Hillary's Bias Problems Have Deep Cultural Roots [View All]

Run Date: 02/20/08
By Elizabeth L. Keathley
WeNews commentator

Hillary Clinton's campaign is pulling at the deep cultural roots of gender bias. Elizabeth Keathley says that's why the senator is so often caught in the double bind between being considered either "too feminine" or "too masculine."

Elizabeth Keathley

(WOMENSENEWS)--Earlier in the primary contest, when comedian Chris Rock quipped on "Saturday Night Live" that Barack Obama was more disadvantaged than Hillary Clinton because "everyone loves white women . . . except other white women," he might have been channelling the mid-20th century philosopher Simone de Beauvoir.

Beauvoir famously argued that women had difficulty uniting and supporting each other because their livelihood and status depended on a "good" marriage. Their competition for husbands engendered envy and hindered female bonding.

Although Chris Rock's joke sparks a laugh of recognition, we should acknowledge that white women are actually the ones showing Hillary the greatest love at the ballot box, voting for her in primary after primary.

That suggests that other women are not the enemy of Hillary nor, for that matter, of all other women. Rather, the enemy is culture and history.

The socio-economic changes of 19th-century Europe and America gave momentum to the international women's movement. Urbanization stripped unmarried women of their traditional, agrarian occupations, while numerous wars depleted the population of available husbands to support them. Women sought traditionally male occupations and civil rights, but these "first wave" feminists of the late 19th century reaped opprobrium and physical abuse for violating the ideals of domesticity, humility and deference to men.


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