Symbols

I didn't vote in the last presidential election. In 2004 I voted for Ralph Nader. I'm registered as a socialist. I'm not a Democratic and voting for them makes me feel gross.

Yet Barack Obama's election had symbolic value that, I think, can be appreciated regardless of one's politics. The event, by definition, demonstrates that an African American can cobble together a majority of the votes in a presidential election. For someone whose head is as often in the nineteenth century as the twenty-first that fact almost defies comprehension. Every time I contemplate, even momentarily, the news footage of exuberant black women celebrating the election results, or the reality of an example for young black men and boys that demonstrates their potential, I get choked up.

Was it an example for young black women and girls? Something else happened in the last presidential election the symbolic value of which I believe I failed to appreciate. Yesterday morning I heard a clip of Hillary Clinton's concession speech. She said something like, "We may not have broken the glass ceiling, but we put about 18 million cracks in it." I started to recognize how momentous her race for the nomination actually was, it's significance I suppose drowned out by the significance of Obama's candidacy. The fact that an African American and a woman were the frontrunners for the nomination of a major American political party is a culmination of tectonic changes in American culture in just a couple generations. My own failure to recognize its significance is, I think, paradoxically, a kind of progress. I grew up in a household with a single mom who has held managerial positions since I was kid, and whose income represented all of the household income. Maybe 70 to 80 percent of my bosses and supervisors have been women. In fact, I currently work at a nursing agency so everybody I work with is a woman. And I'm by far on the lowest rung of the hierarchy. The fact is, I wouldn't know sexism existed if someone didn't point it out to me.

Hillary's achievement is further shadowed by the somewhat quizzical advent of Sara Palin. My thoughts turn more to class than gender when I think of Sara Palin, but perhaps again that's the point--the fact that she's a woman...it just doesn't feel relevant to me.

My perception is what it is. The various women bosses I've had have probably experienced sexism. Some of the older male patients use words like "honey" when they talk to the nurses. It's easy enough for me to chalk it up to an innocent residual reflex, but I'm not the one it's directed at.

Primary Sources, Endnotes, Ellipses...

My research skills aren't very impressive. My emphasis for a long time has been on ascertaining as full and comprehensive an understanding of mainstream interpretations of historical events, persons, and periods as contained in books. I'd read a book, take fairly extensive notes, and write about what I'd read.

I found this by far the most effective means of mastering the material I'm interested in. But it has meant that I have not been developing research skills. Which explains why the Senda Berenson paper I wrote for class was a huge learning experience. Some things I learned:

Understand your sources. I went to the library, typed Senda Berenson into a database and printed the first ten or twelve articles. I read them, highlighted important information and wrote my paper. When I went to cite my sources I realized I couldn't figure out what half of them were. Several were apparently drawn from websites but I didn't have the URL for a proper citation. One of my sources was so poorly written--it cited a page number to book whose title it neglected to provide the reader--that I really should not have used it.
Use primary source material. I made a point to work as fast as I could because I knew getting bogged down in various details, or becoming frustrated with various aspects of the research, would easily facilitate procrastination. That's my excuse for why it didn't even occur to me to look for some primary source material.
Don't neglect the obvious. Senda Berenson was an instructor at Smith College in Amherst, Massachusetts. When I met with Professor Fischer to discuss ways of improving my paper she handed me some material she had printed off a digitized online archive of Senda Berenson's materials through the Smith College website. Never crossed my mind.

Some small things were also learned: the difference in format for a citation in an endnote versus a bibliography; when to use ellipses; when to use "ibid."

I still feel that I have huge gaps in my knowledge of history and that I need to be filling those in. And I feel that reading books and writing about what I've read is the most effective means by which to accomplish that. I do wish to develop research skills however. I feel like the paper on Senda Berenson, the first research paper I've written in years, marks the starting point in developing those skills. Hopefully in writing additional papers for the course I can reinforce the lessons learned.

At the Bottom of the Pyramid

The following is based on the prologue to Jo Freeman's We Will Be Heard: Women's Struggles for Political Power in the United States. Sara Evans' Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America is also mentioned.

The following facts or statements stood out to me:

• "...women's arrival as a factor in politics, in the 1880s and 1890s, coincided with the emergence of the social science discipline...". (1)

• "I entered grad school hoping to find out something about my predecessors. While I didn't expect to find that political science had much to say about women, I did expect to find something. I found virtually nothing." (2)

• Margaret Chase Smith (apparently a Republican) "was the first woman to actively campaign for a major party nomination for president...". (3)

• 1970 "was the takeoff point of the new feminist movement." (8)

• "It wasn't the curiosity of scholars or the availability of research data that prompted the search for political woman; it was trendiness." (8)

• Institutional support seems to have been a major facilitator of research into women's political behavior. Institutions that Freeman mentions as having contributed significant sums of money for research include the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Russell Sage Foundation. (9,10) 

Copied from the website of the Shirley Chisholm Project at Brooklyn College

• Shirley Chisholm was "the first woman to actively campaign for the Democratic nomination...". (11)

• President Hoover was "the only major party presidential candidate to be endorsed by a specifically feminist organization prior to 1984." (15)

The following facts surprised me:

• "...all of the candidates running in both major party primaries in 1968 (except Robert Kennedy) supported the ERA...". (4, Freeman's emphasis)

• The study of the political behavior of women was resisted or ignored by scholars until the 1980s. Only the field of economics was less interested in women as a focus of study. (11-12, 15) Freeman believes the different voting patterns of men and women in the election of 1980 was the catalyst of this belated acceptance of the study of female voting behavior. (15)

• "In the 1920s both major parties gave women equal representation on their national committees; in the 1940s they were given equal representation on the national convention committees." (15)

A great deal of women's progress toward equality in the US has taken place only since the 1970s. Around this time only 10% of political scientists were women. (8, 11) The study of women by political scientists only gained acceptance in the 1980s, the decade in which I was born. One of the books for this course, Born for Liberty by Sara Evans, was first published in 1989. Hers must be the first, or one of the first, comprehensive histories of American women. As she writes in the acknowledgements, "Fifteen years ago, when I began to teach women's history, the field had only a handful of books. No standard text gave women more than a few lines (usually about suffragists) and maybe an illustration or two." (Evans, xiii) It is also notable that if she was teaching women's history in 1974, Freeman's prologue would place her as among the very first to begin teaching the subject, and also to have begun doing just as a "backlash" against the topic occurred following a brief stint of "trendiness" in the early 1970s. Freeman writes: "My last academic job offer was in 1974." (8, 12-13)

Nancy Pelosi, first female Speaker of the House of Representatives. Copied from speaker.gov.

It was only in 2007, when I was 24, that Nancy Pelosi became the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives. Between 1970 and 2007 it seems women had come a very long way. In the most recent presidential election Hillary Clinton came close to winning the Democratic nomination for president and Sarah Palin was the vice presidential candidate for the Republican party. On the other hand, these are the only two women, in a crowd of a dozen or more men, who participated as candidates in presidential politics that year, and only one of them as a candidate for president.

That Palin and Clinton are so different relates to something that bothered me about the prologue. As Freeman notes, women have never voted as a bloc. (14) They are a diverse category of the population and thus womanhood is one of many other categories any individual woman might fall into. For instance, woman can also be categorized by class, and I think it is the lack of class-based discussion that bothers me. I feel an aversion to both major political parties, so a discussion about gender equality at their conventions causes something like cognitive dissonance. I like the gender equality; I dislike the institution that's practicing it.

Similarly, I think increased representation for women in scholarship--as both practitioners and subjects--is a positive development; and yet I do not feel affinity with scholars as a group. If women are treated as equals by elite males in politics and academia, those attitudes may trickle down to the rest of society and I think that would be (or has been and will continue to be) a positive occurrence. However, my interactions with these segments of society are limited. I'd be more interested in family structure among working class Americans, how it developed over time, or how it contrasts with family structures that prevail among other segments of society. More within the purview of the book, I'd be interested in gender relations within labor unions.

This isn't to say that knowledge of how gender relations have developed among the upper echelons of American society is not valuable. What happens at the top of any society has dramatic repercussions it seems. But I feel ambivalent about what I've read so far and I think it's because I'm more interested in life at the bottom of the pyramid.