Coakley criticism proves stereotypes still hurt female candidates
When will you female candidates learn? You can’t be too emotional, that makes you seem weak. But don’t be too cold, that makes you an Ice Queen. Definitely don’t focus on your gender, but don’t ignore it either.
Talk about your family and kids, but not too much, because a busy candidate can’t be a good mother. If you don’t have kids, you’d better be extra warm and fuzzy.
So how can you act, you ask? That question remains unanswered. Why? Because our society has developed so many extreme stereotypes for women that we no longer know how to respond. We don’t know what’s safe.
As a result, female candidates end up trying to traverse the icy trail of double standards, attempting to choose between one extreme over the other, floundering around in the middle, or just trying to be themselves.
Hillary Clinton has always been a strong leader who doesn’t take any crap. But it wasn’t her experience or vision that won over some voters, it was the fact that she cried on television. (”Oh good, she does have emotions, I had no idea”). Would voters ever need to see a male candidate cry to earn their support? Of course not. But apparently Clinton had acted too removed, too hard, too much like…a man for people’s taste.
But if Clinton had come out of the gate overflowing with emotion about women and her campaign, she would have been blasted for being a sappy female.
Meanwhile, Martha Coakley has repeatedly been called “icy” and is now criticized for not emphasizing the historic nature of her campaign. But should a female candidate dare express that her gender is indeed one of her many qualifications, the response I always hear is, “I won’t vote for a woman just because she’s a woman.”
It seems women just can’t win. And believe me, it’s not just women pointing this out (nor are women excluded from judging based on stereotypes). To POLITICO, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) recounted that despite her overwhelming win in Massachusetts, Hillary Clinton still faced sexism from voters there.
McGovern also brought up how a local paper concluded that Coakley’s new hair and makeup style were to blame for the race tightening:
“They wouldn’t write this about a man,” McGovern said. “I still think we have a long way to go to make this an equal playing field.”
James Carroll of The Daily Beast describes Massachusetts’ rich and long history of misogyny toward female candidates:
“The short of it is that the most liberal state in the nation … practices the politics of misogyny. When it comes to positions of real power, no women need apply. Martha Coakley was croaked by an electorate that could not get past her gender.”
Martha Coakley’s loss in the special election for the Massachusetts Senate seat leaves many of us angry that the “progressive” state of Massachusetts continues to squeeze out women. It also leaves us frightened about the future of women’s reproductive rights in the health care bill.
Without Coakley, preventing attacks on choice in health care reform looks bleak. And if Massachusetts serves as a thermometer for the way our country is viewing female candidates, we’re in big trouble.
It’s 2010, folks—when will the double standards stop?
Tags: double standard, female candidate, gender in politics, health care reform, Hillary Clinton, loss, martha coakley, massachusetts senate, misogyny, sexism, special election
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 1:23 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 20th, 2010 at 1:55 pm
Being a woman never helps, but Coakley was the wrong candidate for the time and climate. Brown went after the angry, the fearful and uninformed and that’s how he beat her.
In the U.S. there will always be sexism to overcome. People are so sexist down there that they don’t even realize it, but the Dems bear responsibility for not fielding the best candidate they could find and for making assumptions about the voters they shouldn’t have.
January 20th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
Having been deeply involved in this race, on one hand I saw less “overt” sexism than ever before. The vast majority of the grenades being lobbed back and forth were issues-oriented and attacks (warranted or not) on her professional track record. They weren’t on her personal life choices or her looks. In fact from within her own party, she was being criticized for not being more like Ted Kennedy. I would say on one level she was being judged by more equal standards than any of the female candidates who preceded her in Massachusetts.
This was because in some sense she was the perfect female candidate. She didn’t have kids, she was married to a low-key guy who was behind the scenes and non-controversial; she was attractive enough without being too attractive; and she was an AG who took on Wall Street so her “toughness” was not an issue. All things that a male candidate would rarely have to consider.
On the other hand, here was a tough prosecutor being told to “soften up”. Would we tell a male candidate to “soften up?” So, basically, even if you set aside her blunders (which every candidate has) she might not have been able to win.
Why? Because we can’t gauge the effect of the subtleties and double standards that exist — and they were rampant in this race. Surely if she had been the one to pose as a centerfold, the campaign would have been DOA. And, the horrible attitudes about women by Brown/Brown supporters may have fueled some deep-rooted anti-woman bias (see my post on that: http://blog.downtownwomensclub.com/2010/01/violence-against-women-is-never-funny.html).
I hope she handles the defeat with class because she did help make another crack in the political glass ceiling. I think many people view the failed campaign as due to health care, personal foibles and a poorly run campaign, not to her being a woman. While I didn’t agree with the some of the campaign’s major decisions, if just one woman who has been sitting on the sidelines says “I could’ve done better and damn it, I’m going to,” Martha has done us all a huge favor. The bias and double standards will not fall away until we have more women running for office.
January 21st, 2010 at 6:30 pm
It always amazes me how willing Democrats are to cannibalize their own during times of stress. Massachusetts has been an exceptionally liberal state since…oh, I don’t know, when did Paul Revere ride? Yet, the minute they lose an election they decide that it must have been something nefarious, like sexism! Isn’t more likely that we just witnessed the state of Massachusetts simply even the scales of our Republic, instead of some scheme working in concert to keep women down?
Perhaps the Democrats should look inward (Clinton isn’t President today because the Democrats didn’t vote her forward in the primaries) and a little further South (cough, cough, Spector D-PA just this week lambasting Bachmann R-MN for not acting like a “lady”) instead of trying to pin the scarlet letter of sexism on one of the most liberal states in America.
January 22nd, 2010 at 12:53 am
No doubt sexism hurt Martha Coakley, but is it not possible this election was a reflection of the attitude of voters toward the performance of President Obama and his party? The approval rating of the President is fast approaching that of Sarah Palin, as she rises in the polls and he falls. Democrats have felt at liberty to trample the hopes of their base, not to mention feminists. They deserved to lose this election, and it is not the first special election since Obama took office in which Republicans pulled off an upset. Unless Obama can turn things around in a hurry, his party is a sinking ship. It is unfortunate Martha Coakley had to take the brunt of dissatisfaction with Democratic policies. She is not blaming her loss on sexism, and I do not believe for a minute she was the wrong candidate for the time and climate. Her Democratic colleagues created this time and climate, as her campaign tried to point out (http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0110/Coakley_adviser_memo_DC_Dems_faled_Coakley.html?showall), only to be accused of spreading a pack of lies. The electorate of Massachusetts, being particularly liberal, might be expected to be especially disillusioned with the shenanigans surrounding this toothless health reform bill, and the escalation of the war on terror, which both put Coakley in an awkward position.
January 22nd, 2010 at 9:52 am
[...] Talk about your family and kids, but not too much, because a busy candidate can’t be a good mother. If you don’t have kids, you’d better be extra warm and fuzzy. This rest of this article by Lauren can be read on the Women and Politics site at http://womenandpolitics.org/archives/coakley-criticism-stereotypes-hurt-female-candidates/1878 [...]
February 2nd, 2010 at 5:45 pm
[...] recent narrow defeat of the Stupak-Pitts amendment and Martha Coakley’s loss in the Massachusetts special election, there is no better time than now for women to become [...]
February 4th, 2010 at 5:38 am
If Coakley had run even a passably competent campaign, one could begin to take seriously your argument that she was done in by sexism. But sometimes, even in Massachusetts, women actually rise and fall on their own merits — or lack thereof.
February 5th, 2010 at 2:26 am
Sometimes, even in Massachusetts, voters get so disgusted with the Democratic Party that they vote in a Republican as a protest. It may not make any sense, on the merits, but this was the third high-profile special election in a row Democrats have lost, and there are good reasons for voters to protest what Democrats have and have not done with their mandate.
February 10th, 2010 at 3:39 pm
[...] organization was able to sponsor and air 4 ads during the Super Bowl. With the recent defeat of Martha Coakley and the confirmation of Scott Brown to the Massachusetts Senate, it seems women’s reproductive [...]