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.