Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell And America's Double Standard

A great deal has already been said and written about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email address during her time as Secretary of State, and I’m sure there will be more such conversation over the 19 months leading up to the 2016 election. But little has been made of what I consider one of the more significant stories in response to this controversy/scandal/tempest in a teapot: Colin Powell’s statement that he also used a private email address during his time as Secretary of State, and that many of the messages he sent in that role have thus likely been lost.

There are, of course, reasons for the lack of widespread outrage about Powell’s revelations and actions; for one thing, he’s probably not running for president. But seen through the lens of history, the outrage over Hillary’s emails falls in line with one of America’s most longstanding social traditions: the overt application of double standards to men and women in both public and private life.

The second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s worked consistently to highlight and push back on such double standards. Whether responding to wage gaps and other social inequalities with the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, supporting domestic abuse and spousal rape laws to combat marital imbalances, arguing for birth control and other means for women to achieve comparable sexual freedom to men, or critiquing popular culture’s more limiting and damaging depictions of women than those of men, these activists made double standards a focus of their ideas and efforts. But the American tradition of gendered double standards goes back much further than the mid-20th century, and better engaging with those histories helps us understand the depth and breadth of the issue.

Take communal responses to moments of cross-dressing, for example. In 1837, Harvard undergraduate James Russell Lowell famously dressed in women’s clothing to perform the role of Abby Roe in the Hasty Pudding Club’s annual theatrical production. Lowell’s drag performance was an instant hit and became an annual part of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, one that has continued for more than a century and a half to nothing but laughter and applause. Similarly, the moment did not in any way derail Lowell’s Harvard career, nor his professional trajectory toward a role as one of the era’s most popular and beloved poets.

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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/hillary-clinton-email-colin-powell-double-standard