Christina Wolbrecht | Vox

Did Jeannette Rankin inspire other women to enter politics?

2017-05-11T16:19:25-04:00

As President Donald Trump arrives to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress, members of congress wear white to honor the women's suffrage movement and support women's rights, February 28, 2017. | Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

This week, Mischiefs of Faction is hosting a symposium to celebrate the centennial of Jeannette Rankin becoming the first woman elected to the US House of Representatives. Our first post provides a biographical sketch of Rankin’s career, and the second post highlights the underappreciated role of women’s groups in American policymaking.

As other authors in this symposium highlight, the presence of women in campaigns and elected offices has multiple effects on our political system, ranging from increased political legitimacy to transformed political processes, issue debates, and policy outcomes in the US.

Women politicians also might encourage political engagement by other women and young girls, what we’ve termed the “role model effect.” When Hillary Clinton clinched the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in June 2016 — another important first for women in politics — she tweeted out a picture of herself dancing with a young girl. The tweet, signed by Clinton herself, read: “To every little girl who dreams big: Yes, you can be anything you want — even president. Tonight is for you.”

Both political observers and political practitioners have long expected that by countering the traditional view that politics is a man’s game, the presence of women in prominent political roles would inspire other women and young girls to greater engagement with politics as well. Yet the empirical evidence in support of this expectation has been mixed; some studies find women’s political engagement increases with female candidates, while others do not.

Our recent research suggests that being first, like Jeannette Rankin, may be important for role model effects. We looked at female candidates for major offices — US House, US Senate, and governor — to determine if the presence of female candidates affected women’s political engagement. We employed a panel survey — a study that interviews the same people at multiple points in time — in order to ascertain if individual citizens became more politically engaged if they experienced a female candidate in their district or state.

Like other studies, we focused on viable candidates, candidates who won or came reasonably close to doing so. Unlike previous studies, we also narrowed our analysis to female candidates who were new. Our logic was straightforward: A woman running for reelection to an office she has held, perhaps for many years, is unlikely to disrupt citizens’ views of women as political actors. Such female candidates are likely familiar and accepted by their constituents — even those who support another party.

However, when a district or state experiences a woman running for a major political office held by a man, citizens shift from a situation in which they are seeing no or very few women in politics to an election featuring a competitive female candidate. This, we hypothesized, would help encourage greater engagement among women, and young women in particular. Being first would be key to the role model effect.

Our data supports that expectation: As the figure below shows, we found that where viable female candidates ran for major offices currently held by men, women became significantly more politically engaged in politics.

Importantly, however, we only found this effect among younger women (specifically, under 30). Older women’s engagement did not change in response to the presence of female politicians. This is consistent with what we know about political socialization: Older citizens are more likely to be set in their political attitudes and practices, but younger citizens are still learning about the political world and determining their own place in it.

It is those younger women who we find respond to the presence of new female politicians by becoming more politically engaged. This also is consistent with our previous work finding that media coverage that not only talked about female politicians but specifically highlighted how unusual and unique they were was associated with increased interest in political activism among adolescent girls.

Might we expect that Jeannette Rankin’s campaign and election to the House in 1916 had a similar impact on the political engagement of young women? Unfortunately, to answer that question requires accurate public opinion polls, which had not yet been invented in 1916. If we try to transport our findings back a century, the best we can say is that Rankin’s election certainly had the characteristics — a successful candidate running for an office that had always been held by men — conducive to a positive impact on the political engagement of younger women. Importantly, women in Rankin’s home state of Montana already had the right to put that engagement into action at the ballot box; Montana granted suffrage to women in 1914.

What about today? In 2017, women comprise just 20 percent of the membership of the US House and Senate, nearly 25 percent of state legislators nationwide, and only 8 percent of governors. Reports indicate that one result of the 2016 election is more and more women are planning to run for office. The continued inequality in women’s representation means there are still many opportunities for women to be new candidates — running for a seat held by a man, just as Rankin did.

At the same time, with increasing numbers of prominent political women — Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Carly Fiorina, and Sarah Palin, to name just a few — we might wonder if the public is beginning to view female politicians as “normal” and that as a result, women running for office will no longer have a unique effect on the engagement of women and girls in the future. Perhaps ironically, the more that women run for, and win, elective office, the less likely we may be to find a role model effect, as female politicians are no longer viewed as unusual or new.

Our guess is that this — the declining uniqueness of female candidates — is a price Jeannette Rankin would be willing to pay to see many more women join her in the ranks of elected officeholders in the United States.

Christina Wolbrecht is an associate professor of political science and David Campbell is the Packey J. Dee professor of American democracy, both at the University of Notre Dame.

Don’t overlook the feminist triumph of Clinton’s run

2017-02-13T15:00:19-05:00

Susan B. Anthony’s gravesite, on Election Day, in November

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign led to fresh attention to a related landmark moment in US history: the ratification of the 19th Amendment, in 1920, granting women the right to vote. Election Day saw a steady flow of pilgrims to the gravesite of suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony. Observers have noted that the white pant suits Clinton wore at key moments in the campaign — and, later, on Inauguration Day — evoke the white dresses worn by suffrage activists.

Clinton ultimately failed to crack the highest glass ceiling. Yet her powerful run, which included a popular-vote victory of nearly 3 million ballots, remains a significant accomplishment for women in politics.

It must also not be forgotten that Clinton faced arguments during her race that closely echoed those made in opposition to women’s right to vote. Still-fresh anger over some of the abuse she was subjected to helped to drive turnout to the women’s march in Washington this weekend.

Only 100 years ago, many people found the idea of a woman voting degrading

It’s difficult for many people to imagine the mindset in which it seemed natural and obvious for women to be excluded from politics

But suffrage for women represented a challenge to centuries of established political thought. The central justification was the conviction that women are by their very nature unfit for political life. The political realm was inherently masculine, while the private realm of home and family was the women’s place. The ideal of separate spheres has shown remarkable endurance. As late as 1961, the United States Supreme Court maintained in Hoyt v. Florida that states could reasonably exclude women from jury duty because women were “the center of home and family life” and this obligation should not be neglected.

For opponents of suffrage, masculinity, rationality, and power were intrinsically linked, while helplessness, sentiment, and dependence were defining characteristics of femininity. This self-evident reality was articulated by writer Octavius B. Frothingham in 1890:

The masculine represents judgment, the practicable, the expedient, the possible, while the feminine represents emotion, what ought to be … The predominance of sentiment in woman renders her essentially an idealist.

The political arena was a corrupt and rancorous place. Excluding women from politics protected them from debasement and corruption, and allowed them to maintain their innate purity and grace. It was, suffrage opponents explained, because they held women —but importantly, only white women — in such high esteem that they denied them the vote. In the words of Representative Frank Clark (D-FL) from the floor of the US House in 1915:

I do not wish to see the day come when the woman of my race in my state shall trail their skirts in the muck and mire of partisan politics. I prefer to look to the American woman as she always has been, occupying her proud estate as the queen of the American home, instead of regarding her as a ward politician in the cities … The American mother, the American woman, has my admiration, my respect, and my love—

Women who entered politics, on the other hand, relinquished any right to chivalry and the protection of men. A popular anti-suffrage cartoon presented women with a choice: Forsake suffrage and retain the safety and happiness of the home, or obtain the vote and accept the degradation of the “street corner.”

Women’s innate physical weakness made them unable to withstand the demands of the public sphere, including the casting of a ballot. Justice Bradley famously explained in the Supreme Court Case Bradwell v. Illinois (1873), which upheld Illinois’ prohibition on women attorneys, that “The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.”

Surely, nearly a century after women won the right to vote, these ideas no longer hold full sway over the American psyche. Attitudes toward women in political life have been transformed since the ratification of the 19th Amendment.

Yet in much the same way as the struggle for suffrage forced opponents to articulate a rationale for excluding women from politics, Hillary Clinton’s candidacy laid bare the extent to which some of the same assumptions and prejudices remain powerful subtexts in American life.

Nobody had more respect for women than the men who didn’t want them to vote

Indeed, what was once subtext became text in 2016. What better evidence that we equate political power with masculinity than a political candidate literally defending the size of his manhood on national television? How better to express that politics is fundamentally the purview of men than to claim the female candidate doesn’t have “a presidential look?”

Just as anti-suffragists emphasized their opposition was grounded in their deep esteem for women, Donald Trump assured voters, “Nobody has more respect for women than I do. Nobody.” Yet, once a woman debases herself by entering politics, she becomes a “nasty woman” deserving of humiliation and defamation. Anyone looking for contemporary evidence that a woman who dares enter politics has relinquished any right to respect, much less chivalry, need only peruse the slogans on many T-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers found at Trump events.

The persistent expectation that women should embody the highest ethical and moral standards may help explain why actions that might be considered politics as usual if performed by a man generate not just criticism, but impassioned cries of “lock her up!” And while Americans may no longer believe that women are too weak to mark a ballot or file a brief, the possibility that a woman lacks the “stamina” to fulfill the duties of the presidency can still resonate.

The Clinton campaign and the struggle for suffrage now also share a narrative of defeat. Within just a few short years of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, multiple magazine headlines, from Harper’s to Good Housekeeping, asked: Is Women’s Suffrage a Failure? Their answer was usually yes: Women failed to turn out in large numbers or vote as a distinctive bloc. Women failed to reform the corrupt political system or produce compassionate public policy.

It is true that it took decades for women to become an electoral force, if the standard is determining the election outcome. (It would also, we should note, take decades for enfranchisement to be a reality for women of color). Unquestionably, the elevation of yet another man to the highest office in the land is more evidence that full equality for women in politics has not yet been achieved.

These realities should not cause us to understate the magnitude of both events, however. The ratification of the 19th Amendment and the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton are consequential for how they challenged the ideology of gender difference articulated by opponents of both.

If entering politics is thought to debase women, reclaiming “nasty woman” as a badge of honor is a repudiation.

If men esteem women too much to let them govern themselves — explicitly in 1915, subconsciously today — women’s voice in elections (a voice, like men’s, shaped deeply by race, class, and other identities) is a powerful statement.

If some still think women are too weak for public life, women with power — over their own ballots or as the standard bearer for the nation’s oldest political party —transform our perceptions of what is possible for women in politics.

If people believe, explicitly or, as is more common today, implicitly, that women don’t belong in politics, women’s presence at the polls and on the ballot is a victory.

Clinton failed to shatter that “highest and hardest glass ceiling.” The persistent of rhetoric that denies that women deserve to be in the political arena is disheartening, to say the least.

Yet win or lose, ultimately Hillary Clinton’s 2016 candidacy refutes the ideas articulated by the anti-suffragists and revived again this year. Politics is a place that women enter, a place where women count, and a place where women belong.

Christina Wolbrecht is an associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, and director of the university’s Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy

This piece is part of The Big Idea, a section for outside contributors’ opinions about, and analysis of, the most important issues in politics, science, and culture.