No silver lining for women in coming second

MUCH had been made of the timing of Hillary Clinton’s speech before the Democratic National Convention, coming as it did on the 88th anniversary of women’s suffrage.

Convention organisers took advantage of this coincidence of the calendar — the 19th amendment was certified on August 26, 1920 — to pay homage to the women’s vote in particular and women’s progress in general.

But many of Clinton’s supporters are unlikely to be partaking. They regard their candidate’s cameo as a consolation prize. And they are not consoled.

“I see this nation differently than I did 10 months ago,” reads a typical posting on a website devoted to Clintonista discontent. “That this travesty was committed by the Democratic party has forever changed my approach to politics.”

In scores of internet forums and the conclaves of protest groups, those sentiments are echoed, as Clinton supporters speak of feeling disillusioned, of being cheated and betrayed.

In one poll, 40% of Clinton’s constituency expressed dissatisfaction; in another, more than a quarter favoured the clear insanity of voicing their feminist protest by voting for John McCain.

“This is not the usual reaction to an election loss,” said Diane Mantouvalos, the founder of JustSayNoDeal.com, a clearinghouse for the pro-Clinton organisations. “Anyone who doesn’t take time to analyse it will do so at their peril.”

The despondency of Clinton’s supporters — or their “vitriolic” and “rabid” wrath, as the punditry prefers to put it — has been the subject of perplexed and often irritable media speculation. Why don’t these dead-enders get over it and exit stage right?

Shouldn’t they be celebrating, not protesting? After all, Hillary Clinton’s campaign made unprecedented strides. She garnered 18 million-plus votes, and proved a woman could be a viable candidate for the nation’s highest office. She didn’t get the gold, but in this case isn’t a silver a significant triumph?

Many Clinton supporters say no, and to understand their gloom, one has to take into account the legacy of American women’s political struggle, in which transformational change always gives way before a chorus of “not now” and “wait your turn”, and in which every victory turns out to be partial or pyrrhic.

Indeed, the greatest example of this is the victory celebrated last night: the passage of women’s suffrage.

The 1920 benchmark commemorated as women’s hour of glory was experienced in its era as something more complex, and darker.

Suffrage was, like Clinton’s candidacy, a symbolic rallying point, a colour guard for a regiment of other ideas. But while the colour guard was ushered into the palace of American law, its retinue was turned away. In the years after the ratification of suffrage, the anticipated women’s voting bloc failed to emerge, progressive legislation was largely thwarted, female politicians made only minor inroads and women’s advocacy groups found themselves at loggerheads.

“It was clear,” said the 1920s sociologist Sophonisba Breckinridge, “that the winter of discontent in politics had come for women.”

That discontent was apparent in a multitude of letters, speeches and articles.

“The American woman’s movement, and her interest in great moral and social questions, is splintered into a hundred fragments under as many warring leaders,” despaired Frances Kellor, a women’s advocate.

The grail of female franchise yielded little meaningful progress in the years to follow. Two-thirds of the few women who served in Congress in the 1920s were filling the shoes of their dead husbands, and most of them failed to win re-election. The one woman to ascend to the US Senate had a brief career: in 1922, Rebecca Felton, 87, was appointed to warm the seat for a newly-elected male senator until he could be sworn in. Her term lasted a day.

Within the political establishment the parties gave scant support to female politicians. Suffragist Anne Martin bitterly remarked that women in politics were “exactly where men political leaders wanted them: bound, gagged, divided and delivered to the Parties.”

Male politicians offered a few sops to feminists: a bill to educate expectant mothers, a law permitting women who married foreigners to remain American citizens, and financing for the first federal prison for women.

But by the mid ’20s, Congress had quit feigning interest, and women’s concerns received a cold shoulder. In 1929, the maternity education bill was killed.

Meanwhile, male cultural guardians were giving vent to what Lillian Symes, a feminist journalist, termed the new masculinism — diatribes against the “effeminisation” that had supposedly been unleashed on the American arts.

During the presidential race of 1924, newspapers ran headlines like “Woman Suffrage Declared a Failure”. The daughters of the suffrage generation were so beyond the “zealotry” of their elders, Harper’s declared in its 1927 article “Feminist — New Style,” that they could only pity those ranting women who were “still throwing hand grenades” and making an issue of “little things.”

Those “little things” included employment equity, as a steady increase in the proportion of women in the labour force ground to a halt and stagnated throughout the ‘20s. Women barely improved their representation in male professions; the number of female doctors actually declined.

“The feminist crash of the ’20s came as a painful shock, so painful that it took history several decades to face up to it,” the literary critic Elaine Showalter wrote in 1978. Facing it now is like peering into a painful mirror. For all the talk of Hillary Clinton’s “breakthrough” candidacy and other recent successes for women, progress on important fronts has stalled.

Today, the US ranks 22nd among the 30 developed nations in its proportion of female federal lawmakers. The proportion of female state legislators has been stuck in the low 20% range for 15 years. The American political pipeline is 86% male.

Progress in narrowing the wage gap between men and women has slowed considerably since 1990, yet last year the Supreme Court established onerous restrictions on women’s ability to sue for pay discrimination.

The 20 top occupations of women last year were the same as half a century ago: secretary, nurse, teacher, sales clerk, maid, hairdresser, and so on. And just as Congress cut funds in 1929 for maternity education, it recently slashed child support enforcement by 20%, a decision expected to leave billions of dollars owed to mothers uncollected.

Again, male politicians and pundits indulge in outbursts of “new masculinist” misogyny (witness Clinton’s campaign coverage). Again, many daughters of a feminist generation seem pleased to proclaim themselves so “beyond gender” that they don’t need a female president.

As it turns out, they won’t have one. But they will still have all the abiding inequalities that Hillary Clinton, especially in defeat, symbolised. Without a coalescing cause to focus their forces, how will women fight a foe that remains insidious, amorphous, relentless and pervasive?

“I am sorry for you young women who have to carry on the work in the next 10 years, for suffrage was a symbol, and you have lost your symbol,” Anna Howard Shaw said in 1920. “There is nothing for women to rally around.”

As they rally around their candidate, Clinton’s supporters will have to decide if they are mollified — or even more aggrieved — by the history she evokes.

* Susan Faludi is the author of The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America.