Shame on You Pew Trust
Dear Linda:
re: Washington Post Article
[personal email address deleted]
As a financial analyst working in the investment business, I read parts of The Wall Street Journal, NYT, Washington Post and my local paper every day. And while I understand that this is not exactly usual, I am exceedingly disappointed at the profiles of the women voters you wrote of today and offended at the thought of women getting their news through their husbands. Are we really still so unsophisticated (although I’m sure they know all the wardrobes of the stars in People), or is this just a sample of women who do not work and stay at home? I cannot believe these stereotypes……you may have actually done many of us a grave disservice to suggest they are the norm. Why don’t you write about the women who don’t stay at home and their thinking and reading processes? I am watching Hillary carefully, and I think she has proven herself an excellent senator, very knowledgeable on the issues, a good mother, an unfathomable wife, and an exciting candidate. I don’t think the premise that women will elect her holds a drop of water. I think it totally depends on the general populace and how her positions on the war, health care, immigration, taxes etc., and her personal charisma resonate with them. She drew from a wide constituency when she ran for Senate, and as an Upstate New Yorker by birth, she ran surprisingly well in a part of New York that doesn’t normally embrace NYC liberals, much less liberal women. I have no idea at this point if Hillary will be my choice for President. But I can damn sure sort out the issues and come to an opinion myself.
Shame on you for making that article so one-sided.
Stephanie Haggerty
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A Little from Linda:
Dear Ms. Haggerty:
And shame on the political scientists and statisticians from The Center for Civic Education, the University of Michigan, the Pew Trusts, and Columbia University for their deeply researched, statistically validated studies of women's relative lack of political knowledge, lack of political interest, and unwillingness to read or watch violent or text-based material about political affairs. (Or did you not read my article in the Washington Post to the end?) I fear these scholars and experts have done you a disservice by researching the issue and then publishing their findings in books from the Yale University Press and papers presented, for example, to the American Political Science Association as recently as last year. I'm not sure what I added to the disservice -- publishing their findings? Are you suggesting that the work should be censored, since not a single study turned up the opposite conclusions?
Although your autobiographical information is reassuring on the subject of your capacity for politics, I doubt you would base your professional career as an investment advisor on looking in the mirror rather than facing the actual data scientifically gathered and reported by experts over a decade. You may be right that Hillary Clinton's campaign will not rest, as her advisors Carville and Penn assert, on women's decision-making. But your tactic of offering your personal story and seeming ignorance of 50% of my argument does not immediately strike me as effective advocacy for your point of view.
L.
ps
Please don't write to tell me you don't like my tone of voice. That is, to paraphrase Rebecca West, what everyone always says when I say something to distinguish myself from a door mat, and would sit ill in the mouth of someone who writes to tell me there's "shame" on me.