeit a very rough one, about what racism is and why it's bad, whereas we still disagree about what sexism is and so don't agree on what's bad about it. That's why it's hard to imagine that speech.

 

2. Even though I see that it's hard to imagine, I don't think it is nearly as impossible to make as we think. The miracle of Obama's speech was that he made a number of thoughts that have long been unthinkable in America sound reasonable, even obvious--the notion that white America is suffused with casual racism; the idea that we need not demonize a man who says unacceptable things but does good in other ways. And so on. I put my list out there in a bald, unadorned way. Emily suggested a way to wrap it up more elegantly. The speech would try to re-imagine family values. There might be other ways to give it. I'll admit that neither Kerry nor Clinton has found a way to do so. That doesn't mean that Obama couldn't, if he so chose; or that a female politician with similar levels of eloquence and courage wouldn't be able to put it across.