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When I wrote my recent post on Sarah Palin’s resignation speech, I believed I was one of the few people in the world to whom her speech made sense. Today I ran across a post by Stanley Fish at the New York Times. Fish seems to agree with me and thinks the confusion on the part of the pundits is about their limitations rather than Palin’s lack of clarity:
It is true that her statement was not constructed in a straightforward, logical manner, but the main theme was sounded often and plainly: This is not what I signed up for. I’m spending all my time and the state’s money responding to attack after attack and they aren’t going to let up because, “It doesn’t cost the people who make these silly accusations a dime.” [snip] And in the end she earned the declaration that “I have given my reasons plainly and candidly.”
But the pundits didn’t want to hear them or, rather, they were committed to believing that the real reasons lay elsewhere, and were strategic. They couldn’t fathom the possibility that she was just giving voice to her feelings. It must, they assumed, be a calculation, and having decided that, they happily went on to describe how bad a calculation it was.
Read the whole thing.
Fish also thinks the rambling nature of her speech was a feature, not a bug: the very fact that Palin clearly wrote it herself emphasizes that it was not a calculated political move. Form followed function, in other words. Perhaps he’s right and my wish that she’d had a good wordsmith tighten it up was off-base. I suspect when you’re Sarah Palin, it doesn’t matter how carefully you speak, how tightly you script, how many red pencils edit and re-edit your words: most people - and almost all pundits - are going to hear what they expect to hear. Very few are going to hear what is actually said.
John McCain delivered the weekly Republican address (I didn’t even realize there was one) on the Fourth of July. Reading his words, I really, really wish he was President. I know Obama is nuanced and careful and so on and so forth but I sincerely believe there are times when and issues about which the United States simply has to take a stand. McCain’s words on Iran take that stand and I appreciate them.
Another part of his address caught my attention also:
The signers put their names and ransomed their lives to a universal, not just a national ideal; that all human beings everywhere, not just Americans, not just the mostly well-off white men gathered in Philadelphia for the occasion, 'are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'
We've not always been true to that ideal, and the rights guaranteed by our Constitution. Slavery, Jim Crow, the disenfranchisement of women were betrayals of the principles enshrined in our founding documents, and had to be conquered before we could claim without qualification to be firmly on the right side of history. But we overcame our faults, corrected our mistakes and in the unfinished story of our Republic, we continue our progress toward 'a more perfect union.' And, in the struggle to do so, we have achieved greatness.
This echoes something I have long believed. The United States as we know it began with the utterance of the words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
When this was written, the “men” who were created equal were a select group: wealthy, white, and literally men. The history of the United States has been the slow but steady redefinition of the word “men” to include those who are not wealthy, those who are not white, and those who are not male. To, in other words, make “all” the reality.
Those who founded this country did not believe they were forming an absolutely perfect Union, simply one more perfect than before. It is easy to point out their faults and flaws, their weaknesses and failures. But they did the best they could in their time and that was far, far better than anyone had done before or has done since. Their wisdom and their courage gave us a country, a Constitution, and a set of ideals that have allowed us, down through all these years, to make our Union more perfect still. For that I am deeply grateful.
Here’s to the next 233 years.
Apparently the cheap pink wine I tried for the first time Thursday night was actually Kool-Aid: Sarah Palin’s resignation speech makes sense to me. Of course, I read the whole thing. A lot of people who have written about it seem to have heard or read only the part that begins:
Some say things changed for me on August 29th last year – the day John McCain tapped me to be his running-mate – I say others changed.
By that point, you’ve already missed over a third of her speech and, more importantly, you’ve missed her primary argument for not running for re-election and for resigning. Here’s how I see it.
Palin’s speech begins with what sounds like a pretty standard political introduction - she’s proud of Alaska, it means the world to her, she’s humbled by the chance to serve. This introduction, however, presages her main point: Alaska is an important state, Alaskans need to understand that fact, Alaska has responsibilities to the United States as a whole.
Then Palin begins the meat of her argument: her Administration is doing well. She expands on that theme with a list of accomplishments. I believe it’s important and telling that most of her list is understandable only to Alaskans. A petroleum integrity office; Point Thomson; AGIA; ACES; the dairy business; her education initiatives; filling public safety positions; the new prison; even the Supreme Court decisions in Alaska’s favor: none of these are comprehensible to a national audience. She does get in the usual suspects - holding the line on government growth; opposing special interests on wildlife management; rejecting some stimulus money; cutting back on office perqs; turning down pay raises; the liberalism of the Ninth Circuit - but the bulk of her accomplishments are Alaska specific.
Then she reaches the linchpin of her speech:
But you don’t hear much of the good stuff in the press anymore, do you?
That’s her whole point right there: she has become a distraction, she stands between what Alaska is accomplishing and the media’s reporting of those accomplishments.
It’s here that she begins the part of the speech most people seem to have read or heard - or at least the part most people are talking and writing about:
Some say things changed for me on August 29th last year – the day John McCain tapped me to be his running-mate – I say others changed.
Let me speak to that for a minute.
She does so by detailing the impact the continuing “digging for dirt” has taken on Alaska’s time and money and on her own finances.
Palin then begins talking about choices and her speech becomes less straight line. Boiled down: she decided running for re-election was unproductive for her and for Alaskans; that she would be wasting her time and energy - and the State’s time and money - by re-upping for another term where she would simply spend herself fighting more of the same.
Palin now goes off on a tangent. The same logic - the desire not to waste her time and energy and the State’s time and money - would lead smoothly into her decision to resign. Instead, she wanders off into lame-duck land. I don’t know where that stupid duck came from. Maybe someone suggested to her that she should not run for re-election, collect her paycheck, and use gubernatorial junkets to raise her political profile and she was so horrified by the idea that she needed to rant about it. Maybe she was thinking about Mark Sanford - a lame-duck with a serious junket problem. Maybe she was just trying to up her cred as a maverick. Wherever that crippled “small aquatic bird of the family anatidae” came from, I wish it had stayed there.
At any rate, she staggers through lame-duck land then gets back on the logic train when she says:
My choice is to take a stand and effect change – not hit our heads against the wall and watch valuable state time and money, millions of your dollars, go down the drain in this new environment.
Her point-guard analogy comes here - I think it’s a good one - and then a little more of the logic train and a segue to the kids with:
Some Alaskans don’t mind wasting public dollars and state time. I do. I cannot stand here as your Governor and allow millions upon millions of our dollars go to waste just so I can hold the title of Governor. And my children won’t allow it either.
Then comes the paragraph that has some pundits claiming - incorrectly - that she’s quitting because “they’re being mean to her children”, especially Trig:
In fact, this decision comes after much consideration, and finally polling the most important people in my life - my children (where the count was unanimous... well, in response to asking: "Want me to make a positive difference and fight for ALL our children's future from outside the Governor's office?" It was four "yes's" and one "hell yeah!" The "hell yeah" sealed it - and someday I'll talk about the details of that... I think much of it had to do with the kids seeing their baby brother Trig mocked by some pretty mean-spirited adults recently.) Um, by the way, sure wish folks could ever, ever understand that we all could learn so much from someone like Trig - I know he needs me, but I need him even more... what a child can offer to set priorities right – that time is precious... the world needs more "Trigs", not fewer.
What she actually said was that she thinks the child who was so emphatic about wanting her out of the Governor’s office was so because all the children were upset by the cracks about Trig. All Palin says about herself and Trig is that she wishes people could see how much Trig has to offer.
Then Palin talks about visiting the troops and how they have chosen to serve a cause greater than themselves and to “build up”. She loads the troops aboard that logic train of not wasting time and resources:
These Troops and their important missions – those are truly the worthy causes in this world and should be the public priority with time and resources and not this local / superficial wasteful political bloodsport.
Wrapping up, Palin provides a summary:
First things first: as Governor, I love my job and I love Alaska. It hurts to make this choice but I am doing what’s best for Alaska. I’ve explained why… though I think of the saying on my parents’ refrigerator that says “Don’t explain: your friends don’t need it and your enemies won’t believe you anyway.”
But I have given my reasons… no more “politics as usual” and I am taking my fight for what’s right – for Alaska – in a new direction.
She then says she hopes her story won’t discourage other Alaskans from entering politics; revisits the point guard metaphor briefly; reiterates her belief in Alaska’s importance; says her successor is capable and she’ll help with the transition; and winds up with a nice quote (apparently, sadly, attributed to the wrong person).
So the speech makes sense. Stripped down to bare bones, she decided not to run for re-election because her notoriety is overshadowing everything her Administration is accomplishing and everything her State has to offer. Once she decided not to run for re-election, there was no point to staying in office where her notoriety would continue to overshadow everything her Administration is accomplishing and everything her State has to offer. She’s leaving office, the jackals will follow her, and her successor and her State can get on with their lives in peace and quiet.
Is there more to it than that? Almost certainly. If nothing else, I’m sure Palin realized that once she announced she wasn’t running for re-election she would be not merely a lame duck but a dead one. The constant ethics complaints and constant media blitz had already compromised her ability to do her job. Combine that with the natural loss of influence experienced by any executive who will be gone on a known date and she would be even less able to get anything done. That would be bad for Alaska and would probably drive Palin crazy.
Do I wish the speech was better organized? You betcha. Palin desperately needs a speech writer. Not to make her say things she wouldn’t but to help her make her points more clearly. I read once that a good speech consists of the following: tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em; tell ‘em; tell ‘em what you told ‘em. I can see the vague outline of those elements in Palin’s speech but with about 15 minutes input from a good wordsmith it could have been tightened up and clarified a lot. Palin gives a speech as if she’s talking to you in her living room and there’s a lot of power and charisma in that approach. But to convince, to lead, to explain not one-on-one over coffee but one-on-millions over miles requires more focus. She needs someone who can leave her voice alone while organizing her presentation of her thoughts. I thought both her Republican convention speech and her feminism speech were excellent, which tells me she probably doesn’t need to find one particular magic speechwriter, just a good solid professional with the sense to let her be herself only clearer.
I have no idea what Palin is going to do now. (Of course, neither does anyone else - possibly even Palin herself. I’m just willing to admit it.) However, I do have some thoughts on what triggered her decisions to not run for re-election and to resign. She says this has been in the works for a while but “a while” is pretty indefinite. My guess is that the pipeline deal and the media’s indifference to it were the triggering events. That deal is apparently a huge accomplishment for Palin and yet what Palin news was the media covering 24/7 when this deal was reached? The Letterman “jokes”. Similarly, the recent Vanity Fair profile of Sarah Palin could not spare any of its 9800 words to so much as mention the pipeline deal.
Maybe up to this point Palin was able to believe that while her notoriety was a drain on the State’s time and money it would at least mean when something great did happen in Alaska the rest of the world would hear about it. However, when even an accomplishment as significant as the pipeline couldn’t get coverage, I imagine Palin had to accept that nothing good in Alaska would get coverage as long as she was the face of the State. To go back to her basketball analogy, Palin must have realized clearly that no matter how many shots she made, none of them would show up on the scoreboard. Bad for Palin, worse for Alaska.
Whatever triggered the decision, I’m sorry it’s worked out this way. I was hoping Palin could settle back into her job as governor, run for re-election, put in some more solid years in Alaska, then see where she stood. After hearing her speech, I realize that was incredibly unrealistic of me: can you imagine the combination of media circus and feeding frenzy if she’d run for governor again? I can and it gives me the cauld grue. Unfortunately, I think Palin has made the only rational decision possible. I wish her well and look forward to seeing what she does next and what she’s doing 10 years from now.
*****
Reading: There are a million posts about Palin’s resignation all over the place. These are just a few that I found interesting.
Allahpundit and Reclusive Leftist are examples of bloggers who consider her reasoning to begin with the “Some say things changed for me” line in her speech.
The Optimistic Conservative: Someone else who thinks Palin’s speech makes sense - even more so than I do. The author also thinks Palin’s “not politics as usual” message will resonate widely.
Blue Lyon: In the “politics make strange bedfellows” department, a liberal agrees with Optimistic Conservative. Palin is articulate, clear, refreshing, and her statement “will appeal to a whole lot of folks tired of the same old political bullshit.”
Matthew Continetti at The Weekly Standard: I disagree with his emphasis here but his last lines are interesting:
But Palin may also be thinking that her retirement from office will cause her critics to stop attacking her. She would be wrong to think so. Neither Palin nor the Palin-haters are going away.
Continetti may be right the Palin-haters aren’t going away but from Yahoo comes the news that the Palin’s attorney is giving fair warning: the Palins are not going to stand by while they’re defamed by “most notably liberal Alaska blogger Shannyn Moore” and “those who re-publish the defamation, such as Huffington Post, MSNBC, the New York Times and The Washington Post.” (From a quick look at her blog archives and her Huffington Post entries, Moore appears to be yet another member of the wildly successful Let’s Put Alaskans Who’ll Trash Sarah Palin To Work Program.)
Runner’s World: The magazine interviewed Palin. It has nothing to do with her resignation but I ran across it somewhere and in it Palin just sounds so incredibly normal. Which ties in with my last link:
Cutting Bait by Mark Steyn: Even though I don’t believe Palin is quitting because “they’re mean to her kids”, I think this is the best Palin resignation article out there.
Oh, my. Mankiw's first point in this piece is one of the most vicious things I've seen in a long time but he's so incredibly polite it takes a slow 10-count to realize Krugman's been eviscerated.
The Arbiter of Ignorance
Less fun but more interesting are the links in point 2 to information about the Wyden-Bennett bill, an alternative health care proposal of which I have never heard - for reasons explained at the David Brooks link. Just looking at it briefly, Wyden-Bennett seems like it may be almost, oh, I don't know, effective and affordable. If I get a chance, I’ll do some more poking around and see what the bill says about pre-existing conditions and what happens if someone who is covered gets sick - my two big questions about any health care plan.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
For some reason, the news that the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed the House last night has made me feel very sad and very defeated. The bill is so huge - both page-wise and impact-wise - how can anyone possibly know what they’re voting for, much less what the impact will be? I find the size of the bill particularly distressing since I do not believe that human beings pumping CO2 into the air is going to result in apocalypse within a hundred years. Thus to me Waxman-Markey is a huge, expensive, unpredictable Rube Goldberg machine created to fix a problem that would be better addressed through case by case amelioration than through universal prevention. Passing this bill, creating this monstrous structure, is exactly like using an elephant gun to kill a mosquito - without knowing exactly who the elephant gun is pointed at.
You can read Maxed Out Mama and the links she provides for thoughts on what I guess we can call the first-order dangers of Waxman-Markey. I’m equally concerned about another kind of danger: a bubble. I first worried about this back in November. In discussing how the (in my opinion necessary) long, slow economic recovery could be cut short, I wrote:
The other possible interruption of the economic doldrums period is a new economic bubble. I’m not sure how possible this is since a bubble apparently requires the ability to take on lots and lots of debt. However, the government has pumped a lot of money into financial institutions and that money may be ripe for bubbling. One excellent candidate for a bubble is carbon trading.
It’s pretty clear that the Obama administration wants to address Apocalyptic Anthropogenic Global Warming. Leaving aside what I think of the basic idea of AAGW (not much), we have to decide how to address it. If the country is stupid enough to go with a cap-and-trade system rather than a simple carbon tax, the bubble won’t even need the money already pumped into the financial system: it can form itself solely from all the new government “money” handed out in the form of carbon allowances. (I find it hard to believe the government is going to auction those off given the sad financial state of most corporations; it’s more likely they’ll be given away.) The markets can go crazy bidding them up - heck, someone will probably even create derivatives - and we’ll have another bubble.
Like massive Federal handouts, though, a bubble is a bad idea in the long run. By definition, a bubble creates imaginary profits and fake productivity. That means there’s always a day of reckoning. Do we really want to concentrate our hopes and our efforts on pushing that day off on our children and grandchildren? We created this mess. I think we should take the hit involved in cleaning it up.
A bubble of any kind would be great for Obama and the Democrats, provided they could get it cranked up quickly enough and maintain it long enough. If they time cap-and-trade just right, the economy can begin to heat up prior to the November 2010 mid-term elections. Obama and the Democrats can take credit for the “recovery” and the Democrats can retain their control of Congress. If the CO2 bubble continues to grow through the end of 2012, the economy will look good for Obama’s re-election and the Congressional races and that should keep the Democrats in power. If the bubble can manage to stay intact through 2014, the mid-term elections could go to the Democrats yet again. That’s four years for the carbon trading bubble which seems a decent run so it could then pop and leave Obama’s successor with a mess that will have us all yearning for the economy of January 20, 2009.
There could, of course, be problems. If Waxman-Markey turns out to be more expensive than the $175 currently promised, people might get restless. Inflation might rear its ugly head. People might come to believe that AAGW is not really a threat. Still, an overheating economy can make increased energy costs and inflation look less serious than they are and if Waxman-Markey starts making the economy look good I imagine few people will even remember that the cap-and-trade boom was originally supposed to address global warming - and fewer still will care. Yes, I’d say Waxman-Markey looks like a winner for Obama and the Democrats.
Still, this is just one piece of legislation so it took me a while to figure out why I felt so sad about it. It’s because this bill, more than any other passed or contemplated, makes me think that before too long - 25 years, 50, maybe 100 - the United States is going to look exactly like a Western European nation. Don’t get me wrong: many of them are nice places. But they seem awfully tame, awfully limited and I suspect the reason for that is their financial constraints. The Western European nations have built good lives for their citizens within the terms of their current circumstances but I don’t sense in them a vein of daring, a sense of limitless opportunity, a belief that more is always obtainable - all the faith in ambition that has always been the hallmark of the United States.
With Waxman-Markey, this country is putting its economic engine in Park and - if things don’t go perfectly - in Reverse. There will never be more; the best has already been. What could be sadder?
In Part 1 of my musings on fourth-wave feminism, I discussed my history of feminism, said I would address the issue of abortion in Part 2, and planned to address women in the workplace in Part 3. However, the issue of how women view work has popped up repeatedly in my recent reading and so I instead want to address women in the workplace now. I’ll get to abortion in the next episode.
In Part 1, I talked about women in the workplace in passing when I referred to reading Games Mother Never Taught You by Betty Lehan Harragan and Women’s Dress for Success Book by John T. Molloy:
To me, these were both “feminist” reading which I guess shows pretty clearly that I was not really interested in changing the game - I just wanted to play on equal terms.
I also pointed out that an article called The Feminist Awakening: Hillary Clinton and the fourth wave spent some time talking about women not knowing how to dress to run for President. About that I said:
If women had taken Molloy’s advice all those years ago, we’d have a standard “powerful professional woman” dress code established by now and we could all stop worrying about what to wear when running for President.
I also had a bone to pick with Amy Siskind’s article, How Feminism Became the F-Word:
Ms. Siskind wants to know where the outrage is over “the fact that women still earn 78 percent of what men do” or “the fact that our representation in politics, academia, and corporate leadership tends to hover around 16 percent.” Perhaps if women had taken Harragan more seriously and learned to play the games necessary to get ahead instead of expending energy demanding the rules be changed to suit us, we’d be earning more money and accruing more power. Furthermore, it’s been a while since I read Games Mother Never Taught You but I seem to remember that part of Harragan’s argument was that if women learned to play by the rules we would eventually amass enough power to change them.
I knew then that I wanted to cover this topic more fully and was even more interested in doing so after I found a Website called Kim Allen’s Online Presence. This popped up when I did a search for Games Mother Never Taught You and is owned by a woman who self-identifies as a third-wave feminist. I’m not sure the site is being updated any longer but I thought the book review section was a mother lode of jumping off points for discussions of feminism.
As I said, her site popped up when I did a search for Games Mother Never Taught You. In her review, Allen is quite dismissive of this book characterizing it as “a rare look at right-wing second-wave feminism” which “embodies the 1970's version of ‘make it on your own by playing within the system’-- ie, conservative feminism.” She finds the book “offensive in some sections” because “[i]t has nothing to do with making the obnoxious executive world better, and everything to do with twisting the age-old rules to your advantage, just as men have always done to get ahead.”
Obviously, I find her review somewhat naive: as I said in my quibble about Siskind’s article, if women had learned to play the corporate (and academic and political) game to our advantage we would have done much better over the last 35 years. And Allen herself concedes (emphasis hers):
But the general principles were actually sort of useful, I'm somewhat surprised to admit. Her frank assessment of how much of business is based on military and sports models is quite accurate, even in today's "horizontally-structured" small companies. Just because you don't have a direct chain of command and a drill-sergeant-like boss doesn't mean the basic principles have been totally abandoned. (In fact, assuming that they have been would probably be a big mistake).
I admit that I had a somewhat hazy concept of how executives advance, and now that I've tried to spot some of the patterns in my own company-- I was shocked to see that some of the principles apply. Not all, but some. I also learned a few things about salary negotiation and general professional behavior that help one to be fairly compensated in the world of work (an area where women persistently get the short end of the stick, partly because they don't know how these things work).
No women often don’t know - or don’t understand - how these things work which is probably part of the reason - although not the whole reason - women do in fact make less than men and hold only 16% of leadership positions.
What led me from her review to this post, however, was the phrase “obnoxious executive world”. At first I assumed she was referring to continuing grossly sexist behavior but in fact Allen says later in her review:
(Aside: one chapter was out-of-date, but not hilariously so. That is the one on sexual relations in the workplace-- you know, butt-grabbing and tasteless jokes. If the world was really like what Harragan describes in 1977, I have newfound respect for 2nd wave feminists who wanted to kill all men).
So I was left somewhat perplexed by what is so “obnoxious” about the executive world. Then TigerHawk put up a (ridiculous) video of Dr. Helen Smith interviewing Dr. Richard Driscoll about the role of fathers and said:
If you've watched the interview, I would respectfully suggest that Drs. Smith and Driscoll do not mention one of the big sources of female rage, the continuing preponderance in the workplace of men, male values (such as they are) and male behavioral impulses. That anger needs to come out, and the male partner is the most probable recipient. Inside more than a few marriages, therefore, husbands and therefore fathers take some of the blame for the suppressed frustrations of the day job, perhaps just because they are also men. That transference is as sexist, or more so, than the underlying outrage, but there is no corporate compliance program to deal with it.
Now we have a committed third-wave feminist and a guy on the conservative side both in agreement that women believe there is something deeply distressing about the workplace. It’s not that I don’t understand that the workplace can be difficult for women. Although sexism is not usually as overt as it once was, it does linger. Furthermore women still often bear all or most of the responsibility for childcare: balancing that with work can be difficult and even heartwrenching. Even given these problems, though, I was struck by the oddness of the term “obnoxious” and the intensity of the term “rage”. I don’t know exactly what either Allen or TigerHawk means but it brought into focus something that bothers me about the view many feminists - and perhaps many women who don’t think of themselves as feminists - have about the working world.
A certain set of feminists has always believed that existing social and business structures - corporations, universities, politics, even religions - were created largely by men (a belief I do not share, by the way). Being male-created, those structures are clearly, perhaps even definitionally, sub-optimal at best, dysfunctional most likely, and awful almost certainly. It never seems to occur to this set of feminists to look around and realize that most of those structures work remarkably well. Of course they don’t work perfectly: violence, poverty, war, discrimination, the whole laundry list of ills do exist in our society. But it seems to me that those ills - in fact the full and fervent expression of those ills - is the natural state of human beings. To ameliorate those ills at all is a condition devoutly to be desired and the simple fact is that such ills are least apparent in those societies where the supposedly male-created structures are most firmly in place. The history of the world is one of hideous brutality interrupted by stretches of relative peace and prosperity. I’m more grateful than I can say that I live in one of the best stretches of history.
This is why I view with skepticism some feminists’ insistence that the existing structures must be changed to fit their ideal of how society should look, should work, should hang together. I don’t know of any society that has done better than the ones currently forming the First World. Does that mean we can’t do better? Of course not. But the existing system puts food on my table and a roof over my head; warms me when it’s cold and cools me when it’s hot; cures my ills and delays my death; lavishes me with goods and experiences undreamed of 100 years ago; and affords me and other women in First World societies greater freedom from and freedom to than at any other time in history. I’m simply not happy about the idea of trying to dismantle a system that works in order to replace it with one that may or may not do a better job, may or may not do even as good a job. My goal for women is to be full participants in these endeavors, not to stand outside and throw brickbats.
Equally important, I do not consider the existing social and business structures to be masculine so much as simply human. One of the common feminist complaints is that such structures should be, as Allen puts it, “’horizontally-structured’ small companies”. This preference for non-hierarchical structures is common in feminism and is usually wrapped in references to the communal, co-operative nature of women and of the activities women historically participated in, like quilting bees and cooking large dinners together. This ignores the fact that women have always organized themselves around the concepts of status, hierarchy, and deference just as much as men have. Some woman had to organize those quilting bees and communal dinners, decide what color the quilt backing would be and whose dining room would host the dinner. Odds are it was the woman considered the leader of the community, probably the woman married to the highest ranking man. And the inverse is true also: men involved in a barn-raising or a community harvest were neither more nor less co-operative, neither more nor less hierarchical than women in quilting bees and kitchens. Given the opportunity, humans organize themselves in whatever way most efficiently allows them to achieve their goals.
Furthermore, women have always embraced more formal aspects of status, hierarchy, and deference. A woman may have taken her status from her husband in the past but that doesn’t mean she didn’t avail herself of it to the greatest extent possible. When Lord Whosis rode off to fight for the king and Lady Whosis was left behind to run the castle, she didn’t sit down with their serfs and discuss who would do what: she gave orders and she expected them to be obeyed. In more modern times, the factory owner’s wife expected deference from the men who worked for her husband and from their wives. The image of Colonels and Colonels’ wives required to dance attendance on the General’s lady is an enduring one.
In a great irony, some of the most compelling evidence that the concepts of status, hierarchy, and deference are important to all humans and not just to men comes from within feminism itself. In another of Allen’s book reviews, she writes about Manifesta, a book about third-wave feminism written by two third-wave feminists. In summarizing the book’s discussion of relationships between the younger feminists and their older counterparts, Allen says:
In particular, young women have begun to speak up about abuse at the hands of the elders in the movement-- being ignored or patronized (I use that term deliberately). The young women make coffee and play the supporting roles while being expected to worship the divas and icons of the Second Wave. This relationship sounds a lot like how men in general expect the women around them to behave.
Oddly enough, Allen does not draw from this what seems to me the obvious conclusion: the organizing principles of status, hierarchy, and deference are as meaningful for women as they are for men. She cannot see that the young feminists’ dislike of their role is not a matter of some feminist ideal of community but of the universal rebellion of the young against elders who hold the status the young want, command them through the hierarchy established by that status, and demand deference. The young feminists’ reaction to their elders is no different from the reaction of male junior executives to their bosses: compliance mixed with resentment.
Furthermore, by pointing out that the elders in the feminist movement expect the same behavior from their juniors that men expect from women, Allen makes an important point although again she does not see it. The problem with the way men treat women (or at least have historically treated them in the workplace) is not that status, hierarchy, and deference is intrinsically wrong; it is that tying status, hierarchy, and deference to gender is wrong. Failing to make this distinction is a problem for many feminists and perhaps for many women in the workplace. The goal often seems to be to create communal, co-operative enterprises where women think they will feel comfortable and get a better deal. When enterprises are competitive instead, women react badly. Far better for women to understand that the only realistic goal is to achieve more status and demand more deference within a hierarchy: flat social structures are not the human way.
For a final dose of irony, we need only look at the very recent NOW election. First, the fact that there is an election at all should give anyone enamored of the flat, communal, co-operative ideal pause. If the most powerful self-identified feminist organization in the world feels the need for leaders who hold ranked offices, exercise real power, and get paid serious money, why on earth would anyone believe that entities dedicated to making profits and crushing their rivals would see - or in fact derive - any benefit from exchanging their hierarchies for a more egalitarian model?
Second, the stories that are coming out about how the NOW election unfolded seem to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that women are just as willing to fight for power, just as willing to use whatever means are necessary, just as willing to destroy their opponents as any man clawing his way up the corporate ladder at Really Humongous Corp, Inc. These are not women sitting around a quilting frame discussing how to make everyone feel good about the outcome. These are ruthless competitors determined to end up on top. Although I can’t say I approve of some of the tactics used, I can point out that these women embraced the reality of their workplace and went after what they wanted with all guns blazing.
Would that more women in corporations, universities, politics, and religious organizations followed their leads. While women sit back and sigh that their working lives would be much better if only the working world would embrace its feminine side, the guys who work at the next desk over are plotting to take over the world and thanking their lucky stars women aren’t doing the same. As far as men are concerned, the less competition the better and if women are willing to take themselves out of the running without men having to so much as lift a finger, that’s fine with them.
And this, to come full circle, is where I think Allen made her biggest mistake in her review of Games Mother Never Taught You:
I called this book sexist because it is by 90's standards. Harragan unabashedly declares that men and women are at war in the corporate setting, and we will triumph by beating the men at their own game--gathering arsenals, performing espionage, strategically moving around, and always keeping our friends close but our enemies closer.
It’s not that men and women are at war with each other in the corporate setting; it’s that so long as women want to advance in the corporate setting they are at war with - competing with - everyone else in that setting. There are a hundred entry-level positions; 25 managers; 5 VPs; and one CEO. If a woman wants that one top position, she is going to have to compete for it with men and, yes, now with other women.
Does that mean a woman can’t be a feminist and still climb the ladder in corporate - or academic or political or religious - organizations? Of course not. Let’s say Sally is a feminist and is competing for a job against Bob and Nancy. Sally can feel free to make sure her boss knows Nancy is an incompetent idiot who couldn’t do a financial forecast if her life depended on it - provided she’s willing to say the same about Bob. Heck, Sally can even tell her boss that Nancy shouldn’t get the job because she has small children - provided she’s willing to say the same about Bob.
What Sally can’t do is attack her female competitors on sexist grounds - or stand by while others do so. If someone else says Nancy shouldn’t get the job because she has small children, Sally will either point out that the same is true of Bob or point out that Nancy is the best judge of how to balance her work life with her children. If someone refers to Nancy with any of the hundreds of sexist - and often sexual - slurs reserved for women, Sally will call them on it. Sisters may fight with each other but when it really counts they have each other’s backs.
And after the dust settles, Sally and Nancy can go out for a drink and talk about how they really need to get going on standardizing that “powerful professional woman” dress code.
South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has copped to having an affair for the last year. Not a total surprise: I figured he was having marital problems given his wife’s disinterest in his whereabouts.
What I don’t understand is why he decided to make a public admission of this. He seems to be saying that he wants to be reconciled with his wife - although I’m not sure he was really definite about that - and if I were her, I’d find such a reconciliation much easier if my husband didn’t spread our personal life all over the media. Even if he doesn’t want to reconcile with his wife, I’d think that part of what he owes her when seeking her forgiveness is helping protect her privacy. A play by play of his affair doesn’t really pay that debt.
Perhaps he didn’t think things through before disappearing for five days, was taken aback by the firestorm of speculation that had arisen while he was away, and felt only the truth could provide a believable explanation for his absence. Even so, I would argue that if his first loyalty is to his wife - or his children - he would have done better to fall on the sword of “I have no excuse, I just needed to get away” rather than to expose their family life to the type of scrutiny it’s going to get. Unless, of course, he believed confessing the affair would give him a better chance to maintain political viability. In which case, his first concern isn’t really his wife and children.
Perhaps he believed that once his visit to Argentina was public knowledge it would only be a matter of time before someone figured out what he was doing there and the best course was to reveal the truth on his terms. Or perhaps someone who knew - it sounds like quite a few people did know - was going to blow the whistle on his affair.
I imagine he’ll eventually explain why he held a press conference to announce his affair. But I sure do wish someone at the conference had asked him for that explanation now.
