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Woman President
Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture
By Kristina Horn Sheeler, Karrin Vasby Anderson Texas A&M University Press
Copyright © 2013 Kristina Horn Sheeler and Karrin Vasby Anderson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62349-010-2
CHAPTER 1
The First Shall Be Last
The "Pioneer" Frame as a Constraint for Women Presidential Candidates
The 2006 midterm election season seemed to portend a new era in US presidential politics. With buzz about the 2008 presidential campaign well under way, the August 28, 2006, issue of Time magazine put the junior US senator from New York, Hillary Clinton, on its cover, with seasoned political reporter Karen Tumulty claiming that "Hillary would step into the [US presidential] race as the instant front runner." Clinton was popular with her New York constituents, had proven ability to raise money, and her candidacy was treated seriously—even enthusiastically—by many mainstream media outlets. The early buzz seemed to confirm polling data that suggested that US voters were willing to elect someone other than a white, heterosexual, Christian male to the highest office in the land. A 2005 poll conducted jointly by the White House Project and Roper Public Affairs reported that 79 percent of respondents stated that they were "very comfortable" or "somewhat comfortable" with a woman US president, with only 19.4 percent of respondents reporting to be "not very comfortable" or "not at all comfortable." The results of a 2006 Gallup poll reported more modest support for women, with 61 percent of respondents indicating that "Americans are ready to elect a woman," followed closely by African American or black candidates (58 percent). The same poll rated public receptiveness for a woman president higher than that for presidential candidates "with other background characteristics, including Hispanic (41%), Asian (33%), Latter-Day Saint or Mormon (29%), Atheist (14%), or gay or lesbian (7%)."
Since before woman suffrage, US women have envisioned the moment when they could lead the nation, yet, ninety years after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, US women held only a small percentage of seats in Congress and no woman presidential candidate from a major party had made it past the primaries. According to a list compiled by the Interparliamentary Union and ranking the percentage of national parliamentary seats held by women worldwide, the United States ranked an abysmal seventy-second in the world in November 2010. Similarly, in terms of presidential leadership, the United States lags behind countries as diverse as Ireland, New Zealand, the Philippines, Germany, Liberia, Great Britain, and Chile, among others, which each have elected women as heads of state.
Given the historical and cultural resistance to women leaders in the United States, it was no surprise that by October 2006, speculation favored the theory that Senator Clinton would leverage her considerable amount of Democratic funding to secure the role of Senate minority/majority leader, paving the way for the significantly less experienced US senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, to emerge as a popular Democratic presidential nominee in 2008. In fact, an October 23, 2006, Time magazine cover announced journalist Joe Klein's theory under the headline "Why Barack Obama Could Be the Next President." Of course, cultural barriers exist that have typically precluded the election of any nonwhite male, and the national popularity of African Americans such as Obama and Colin Powell represents a broadening of the US presidential image. Nonetheless, despite Americans' professed willingness to admit women to the Oval Office, research demonstrates the resilience of the cultural, political, and economic barriers barring the door to women.
This chapter argues that the "pioneer" frame represents a significant discursive component impeding US women's presidential aspirations, one that is obscured by the rhetoric of postfeminism. When female candidates characterize themselves as pioneers or are framed as such by the media, two notions of the metaphor can be at play. A pioneer is someone who is first to do something, paving the way for those who follow. The assumption is that although "pioneering" individuals face hardship as they pursue a new goal, their efforts make the way easier for those who follow. Additionally, in the realm of electoral politics, the pioneer metaphor often invokes a distinctively western mythos that connotes frontier spirit, rugged individualism, and heroic masculinity.
More specifically, this chapter contends that the pioneer frame, which has been applied to each woman candidate for the US presidency since the nineteenth century, undermines the credibility of women candidates, underscoring the transgressive and oxymoronic quality of all woman presidential candidates. Although political women have benefited from the efforts of their predecessors, the pioneer metaphor obscures women's progress in the political sphere. The pioneer metaphor is potentially more debilitating for women than for men because: (1) the "first" metaphor situates women candidates as perpetual novices, (2) a male candidate will always exemplify the heroic masculinity implicit in the frontier narrative more authentically than a female candidate, and (3) postfeminist discourses inhibit recognition of the ideological, cultural, and political forces that contain women's agency and make the pioneer metaphor potentially debilitating. Women's presidential bids will gain traction only when one or more female presidential candidates displace the pioneer narrative and replace it with a story that locates women at the center of US political leadership, rather than at its periphery.
Women and Political Agency in US Presidential Politics
Decades of research on US women's political agency reveals that despite legal and social prohibitions against public, political action, women have worked since colonial times to assert their rights of citizenship and shape the public, political character of the United States. Although the purpose of this chapter is not to rehearse the history of women's political activities, it should be noted that women's path to the US presidency was paved by the founding mothers of colonial times, antebellum abolitionists, the temperance, suffrage, and labor activists of the Progressive Era, women candidates and officeholders of the mid- to late twentieth century, and women voters whose combined voice has the power to swing elections.
In addition to enacting political agency as citizens, activists, voters, candidates, and officeholders, women have taken steps to run for the US presidency. The burgeoning literature on women presidential candidates poses a number of explanations for the failure of women's presidential candidacies to gain traction. First, the office of US president is gendered masculine in ways that other elective offices are not. Thus, the public, the major political parties, the media, and campaign funding sources have trouble framing women presidential candidates as legitimate contenders. Second, women presidential candidates historically have had difficulty raising funds, even when they are proven, politically connected figures such as Elizabeth Dole. Although funders will back women candidates for other political offices, the failure of any woman prior to the 2008 election to launch a successful presidential campaign has made enthusiasm for women candidates largely emotional rather than economic. Additionally, women fail to fill presidential "pipelines," such as seats in the US Senate, state governorships, and the vice presidency, in large numbers, in part because of "role conflicts" that encourage them to opt into political service later in life than men and in part because of women's historic exclusion from the political sphere.
Scholars of gender and US political culture have documented the ways in which archetypes of female identity are employed to frame female politicians and political candidates. Women are cast as "puppets" and "pioneers," as "beauty queens" and "bitches," as "Madonna" and "Eve." Shanto Iyengar, Nicholas A. Valentino, Stephen Ansolabehere, and Adam F. Simon explain that cultural stereotypes reinforce gendered campaign frames, noting that "culturally ingrained expectations about the strengths and weaknesses of candidates serve as important filters for interpreting and understanding campaign communication. The typical voter lacks the motivation to acquire even the most elementary level of factual knowledge about the candidates and campaign issues. In low information environments, expectations based on visible cues—including a candidate's gender—take on special importance. Messages that confirm rather than cut against these expectations are more likely to be noticed, assimilated, and retained." Such media messaging has significant consequences for women candidates. Diana B. Carlin and Kelly L. Winfrey document the ways in which "describing women in sexist terms reduces their credibility or may cause them to be seen as less human."
Preliminary academic research on the 2008 campaign indicates that in 2007–8 the media continued its habit of framing women candidates in stereotypical ways. This rich and still emerging research on women and the US presidency has given scant attention to the role that metaphor plays as a rhetorical constraint—one of the many barriers blocking women's entrance to the Oval Office. What could be a frame that asserts a woman's strength, experience, and leadership qualifications instead exaggerates her difference.
Women Presidential Pioneers on a Wagon Train to Nowhere
When women presidential candidates are hailed as pioneers, the metaphor is often deployed as a positive moniker and one that signifies precedence. Presidentiality includes many potential "firsts" for women: the first woman to get her name on a ballot, the first woman to be nominated by any political party, the first woman to be included in a major-party primary process, the first woman to be a major-party frontrunner during the primaries, the first woman to be nominated by a major party, and so forth. This laundry list of "firsts" tacitly suggests that women are perpetually new to presidential politics while men are the familiar standard. This masculinized presidential history becomes problematic for women insofar as successful "candidates for president promise to be like the best of their predecessors, strong leaders in a nation whose political culture memorializes strong leadership." The difficulty for women is not that they cannot demonstrate strong leadership but that it is more difficult for women to instantiate themselves into a thoroughly masculinized presidential history. Moreover, because there are so many "firsts" for women candidates, the media habitually apply a "novelty frame" to every woman candidate, making the proposition of backing a woman candidate seem risky. Male presidential pioneers like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln are historical and cultural heroes; female presidential pioneers are either historical unknowns or cultural firsts.
When deployed in US political culture, the pioneer metaphor connotes much more than chronological precedence. It also invokes a frontier mythos. The notion of the frontier that has come to define US culture was advanced by Frederick Jackson Turner, whose essay, "The Significance of the American Frontier in American History" (1893), announced that the democratic, freedom-loving character of the United States arose from the frontier and the American West. Karen Dodwell explains that Turner's so-called "frontiersman" "defined what it meant to be an American as he moved west and left European influence behind. Most importantly, frontier life developed the individualism that promoted democracy, and it created a buoyant American character that thrived on freedom, strength, inquisitiveness, invention, and expansion." Ronald Carpenter argues that as a result of Turner's work, "a national hero emerged, one whose mythic character was capable of solving virtually any problem facing Americans, at any time." That "national hero," that "frontiersman," is the American president.
The frontier hero has proven to be a relatively elastic metaphor for men, with ranchers (Theodore Roosevelt), celluloid cowboys (Ronald Reagan), and neo-westerners (George W. Bush) equally able to invoke the frontier mythos. Even men whose locational identities were far removed from the West benefited from identification with the frontier mythos. John F. Kennedy presided over the conquering of the "new frontier," deploying that metaphor to boost space exploration and launch the Peace Corps. Barack Obama's 2008 campaign rhetoric aligned himself and his audience with "the pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness."
Women presidential candidates have had a much more difficult time articulating an identity that resonates with the frontier pioneer in a way that harnesses its power. The frontier myth has proven challenging for women to negotiate in part because of the way it has been appropriated in the American psyche as something entirely masculine. Janice Hocker Rushing states that "the frontier has always been a patriarchal myth in which women were overwhelmingly dominated by men. Though necessary to life on the real frontier, women were rarely the center of action in the myth; those heroines who did appear were usually caricatures, masculine personalities in female bodies. Ever-present in the background as helpmates, mothers, captives of the Indians, schoolmarms, and saloon girls, women were nevertheless primarily supplements" [emphasis in original].
Jenni Calder concurs, noting that "very, very few Western makers ... have made convincing use of women's life in the West, either in terms of conveying something like the reality of their existence or of dramatising their mythic potential." Despite these limitations, a handful of women politicians running for offices other than the US presidency—especially those from western states—have invoked the frontier mythos productively. In previous research, we have examined women governors who embraced the ethos of the pioneer and found that its populist dimensions "enabled them to appeal to the 'common people.'" A few women have even negotiated successfully the hypermasculinity of the pioneer metaphor. When Ann Richards was governor of Texas, she crafted an unruly pioneer persona that complemented the "Lone Star mystique" of Texas, allowing her to "perpetuat[e] the mythos of the Texas frontier experience" in order to "create identification with her audience." Even so, the Texas governorship is a relatively weak office since the governor shares executive power with five other independently elected officeholders. Consequently, what works symbolically for that office is not necessarily transferable to the US presidency. Even in Texas, Richards's appeal as the unruly pioneer lost its luster after just one term. She was unseated by George W. Bush, the neo-westerner destined to become cowboy in chief of the United States. Despite his pedigree as the wealthy, Yale-educated son of a US president, Bush's masculinity allowed him to convincingly inhabit the pioneer persona without the dimension of unruliness that ultimately disciplined Richards.
The pioneer metaphor, then, connotes both precedence and the frontier mythos. It is frequently deployed by candidates, the media, and historians who reflect on women presidential candidates, often in ways that align with feminist goals and values: women are as capable as men of presidential leadership and those who pave the way to the Oval Office should be lauded. What critics have been slow to examine, however, is how easily this framing also comports with postfeminist rhetoric, intimating that the election of a woman president is inevitable—only the passage of time and the industry of individual women candidates are needed in order for women to conquer the final frontier of the US presidency. Such framing actively displaces sexism as a barrier to female presidentiality while paradoxically bolstering the supposition that pioneering women candidates are perpetual presidential novices.
In what remains of this chapter, we provide a brief overview of women's historical bids for the US presidency, demonstrating the ways in which the pioneer metaphor has functioned as a debilitating frame for women candidates and tracing the development of the postfeminist narrative of the inevitability of female presidentiality. Our analysis is suggestive rather than exhaustive. Our intention is not to provide a complete examination of each candidate's rhetorical strategies. Instead, we focus on the ubiquity of the pioneer narrative as a frame for women presidential candidates in news accounts and historical narratives. Both primary and secondary sources are instructive in unmasking the durability of the pioneer metaphor because they demonstrate the fact that women are both framed as pioneers during their presidential campaigns and remembered as such well after their campaigns have ended. Moreover, our understanding of contemporary women candidates is shaped not just by the campaign rhetoric of their predecessors but also by the historiography that has framed women presidential candidates throughout history. After providing a brief overview of women's presidential bids throughout history, we examine the announcement speeches of Victoria Woodhull, Margaret Chase Smith, Elizabeth Dole, and Carol Moseley Braun. These four speeches are significant because they typify the diverse strategies women candidates have used to assert their presidentiality and to instantiate themselves as feminists.
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Excerpted from Woman President by Kristina Horn Sheeler, Karrin Vasby Anderson. Copyright © 2013 Kristina Horn Sheeler and Karrin Vasby Anderson. Excerpted by permission of Texas A&M University Press.
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