Abolish The First Lady
The Office of the First Lady of the United States needs to end. Institutional nepotism of this sort presents several problems. Primarily, we allocate budgetary resources and authority to a person whose sole qualification is being married to an elected representative.
Equally concerning is the corrosive effect it has on the society that encourages this. The office creates this fictitious family with the President as Father and the First Lady as Mother and leaving a place for the Mother to go about visiting soup kitchens and such while Father does the work. This platitudinous waving to the crowds and advocating is her prescribed role, not work a job of her own and be defined in any way separately from Spouse of The Guy Who Does Things.
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[1] 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. Like Chéng Xīn[2], she is too soft.
Many newspapers tried to make it seem particularly rosy [3] 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.[4]
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. While Germany is far less important than the US, 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. Both their countries have a history of women in leadership.
And that's how it should be. Other nations have their Margaret Thatchers and Indira Gandhis - agents of power, not caretakers. End this nepotistic appointment, and we will find that women in the U.S. are just as capable when they are no longer the National Housewife.
Notes[edit]
- ↑ Gail Sheehy, Hillary's Choice, Hillary's Hidden Hand in Kosovo p. 344
- ↑ Chéng Xīn (程心) from the third book Death's End of Chinese sci-fi trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Past is a soft stereotypically feminine woman who is given (spoilers follow here) control of a Mutually-Assured Destruction device and fails to threaten sufficiently to use it, resulting in humanity's enemies conquering mankind after destroying the device. The reason for her failure to do so is that she cannot bear the destruction of all these beings. I've seen on Reddit that she was supposed to be cast as a man and Cixin Liu's editor suggested the gender swap, but I can't find a reference to that on the Internet apart from these Redditors.
- ↑ “A woman” is tough enough to be president (but maybe not Clinton, Rice), poll says
- ↑ Daily Collegian Can a woman become president?
