Oh, genderquake, where are you now? Year of the Woman, were you the year that was? As it has in every election year except 1992, the women’s vote has failed to materialize as a self-conscious political alignment of sufficient magnitude to sweep liberal women candidates and like-minded men into office.
No doubt by the time you read this, the nation’s Op-Ed pages will have run dozens of shrewd number-crunching analyses by Democratic feminist pollsters and pundits, who will manage to discern, even in the biggest Republican triumph in 40 years, proof that the women’s vote is bigger and gender a more potent independent political variable than ever, or would have been, had not some unforeseeable sinister factor-negative campaigning, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Clinton-got in the way. Just you wait, we’ll be told, for all those female candidates in the pipeline to burst forth on the national scene. Always a pipeline, never a pipe! Clarence and Anita, could we play those hearings again?
How bad were results for Democratic women? In the Senate, incumbent Dianne Feinstein managed to squeak past fabulously rich weirdo Michael Huffington, but all three women challengers were defeated, one of whom was Minnesota’s Ann Wynia, running for an open seat and widely favored to win against her pro-life conservative opponent. In the House, Democratic women lost a net five seats. In gubernatorial races, Democratic Party star Ann Richards was unseated in Texas, and challengers Kathleen Brown, Bonnie Campbell, Dawn Clark Netsch, Myrth York and Kathy Karpan lost their respective states of California, Iowa, Illinois, Rhode Island and Wyoming.
“In a way, the pace of progress for women is solid and healthy because it’s not a flash in the pan,” Ruth Mandel, of the Center for the American Woman and Politics, told USA Today. Now there’s a spin doctor.
The notion that political campaigns were going to become shootouts at Gender Gap that Democrats could win was based on two factors: Women tend to be more liberal than men, especially on social issues like abortion and child care, and there are more of them than men.
It was this last fact in particular that led Naomi Wolf to predict last year in Fire With Fire that women, roused from sleep by the Clarence Thomas hearings, would recognize their collective power and start running things their way, as evidenced already by the Year of the Woman and the election of Bill Clinton.
It was never clear, exactly, why the genderquake, as Wolf called it, was supposed to be happening now-after all, women have had the vote since 1920 and in that time have witnessed plenty of insults even more grievous than those Anita Hill suffered at the hands of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Nor was it clear why a slight numerical advantage were supposed to do for women what it hasn’t done for any other slice of the demographic pie. I mean, if voting were all that mattered, wouldn’t the working class be running the country?
Even as demographics, the gender gap is much too simple and static a concept. Why assume that as women heighten their gender pride and commitment to their own issues and interests, men won’t do the same? Indeed, as irritated conservatives often point out, the gender gap is caused as much or more by men moving right as by women becoming or staying liberal.
Passion comes into it too: Women may hold up 53 percent of the sky, but this year many decided to stay home. And in a way you can’t blame them: By the time women candidates have gone through the elaborate makeover demanded by party handlers, they’re no longer talking about the feminist issues that opened up the gender gap in the first place.
EMILY’s List and the other women’s fundraising groups play a funny role here, playing up their candidates’ women’s angle in mailings to women like me, while helping the candidates craft centrist positions and bland personae for the campaign trail: more prisons, yes, but with daycare centers and mammograms.
The real stumbling block for genderquakery, though, is that women aren’t a voting bloc, except under special and temporary circumstances-an unabashedly hostile candidate, say, like rape-joker good ol’ boy Clayton Williams, who lost to Ann Richards in 1990, or a serious threat to legal abortion.
For a while, indeed, women’s pro-choice passion was going to be another factor smuggling liberals into office-remember that? But Republicans aren’t stupid: They’ve figured out how to neutralize the abortion issue-just say you’re pro-choice, even if you’re not, like George Pataki, or campaign with your pro-choice mom, like George W. Bush. Republicans too can run women candidates and men who don’t scratch their crotches in public.
The truth is, most women voters do not have a sense of collective interests that overrides their other concerns in a strong and consistent way. Women may admire a female candidate’s dynamism, and may think government needs more women’s voices. They may even believe that women candidates are more honest and caring, and that they will fight harder for breast-cancer research.
But in the voting booth, most of them are going to act like the middle-class white suburbanites most of them are: worried about their jobs and their children’s futures in a dimming economy, afraid of crime, resentful of immigrants, blacks, taxes, government “waste.” So far, no one, certainly not women candidates, is offering women-or for that matter men-a strikingly different vision, one that would, for example, mobilize the two-thirds of Americans who don’t vote. So there you have it. The gender gap is too small, too manipulable, too crosshatched by class, economic, racial, regional and other interests to make the country safe for women candidates and/or for liberal Democrats.
In fact, the way things are going, the women’s vote may not even keep welfare babies out of those orphanages Charles Murray is so keen on.
