Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/062292/0622640.000

Text File | 1992-09-22 | 6KB | 122 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 82

Why Women Finally Are Winning


By Barbara Ehrenreich


    This has been declared the "Year of the Woman," the
others having for millenniums belonged to the men. From
Geraldine Ferraro in the East to Dianne Feinstein in the West,
with plenty more in between, female candidates are challenging
the principle that it takes a real manto bounce checks and
deliver monologues on C-SPAN. Some observers are already
heralding the feminist revolution in which, after centuries of
producing the babies that male politicians are required to kiss
and attempting to humanize such characters as George Bush and
Michael Dukakis, women will finally seize power for themselves.
But the optimists are forgetting what might be called Murphy's
Law of feminist struggle -- if the very word Murphy hadn't
become so politically charged in the past few weeks -- which
goes like this: When women get to take over some field of human
endeavor, it is usually because that field has been downgraded
to the level of broom pushing.

    Clerical work is the classic example -- a once prestigious
occupation for males that was rendered female and unremunerative
in one fell swoop roughly 70 years ago. Even child rearing may
be a case in point. The courts started favoring mothers in
child-custody suits soon after the turn of the century, which
was about the time child labor was outlawed. Women got to keep
the kids, in other words, just as they ceased to be moneymakers
and became the tiny parasites clamoring for Nintendo that we
know so well today.

    The same principle applies to religion: by the time women
climbed into the pulpit, the real action in the religion
business had shifted to televangelists in their TV studios. Or
the military: just as women finally got to participate in
combat-like roles, the old heroic concept of war was replaced
by televised fireworks and the mass bulldozing of enemy
infantry.

    The list goes on. Women poured into the legal profession
only to find that Dan Quayle, Esq., had got there ahead of
them, and was campaigning for Malthusian measures to shrink the
profession. Or they elbowed their way into male-only clubs --
where they found the huge leather armchairs empty and the air
strangely clear of cigar smoke. The men had already run off to
the woods, half naked, to pound on drums with Robert Bly.

    Most analysts hesitate, of course, to attribute the Year
of the Woman to the mounting worthlessness of political
endeavor. More commonly, they point to the restiveness of the
female electorate, for which we can thank those great feminist
organizers -- Clarence Thomas and William Kennedy Smith. We all
recall the Hill-Thomas hearings and the ineradicable image of
14 white men forcing one petite black woman to recount
porn-movie plots over and over while they endeavored to keep
from licking their lips.

    The Year of the Woman is long overdue, the optimists would
argue, pointing to the curious fact that America, with the
largest and most entrenched women's movement on the planet, has
also had proportionately fewer female legislators than almost
any other Western nation. No one knows exactly why, though many
plausible reasons have been advanced. There is the
understandable reluctance on the part of many women to venture
into a building already occupied by Jesse Helms or Bob Dornan,
a building that was designed, for all we know, without a single
ladies' room in the floor plan. Plus there has been the chilling
effect of male politicos like former Republican Party chairman
Clayton Yeutter, who reportedly addressed a high-powered donor
as "little lady" and inquired as to whom she "belonged to" --
thus sending a generation of Republican women out to join
militantly separatist rural communes.

    But the real reason women may finally be let into the
political process is that the men are moving on to better
things. Politics has become too loathsome, degrading and of
course devoid of any discernible impact on the world. As William
Greider explains in his new book, Who Will Tell the People, the
actual function of our elected representatives is to serve as
lunch companions for the hordes of corporate lobbyists who would
otherwise be lonesome and pitiably hungry. Leadership has long
since passed out of the political sphere, which is why, in times
of crisis and civil disorder, we turn not to our President but
to the notoriously lite-minded Arsenio Hall.

    Hence the mass exodus of male politicians just as the
women come tearing in. Male incumbents in Congress -- 51 at last
count -- are fleeing as fast as they can, searching for
meaningful work. Sorry, Ross Perot is only further evidence of
the ongoing political decline: our first generic candidacy --
no party, no platform, no issues -- just the first guy to come
along with the incontrovertible means to buy his own lunch.

    There is always the possibility that women will get in and
somehow transform politics, making it meaningful again,
restoring antique notions like "democracy" and "representation."
A study from Rutgers University claims that female officeholders
have already shown a radical tendency to recall who their
constituents are and even bear them in mind during the framing
of legislation. Plus there is reason to hope that no elected
woman will ever feel obliged to prove her "manhood" by calling
out the troops.

    So a woman is well worth a vote. And if the Year of the
Woman is a flop, if politics continues to decline, finally
reaching the point where even women, as a class, don't want it,
then we will have only one place to turn: to the people who
already perform all those tasks -- like busing tables and sewing
garments in sweatshops -- that native-born Americans disdain.
It will be the Year, sooner or later, of the Undocumented
Immigrant from south of the border.