Sorting out feminism and politics
Two new books look at issues and offer explanations for what happened in 2016
Writing in 1960, Robertson Davies described Canada as America’s attic. The people downstairs have since given us plenty to talk about — but our wonderment has reached new heights since the 2016 presidential election.
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s What Happenedoffers a compelling guide to the perplexed. Like the start of her 2003 memoir that chronicles girlhood in Chicago’s postwar suburbs, the initial pages of this book unfold behind the scenes at Donald Trump’s inauguration. Even George W. Bush seems far from enamoured with the new chief executive.
What Happened recounts not just electoral loss but also what Clinton sees as profound threats to American democracy: An FBI director who mixes innuendo and investigation, Russian oligarchs determined to stop her ascent and news organizations with a distorted sense of journalistic balance figure prominently. Yet Clinton remains confident about her own future as an active citizen and the resilience of her country, noting that she refuses to disappear following a campaign that didn’t turn out as the more than 65 million Americans who supported her in 2016 wanted. Or as the upstairs neighbours expected.
Clinton recognizes her image as cold and out-of-touch. She writes about how she’s taken time to heal herself and assess the campaign; she discusses the benefits of doing yoga, hugging her grandkids, eating ice cream and walking in the woods. Her close relationships with husband Bill, daughter Chelsea and her late mother are front and centre, offering a sense for those who didn’t read through the reams of emails leaked during the campaign that she is a caring human being. Not that male leaders need to be warm and fuzzy — witness Trump, Putin and others.
Turning to “those damn emails,” as she titles one chapter, Clinton focuses on statements by FBI director James Comey combined with news stories that falsely equated her use of a private email server with Trump’s far more egregious errors.
The book cites media analysts at Harvard and elsewhere who track media coverage of allegations re Trump’s ties with Russia vs. her email server decision.
The decision by Republican strategists to emphasize a potential but unproven security breach by Clinton is consistent with research showing female candidates in the U.S. are seen as less able than males to defend national interests. (For example, my own research shows that when Geraldine Ferraro became the first female vice-presidential candidate for a major party in 1984, her readiness to deal with Soviet threats was frequently questioned. The Democrats lost that race by a landslide.)
For readers who ask why Clinton wasn’t more assertive, the book shows she paid a price for being as outspoken as she was.
In Michigan, for instance, her insistence on water quality in Flint (which primarily affected African Americans) was far from helpful in white areas. Her support for gun control and reproductive rights, which featured far less in Bernie Sanders’ legislative record, drew the ire of traditionalists.
Even though Clinton’s economic policies would have better served white working-class voters, Trump’s anger-laced trope of racial division and cultural nostalgia gained more traction.
Throughout the book one thing becomes clear: it’s hard to see how Clinton or, for that matter, any Democratic woman could have won the Electoral College in 2016.
The party had already held the presidency for two consecutive terms under a black president. For people seeking a return to the past, change hardly meant more diversity in the Oval Office.
Even worse, Clinton recounts, lots of young women tell her after the election that they hadn’t bothered to vote. Lauren McKeon’s book, The FBomb, reports 53 per cent of white women who did participate cast their ballots for Trump. She describes in lively detail how antiequality interests continue to mobilize on campus and via the internet, using social media to spread their message.
ACanadian journalist of the millennial generation, McKeon suggests today’s anti-feminists are not necessarily more influential than their predecessors who opposed legal reforms in the1970s, or suffrage in1915.
Even as new players beat the drum for old arguments, few women in Canada or the U.S. can afford to cast aside paid employment. This is particularly true for immigrants, ethnocultural minorities and sexual minorities.
Moreover, as McKeon notes, more than three-quarters of Americans oppose the view that women should return to traditional roles.
Yet November 2016 really happened. Thankfully, we have two engaging books to make sense of that puzzling outcome. Sylvia Bashevkin is the author of Women as Foreign Policy Leaders, forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press. She is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto.