Martha Nussbaum on Women in the Campaign and the Court

(This piece was originally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer on November 24. It is reposted here at the request of Professor Nussbaum, who welcomes discussion on the subject in this forum.)

Thomas Jefferson liked women - up to a point. They were fine as wives, daughters or mistresses, but they had better not try to enter the political realm.

"Were our state a pure democracy," he wrote to a friend in 1816, "there would yet be excluded from their deliberations . . . women, who, to prevent depravation of morals and ambiguity of issue, should not mix promiscuously in the public meetings of men."

Such "ideas" die hard. When I was elected as the first woman in Harvard's Society of Fellows in 1972, a prestigious classical scholar wrote to me that he didn't know what to call a female fellow. Perhaps the ancient Greek language could solve the problem, he suggested. Since hetairos is Greek for fellow, they could just call me hetaira.

As he and I knew well, however, hetaira was also the Greek word for high-class prostitute.

Such "jokes" reinforced the old Jeffersonian stereotype: Women are frivolous, distracting beings, all about sexuality, so they'd better not go near those important public gatherings.

For many women, this past election promised the end of exclusion from the nation's highest offices. Thrilled by the prospect of a woman in the White House, they were all the more disappointed when those old stereotypes kept surfacing throughout the campaign.

Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin endured a level of scrutiny of their appearance and behavior that is not applied to male candidates. Was Hillary too angry? Not tough enough? Is Palin a soccer mom? A sex object?

Sure, we did hear about Barack Obama's upscale suits and Biden's temper, but not to the same extent - and not with the same tacit demand to prove that their biology should not bar them from the "public meetings of men."

Actually, though, this election marked a victory for women's interests. Obama has done well among women ever since Iowa, where more of them voted for him than for Clinton. Predictions of massive defections of women after Clinton's defeat and Palin's nomination proved unfounded. It was, after all, a silly notion: Women are adults who care about many things - the economy, the war - and are capable of making an intelligent choice based on issues.

Especially on issues of particular concern to women, there were strong reasons to choose Obama and Biden, including their positions on health care, abortion rights, and particularly domestic violence, which remains a national scourge.

On the one side, women had Joe Biden, one of the real feminist pioneers of American politics and the chief author of the Violence Against Women Act; and Obama, whose commitment to women's equality, though less-documented, seems entirely convincing. On the other, they had McCain, with his old-fashioned insensitivity to women's problems; and Palin, with her mean-spirited policy of not paying for post-rape medical examinations in Wasilla, which no doubt deterred countless women from reporting the crime.

But if women's issues are paramount, what about their presence? Jefferson thought that nice men could represent women, too - an ugly, patronizing idea. Presence, though less important than the issues, still counts for a lot.

The presence of women in high office breaks old stereotypes. It establishes models of achievement. And it ensures that people with firsthand experience of women's issues, such as domestic violence and sexual harassment, will be involved in public policy.

So, even though women were wise to focus on the issues, they should still demand the appointments of women to key positions.

The contributions of women are especially important on the Supreme Court. If women are represented inadequately there, it sends a signal that they are less deliberative than men - less capable of the weightiest sort of reflection.

After the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg commented that, with two women on the court, the symbolic message was: "Here are two women. They don't look alike. They don't always vote alike. But here are two women." She worried that a lone female justice looks like a "one-at-a-time curiosity, not the normal thing."

Beyond the symbolism, Ginsburg often touches on women's experience in her opinions. She shows that key legal concepts, such as the equal protection of the laws, require us to think substantively about women's lives and the obstacles that stand between them and full equality.

So Obama needs to appoint top women to his administration. And he needs to heed Ginsburg's advice, ensuring that there will be more than one woman on the Supreme Court. Given the likelihood that Ginsburg's own retirement will create one of the first two vacancies, this means his first two appointments probably should be women who understand women's issues. One of them should be Judge Diane Wood of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, who is respected by both right and left for her superb technical competence and legendary work ethic.

Women have won a lot on the issues. Now we need to keep up the pressure for presence.

Comments

[Thom Brooks]

I could not agree more with you. Thankfully, the initial signs are rather positive that Obama will have a number of women in key positions. Let us hope he follows your good advice, not least on Judge Wood!

[Kimball Corson]

Women themselves often invite some distinctions Jefferson suggested. While Keary may have spent a few hundred on his barber, while pushing the male envelope, Palin blew more than $150k on her appearance. We can better believe the positions presented here when women themselves come to believe them, not only in word, but in deed as well.

[Uzair Kayani]

Inglehart and Norris have an interesting (though dated) paper on the gender gap in voting across democracies, 21 International Poli Sci Rev 441 (2000).

They note that in developing democracies women vote more conservatively than men, while in post-industrialist democracies, women vote more liberally.

Assuming that developing democracies are more conservative than developed ones, women are more conservative in conservative democracies and more liberal in liberal democracies. I would have thought that they would be uniformly left-leaning.

Women's historical tendency to vote conservative is called the "traditional gender gap," while their recent tendency to vote liberal is termed the "modern gender gap." The traditional gap still prevails in post-communist countries and some other developing countries, like India, Mexico, and Turkey. Meanwhile, the modern gap shows up in Japan, Ireland, Denmark, and increasingly, the US.

Umm, I don't understand gender at all, though.

[Uzair Kayani]

Hypothesis for the gender gap: young women are likelier to vote than young men; old men are likelier to vote than old women. I'm sure someone has tested this.

On an unrelated note: I generally agree with the little feminist thought that I've read, but I do worry that it tends to be more aspirational or abstract (on average), and even moralizing, than literature as a whole. It just happens to be the case that I agree with feminist views, but I'm not sure they are particularly flexible. That might mean that women are likely to shut out dissent. But we are probably centuries away from that eventuality.

[Uzair Kayani]

I think this "women invited X" talk is wrong-headed. This is a misogynistic culture. Men have spent many centuries destroying any independent notion of female identity.

It is a mistake to think that women have the freedom to act that men do. It is too convenient how things turn out in the usual account: women being exactly what most men want; wanting exactly what men want them to; avoiding what men want them to avoid; and "inviting" what men would have them invite. This is an unacknowledged system of slavery. Suddenly it turns out that women invite invasions of privacy, slander, gossip, and even aggression: "You asked for this; this is what you want." Except that they really don't. They are pinioned from the start.

It is a vicious cycle: men expect how women ought to be, then they meet that expectation, and then men pat themselves on the back, because they've figured women out.

This has never been a level playing field.

[Kimball Corson]

Extending my position stated above, the rare woman who, by word and deed belies the Jeffersonian position in all regards, is fully entitled to all the protections conventional feminist thought would afford her. They are analogous to the blacks who you never really notice or care are black. But there is a problem, for it is a truly rare woman who does want to have it both ways at one time or another.

[LAK]

Perhaps, Professor Nussbaum, this is the time where you fully embrace your Aristotelian roots and leave the world of privatized social welfare and human rights, leave the Academy and the NGOs and get yourself a political appointment with the U.S. Government. Lord knows we need someone advocating on behalf of the United States government for basic human rights and fundamental human capabilities that go stunted under the many oppressive political regimes and cultures around the globe. There is a lot of work to do in the name of right and wrong around the globe given that our government was very wrong when it came to what is right over the last 8 years.

Uzair, like ethical and political thought in general, feminist thought is incredibly diverse and often conflicting. You can't really lump it all together because accounts for what gender and sex are and should be are vary widely. There are theorists who argue (poorly) that not just gender but sex itself is a completely contingent social creation and the best women can do is privately resist and subvert those norms with parody and performance. There are feminists who argue that women are fundamentally different, not just in biology but in the way they feel and reason ethically and that for society to change meaningfully, women need more that mere access to and superficial equality in the social and economic institutions of which they have been historically deprived. There are radical feminist thinkers who wait for the time when technology makes men obsolete and expendable. And there are humanist feminist thinkers who think men and women both stand to benefit from women's equality and less destructive gender norms. The meaning of equality in an unequal world is a very complex issue, and feminist thought is accordingly complex and varied.