Votes for women may breed the mother of political convention
We won for 13 straight weeks. We were The Prones of Clontarf and were briefly famous, despite my sister’s gaffe when she was asked the difference between an antiseptic and a disinfectant.
“An antiseptic heals wounds,” she said crisply. “And a disinfectant prevents wounds.”
(Is it any wonder MRSA is so prevalent?)
My father had his moments, too. Like when he surprised the presenter when asked to finish the phrase “Rack and….?” The nation waited for him to say “ruin.” He said “pinion,” rack-and-pinion being some obscure form of mechanical contrivance. After a bit of negotiation, he got his marks.
I was the coach for the team, because I was regarded by the producers as too young to compete. I had a whole library of quiz books and anytime any of the team held still, would subject them to a barrage of questions:
* Who was it said: “The prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates the mind wonderfully?”
* Who was the only admiral to be court-martialed and executed by the British Navy?
* What are the colours of the rainbow?
* What is the name of the one-humped camel?
When you’re a quiz coach, you end up knowing fascinating but random stuff. Like that “women and children first” as a drill on a sinking ship started on a military vessel called the Birkenhead, where the captain ordered his men to stand back until every women and child had been put in lifeboats.
Up to then, it was every man for himself and to hell with the spouses and progeny. The change gave rise to a song which went “To stand and be still to the Birkenhead Drill is a damn tough bullet to chew.”
When you’re a quiz coach, in addition to learning unrelated trivia, you learn strategic guesswork.
If, for example, you’re asked who invented something and you haven’t a clue, you go for Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Edison.
If you’re asked who first made a famous statement and you don’t know, you guess one of three names, on the basis that 90% of everything worth saying was said by Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain or Dr Johnson (you do have to remember, though, that the one stating that “men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses” came from Dorothy Parker).
My past as a quiz coach is the reason why, last week, when someone in the office wondered aloud who had been the world’s first female prime minister, I produced the answer with the fast and shallow certainty of a quiz buff: Mrs Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka.
The questioner thought I was making it up, and Googled to prove me wrong.
I was right. Sirimavo Bandaranaike became the first woman head of government on July 20, 1960, six years before Indira Gandhi became India’s first woman prime minister.
“This is the suffragette’s dream come true,” said the London Evening News at the time.
It was also the first opportunity to prove that women would bring to Government a new and different approach. Bandaranaike gave all the indications of being about to do just that.
At a summit conference not long after her election, she announced that she was speaking as “a woman and a mother.”
Of course, once she’d got that off her chest, Bandaranaike tossed the US Peace Corps out on their ear, closed the Israeli Embassy, declared Sri Lanka a republic, nationalised private companies, church schools and newspapers, banned imports and used the army to crush Marxist rebels so vigorously that 20,000 people died. Just where her womanliness and maternal instinct came into play in all this wasn’t clear.
NOR is it clear whence comes the unfounded but amazingly resilient expectation that the election and promotion of enough women, particularly if those women have been ennobled by the experience of motherhood, will change the face of politics. It never goes away, that myth.
It’s surfaced in the current run-up to the general election. In among the comments about how thin on the Leinster House ground are women TDs and how scarce they are around the Cabinet table are the fruitless, bootless, evidence-free but vaguely inspiring notions that if a tide of women got elected, the entire process would improve. From sea to shining sea would flow a new kind of maternally-informed warmth.
This “ennobled by motherhood” hogwash triumphs over reality every time.
If Bandaranaike’s history were read by people who did not know her gender, many, if not most, would make the assumption that it was typically, even archetypally, the biography of a male politician.
Ditto Maggie Thatcher, who may have had her soft and fuzzy side rendered softer and fuzzier by twice giving birth, but not so’s you’d notice, if the experience of miners was anything to go by.
And yet both of these leaders felt the need to parade their gender and their maternity, Thatcher’s femininity clinched by her posing for a photograph while doing her ironing.
These days, the world has women in leadership in fair numbers.
Condoleeza Rice may be the most obvious unelected example. Michelle Bachelet leads Chile, Tzipi Livni is the Israeli foreign minister. Ségolène Royal is giving the French presidency a good run.
And the first female elected to the presidency of an African country, Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirfleaf, has moved strongly against corruption in her country while addressing the social chaos left by a decade and a half of civil war.
Admittedly, Merkel and Bachelet were judged first on their appearance and clothes.
But once their rivals – and media – got over the haircut and weight thing, each went on to prove themselves as good, if not better, than any male political leader.
Indeed Merkel, who on becoming chancellor was not expected to be a major EU force, has revived the constitution rejected in 2005 and won plaudits in the process.
“She has improved the mood of Europe,” an economist at the Centre for European Reform in London said this week.
“She has managed to reconcile different interests in a short period of time, maybe because she does not let her ego get in the way.”
All of which would suggest that Hillary Clinton would not feel the need to make the noises about femininity and motherhood Bandaranaike made half a century ago. But she’s still making them.
“The fact is that being a woman — being a wife, a mother, having to work my way forward in the legal profession and politics — is part of who I am,” she says.
Now, I ask you. Is anybody going to woman the barricades as a result of a statement like that?
While it — unenthusiastically — reminds listeners of the sacred status of motherhood and wifehood, it also demonstrates Hillary Clinton’s tin ear for human feelings. A tin ear that makes her unlikeable and, quite possibly, unelectable.
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