Abolish The First Lady

The Office of the First Lady of the United States needs to end. There are many problems with institutional nepotism of this sort. The foremost one is the fact that we allocate budgetary resources and authority to a person whose sole qualification is being married to an elected representative.

But secondary and just as important is the corrosive effect it has on the society that encourages this. You create this fictitious family with the President as Father and the First Lady as Mother and then there's always a place for the Mother to go about visiting soup kitchens and such while Father does the work. This kind of platitudinous waving to the crowds and advocating is what she is supposed to do, not work a job of her own and be defined in any way separately from Spouse of The Guy Who Does Things.

PEW's Survey reveals what people really think (45% say they aren't tough enough)

In fact, the expectation of this role that a woman could play is common in the US: where the ideal of femininity is unthreatening, caring home-maker, the Virgin Mary. As a consequence, Americans ask themselves silly questions: "Could Hillary Clinton push the button if it came to Nuclear War?". That's a pretty comical question to ask of someone who famously urged the President to bomb Kosovo but it's a perfectly reasonable question to ask of someone you consider Die Bundeshausfrau. After all, does the child-rearer and pie-baker have the iron will needed to wage war? Not really, no. Cheng Xin is this ideal.

Many newspapers tried to make it seem particularly rosy by pointing out that many Americans think women are tough enough to be President. But when any specific woman was considered, very few thought so.

Americans today appear largely receptive to the idea of a female candidate. A poll by the Westhill Partners and the National Journal’s Hotline asked 1,015 Americans if a woman was “tough enough to be president,” and 64 percent strongly agreed with the statement. When faced with the choice of Rice or Clinton, however, the support fell considerably, with the former receiving 21 percent of those polled, and the latter 32 percent. This drop may correspond to party-identification, with staunch Democrats refusing to support the Republican Rice, and solid Republicans detesting Clinton. Another possibility, however, is that Americans are more uncomfortable with a female president than they would like to think.

This isn't universally true in the Western World. No one ever really cared who Angela Merkel's husband was. Some amount of that is that Germany is far less important than the US, but that's not everything. The real reason no one cared is that he's just a guy there who stands or falls on his own merits. It isn't even universally true in the Anglophone world: Julia Gillard and Theresa May were pilloried but not for being weak women. And both those countries have a history of women in leadership.

And that's how it should be. Other nations have their Margaret Thatchers and their Indira Gandhis - women who exercised agency. We should end this nepotistic appointment and maybe we will find that women can play this executive role when they are not considered the National Housewife.