Gillibrand roared but did not win numbers too big to ignore
One of the ways I’ve learned to make learning engaging for college students over the years is to connect course content to popular culture. When I start each women’s studies class, for example, I like to play a song that in some way illustrates what it means to be a woman.
For most of my millennial students, Helen Reddy’s “I am Woman” from 1971 is a song they have never heard before. It helps to follow it up with something they’ve likely heard, such as Taylor Swift’s “The Man.”
Reddy’s opti- mistic celebration: “I am woman, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore” is tempered with the Berks County native’s inquisitive lament: “I’m so sick of running as fast as I can. Wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man?” Then I transition into the course material, and when discussing the 2020 presidential race, these two songs fit right in.
Both lyrics offer a glimpse into the 2020 presidential race and the five women who are still in the race. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the most rhetorically feministic of all the women running, dropped out Aug 28. Though hardly enough of a sample to know for sure, it hints that “running as a woman — for women” is not enough and can even turn off voters.
Gillibrand’s “Off The Sidelines,” a call-to-action book in the spirit of Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In,” encourages women to make their voices heard on the issues they care about and to take on greater responsibilities in life. The election of Donald Trump and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings seemed to be custom made for a candidate like Gillibrand
— a woman with political experience and the record to back up the message: It is time to elect a woman to the White House.
In her speeches, Sen. Gillibrand often evokes the image of her mother, a black belt and lawyer, and her New York political king-maker grandmother. Her mother, who was one of only three women in her law school graduating class, took her criminal law exam two days after she gave birth to her older brother Douglas, and a year and a half later, she stood for her New York character bar exam three days before Kirsten was born. As for her maternal grandmother Polly, a founder of the Albany Democratic Women’s Club, apparently nobody became anyone in Albany politics without gaining her good graces.
And yet, my own research on women and elected office shows that female candidates are not successful when they take a feminist stance as their main message. For one, gender alone is hardly a reason for anything. “I am Woman” and “The Man” may get people humming in their car or up on the dance floor, but they won’t get them to the polls.
In a poll I conducted of more than 500 college women, 88% of the students reported that gender alone would not be enough to motivate them to vote for a female candidate. Of course, Sen. Gillibrand did not ask voters to vote for her simply because she is a woman. She kicked off her campaign in front of Trump Tower declaring, “Our president is a coward.”
She also used the slogan “Brave Wins,” which implied that it is brave for women — or at least for her — to run for president. She called for Minnesota Democrat Al Franken to leave the Senate in 2017 after he was accused of inappropriately touching women, and complained to the press that regularly being asked about her decision smacks of sexism.
Gillibrand centered her campaign on equality, especially for women, and shared her plans on reproductive rights, paid family leave and a broader plan she called her “family bill of rights.”
What polling and other research shows is that women who are aspiring to the presidency must remember that their gendered struggle resonates with only part of their audience.
When I look into my classrooms and see more women than men, I see women who have not experienced the same kind of gendered struggles than older voters know from their experiences.