She's Baaaack
OK, so I have been a little MIA lately. I have not been baking cookies, as many of you suspected, however. I am working on a project, which I hope will become a book, on American women as citizens and voters. I have been wondering whether the intense privatization and moral relativism I found in the stay at home moms would affect their political behavior as well.
Events conspired to make my obscure academic interest very relevant, of course, when Senator Hillary Clinton declared her candidacy for President. Her advisors, James Carville and Mark Penn, had been quite vocal asserting that her eventual electoral victory would rest heavily on the disproportionate support of female citizens. Since I had a computer full of research on women's political behavior, I indulged in some speculation on how some women would react to the reality of a serious female candidate. The article, "You've Come A Long Way, Maybe," appeared in the Washington Post, on the web Saturday and in print on Sunday.
If you read it you will see that I used a handful of conversations with DC area SAHM's to give a little color to the extensive political science data I had gathered. Although it is interesting that the women I interviewed turned out to look just like the studies said they would, the article then continued to tell the reader that the statistical data reflects that women are not as interested in politics as men are, do not know as much about politics as men do, and do not read or listen to the media where political information is dispensed as much as men do. The Center for Civic Education says so, the University of Michigan says so, the Pew Trusts say so and every study by reputable political scientists since Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter's pathbreaking book from Yale, "What Americans Know and Why It Matters," came out in 1997, have said so.
ASU political scientist Carol Mueller had concluded years ago that this ignorance and lack of interest would lead to volatile, emotional and impulsive behavior in the polling booth. Accordingly, I speculated that a successful Clinton campaign would have to be shaped to the reality of female political behavior, including equal parts of deploying a very privatized and domestic persona and making sure that the Mighty Republican Wurlitzer machine did not turn her into the person no one wanted to sit with in the cafeteria.
Ink still wet, careless readers from across the country assaulted me for making predictions based on a handful of conversations with Maryland Mommies. Apparently most readers, male and female, are incapable of taking in information that comes in any form other than reported conversation even when the studies cited appear in the same article or even on the same page as the dialogue. The wealth of research might never have appeared.
Worse, the most poisonous of the criticism about relying on anecdote came from another academic, one Ann Althouse, who opens her eponymous blog, each time by telling everyone that conservative critic Terry Teachout thinks she's "divine." (Maybe divinity strips you of the capacity to read the full text of a 2000 word article, but it's not a characteristic I anticipate from people making a living from the learning trades.) Here's Althouse's take on my article: 'Women don't decide elections because they're not rational political actors... [T]hey vote on impulse, and on elusive factors such as personality.' Linda Hirshman editorializes in the Washington Post. She interviewed some woman about Hillary Clinton . . . " True enough, but nowhere in any of the rest of the post does she so much as mention any of the above described research, which makes up at least half of the article that got her so upset (she implies that I advocate repealing the Nineteenth Amendment). In a pile on on bloggingheads.tv.com,Althouse and Mark Schmitt, a lifelong policy wonk and political intellectual, who should know better than to read just half an article, can be seen cackling away about how DC area voters won't decide the election anyway. No kidding? Really? And here I thought the five people I talked to WERE the missing Florida votes from 2000.
Well, Althouse and Schmitt have a high old time, howling over how anyone could be stupid or misogynistic enough to think that a campaign to voters who don't learn or care about policy disputes would look different than a campaign to the millions of males immersed in copies of Newsweek and Time. The absolutely weirdest part of the entire performance art was Schmitt, who works for the New America Foundation and writes about nothing but politics all of the time and has written about politics all of his adult life, nodding mindlessly while Althouse asserted that it's too early for any sane person to get interested in the election of 2008. Maybe goddesses have some hypnotic effect on policy wonks that has gone unnoticed until this time. One blog of Venus?
Meanwhile, of course, HRC is doing EXACTLY what I said she had to do -- campaigning as a mom and warning her opponents that if they tried to demonize her like they did to John Kerry, she'd "deck 'em." Not forty-eight hours after I predicted that development in the Washington Post, the New York Times caught up with Robin Toner's Political Memo, "Women Feeling Freer to Suggest Vote for Mom.".
I'm sorry that Ann Althouse -- and all the other wishful thinkers on the blogosphere who believe that women act just like men in the political arena -- don't like the message or think it's a betrayal of feminism to report the data. I continue to believe that drugging ourselves with empty talk of gender gaps is no substitute for hard political research and analysis. And I guess Hillary thinks so, too.