Weekend Focus: Race, Sex and Hillary Clinton

Starting this weekend, a couple of features on the Women's Village and elsewhere across the IMDiversity network attempt to look back at the week's hub-bub surrounding the race-gender split arising in the Democratic Presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

First, we track a series of Clinton-Obama analyses of from the Associated Press that provide different takes on the tit-for-tat between the campaigns, and looking at how race and gender, racism and mysogyny, play into the coverage. It also looks at the impact of women voters, as well as the importance to the campaigns of parsing out that vote by generation, class, race and philosohpy.

In another feature, Hispanic American Village Editor Carol Amoruso reflects on the (false?) dichotomy threatening to divide voters' loyalties in the party, in Race and Gender at Odds Again as Steinem Wades into the Clinton-Obama Fray.

On the African American Village, frequent contributor Kam Williams looks back at the N.H. results and seeks to put the focus elsewhere: on the Diebold Corporation. "For, while the punditocracy has been busy dubbing Hillary Clinton the Comeback Kid and attributing her surprise victory to women rallying to her support in the wake of her eyes welling up on camera, no one’s looking for a more plausible explanation than that overly-publicized Muskie moment.," Williams writes. Suspicious of dubious vote tallying, Williams concludes "we’re again in dire need of U.N. observers during the 2008 primary season, just to give an the democratic process a chance to unfold untainted by fraud."

Additional features will unfold, as our editors and visitors try to interpret the events in what is becoming an unhappily tense time in an otherwise historic election. One reader said that she liked Obama and Clinton "almost equally," and would support either in a general election, but "as a woman, I have to go with Clinton now."

Another wrote that she "resented having to choose" between candidates who each represented a historic political milestone she'd been "waiting for my whole life."

And, should it matter?

We ask in our blog poll for the week: Would you lay issues aside and vote for Hillary Clinton for president for the historic precedent of having a woman in the White House?

What do you think?

Old school feminist to head our oldest university, like it or not

If “fellow” Harvard University academic Dan Kindlon’s surveys are accurate (he goes out of his way in his latest book, Alpha Girls: Understanding the New American Girl and How She is Changing the World—more than an overstatement-- to promote the thoroughness of his research), Drew Gilpin Faust, just-named president of the country’s oldest and most prestigious institution of higher learning, is an irrelevant anachronism, with both a CV and personal history his next-generationers of women disown as an embarrassment to their sex.

Dr. Faust is a historian, having devoted much of her academic life to teaching and chronicling women’s history as well as her own struggles for equality, not just for women, but for African Americans as well. Her biographies note that she grew up as a white southerner with priviledge, but who, early on and much to the consternation of her mother, began to question women’s role in southern society and who, when 9 years old, wrote a letter to President Eisenhower, asking him to end segregation.

The alpha girls of Dr. Kindlon’s book, aged 13 to 22, will be unimpressed, grousing that the struggle for equality of women, in the home, at school, in the workplace, is old hat; they’re tired of hearing their mothers’ “You don’t know what it was like out there when I was coming up,” and boast that their equality with, even superiority to, males is a no-brainer.

In an early Times news story, Dr. Faust’s “collaborative style and considerable people skills” were praised. At the same time, some male faculty members grumbled that this more feminine, if we may, management style was too feeble for the tough job of managing tough issues involving tough contenders. Kindlon’s alpha girls would agree. Their role models tend more to Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher, advocating for a pro-active, tough-guy, take-no-prisoners approach to getting on in the world.

Stay tuned to the Women’s Village pages for a frontal lobotomy (wasn’t too difficult, as there wasn’t much grey matter to excise) on Coach Kindlon’s Warriors. Meanwhile, my hat’s (without the veil) off to Drew Gilpin Faust. You go, girl!

Pelosi Steps Up as Democrats Shift Balance of Power in DC

With U.S. Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1994, Nancy Pelosi is now in line to become the first woman Speaker of the House.

While there remain before her some tricky negotiations within her Party, which in many ways turned toward a more moderate position last night, Pelosi looks forward to a powerful role that can significantly control the country’s legislative agenda. The Speaker of the House is also second in the line of presidential succession, behind only the Vice President.