April 24, 2007
Cowgirl Hall of Fame, Political Division Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:55 PM EST An article by Alexandra Starr in The New Republic (reprinted here in the New York Post) contains a disconcerting revelation about New Jersey’s former governor, Jim McGreevey. Governor McGreevey is best remembered for his fondness, as recalled in his recently published memoirs, for pressing the flesh of his constituents New Jersey–style by trolling for company at turnpike rest stops. But it turns out that when he wasn’t busy making friends at the Vince Lombardi Service Area, Gov. McGreevey liked to ogle female strippers with his fellow politicians. Anything for diversity in the Garden State. Ms. Starr blames the pervasive sleaze of New Jersey politics (which certainly did not begin or end with McGreevey) for the state’s low percentage of women in elected office. I’m not sure I buy that, but I was struck by one sentence in the article. After reeling off figures on the low numbers of female officeholders in several Northeastern states, she writes: “Yet many conservative Western states proved surprisingly hospitable to female politicians.” There is nothing surprising about female politicians in the West. Wyoming let women vote in 1869, as soon as it was organized as a territory, and Utah did the same in 1870, with both reaffirming the policy when they became states. And here are the other states that enacted female suffrage before World War I: Colorado (1893), Idaho (1896), Washington (1910), California (1911), Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon (all 1912), Illinois (1912, along with Alaska Territory), and Nevada and Montana (both 1914). As for women officeholders, Utah elected a woman state senator in its very first election (among the candidates she defeated was her husband; details can be found here if you don’t mind all the stifled giggling). Rep. Jeannette Rankin, who voted against U.S. entry into both World War I and World War II, represented Montana. As Ms. Starr acknowledges, the nation’s first two female governors, elected in 1924, were in Texas and Wyoming (see this for my scintillating account). After that, there was a long drought, but of the two dozen women elected as state governors beginning in the 1970s, more than half have been from Western states (i.e., those not east of or touching the Mississippi River). As I say, there’s nothing surprising about all this. It’s hard to maintain the notion of hearth and home as woman’s separate sphere when she’s out doing farm chores all day long, and in any case Westerners have long been skeptical about Eastern customs. Ms. Starr concedes much of this, and in general she seems enthusiastic about how government works in the West. But her gratuitous introduction of “conservative” and “surprising” gives the game away: She can’t believe what’s she’s seeing, because if these folks are so smart and enlightened, why aren’t they liberals? It’s like saying that Alexandra Starr is pretty smart for a woman. What I think is at work here is the common tendency, evoked with great perception and sensitivity here, of political activists to be sensitive to the finest distinctions within their own camp, since that’s where they spend all their time, while lumping together everyone on the other side as an undifferentiated mass. I have heard conservatives express wonder that liberals can be shrewd businessmen, since they’re all a bunch of socialist hippies, aren’t they? In similar fashion, Ms. Starr seems to assume that anyone who votes for a Republican or opposes partial-birth abortion must hate women; you know those “family values” types, right? All this leaves aside the question of whether the percentage of female officeholders is a reliable indicator of the status of women, or whether going to strip clubs is a reliable indicator of sexism. But whether or not these are true, Ms. Starr’s use of “conservative” is telling. A conservative is an admirer of tradition, and the Western states have a much deeper tradition of women in politics and government than the Eastern ones.
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