Views » March 22, 2004

Bushettes: Its a Bad Thing

By Susan J. Douglas

Ah, the dreams of the women’s movement. We envisioned a day when there would be women in high places, and here we are, with a female national security adviser, a female Secretary of the Interior, a female Labor Secretary and even our latest female corporate felon.

Now, I’ve never been a fan of Martha. Her elevation of domestic chores to an obsession, the profusion, in her magazines, of those dictatorial images insisting that your house be a sun-drenched, voile-curtained, neat-as-a-pin showroom, and her smug condescension while trimming the rough edges off poached eggs, all made me long to throw a cream pie at her.

But like many, I see her prosecution and conviction as a cross between showboating by federal prosecutors and good old-fashioned backlash. Did Martha lie? Looks like she did. Is Kenneth Lay still enjoying one of his five homes in Aspen? You bet.

And there’s more to it than just her being a celebrity. Martha’s biggest crime, it seems, was to blur and confound the codes of gender in ways that have made a lot of men, and many women, uncomfortable. A woman who is an expert in hand-washing sweaters and folding napkins into the shape of flamingos is supposed to be nurturing, generous, innocent of ambition, focused on family. But Martha, even before the trial, came to be known as a tough, demanding, ruthless businesswoman who didn’t suffer fools and wasn’t particularly cuddly.

In a society where we police the borders of gender relentlessly, through clothing, gestures, behavior, language and activities, what are we to make of a woman who sells female domestication in a honey-hued voice but behind the cameras acts like what we expect of a tough-as-nails male CEO? Martha was an irresistible target not only because of her fame but because she seemed a housewife with way too much power. Worse, she was a housewife who got paid—a lot—for her labors, and a housewife who seemed greedy.

To emphasize that such a gender offender deserves whatever she gets, TV news reporters have slavered over accounts of how Stewart will be subjected to a cavity-search when she goes to prison. Has the viewing public been urged to imagine the same humiliation for Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling?

At the same time, ironically, Team Bush has successfully used women, in cabinet positions and elsewhere, to make the administration seem female-friendly and egalitarian. To read more about this, run, do not walk, to the nearest bookstore to get Laura Flanders’ terrific new book, Bushwomen.

She begins with Katherine Harris, and other chapters are devoted to Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, Ann Veneman, Elaine Chao, Christine Todd Whitman and Gale Ann Norton. Of the five female cabinet members she profiles, only one has children. The rest are simply unfamiliar with struggles faced by millions of mothers to juggle the demands of work and family. All have “benefited directly from feminism—the movement they now cast as women’s enemy,” writes Flanders, who chides mainstream women’s organizations for failing to criticize the policies and actions of powerful women.

Flanders notes how sexist and racist conventions in the news media actually help make these women seem less powerful (and dangerous) than they actually are. For example, all you have to do is say “Katherine Harris” and one immediately pictures garish makeup and shellacked hair. “No one,” writes Flanders, “was made more fun of in the media” and “no one did more, more carefully, to use the power of her public office to steal the presidency for her candidate.”

Or take the endless pieces that have been written about Condoleezza Rice’s childhood in ’50s Birmingham, Alabama, and how she rose from there to success. A New York Times piece on Rice, for example, emphasized her hair, dress size and place of birth but “didn’t discuss her views on national security until the twenty-seventh paragraph.” No Times story so far has dwelt on Vice-President Cheney’s youth as a white man in “pre-civil rights Nebraska,” notes Flanders, writing that this news frame about Rice both “smacks of racism” and ignores what, exactly, she did after Birmingham.

The Bushwomen, writes Flanders, are “an extremist administration’s female front” and if the corporate media took them more seriously “they wouldn’t stand a chance.” They have been used to mask the ongoing gender gap plaguing the Republican Party. Flanders reminds us that in 2000 Bush had an 11-point margin over Gore with men, but that he lost women by the same amount. Thus it is crucial for women to look beyond the cabinet window dressing and learn what these Bushwomen are really about.

The Martha drama and Team Bush’s acute awareness of the gender gap ensures that gender will be front and center, if in often sneaky, subliminal and superficial ways in the coming campaign. Bushwomen and the Stewart conviction remind us how fatuous stereotypes keep us all in line and undermine women and the issues that matter to us most.

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• Reader Comments

  I am always amazed at how quickly women and minorites are held to the strictest letter of the law, while white men are traditionally given the benefit of the doubt and treated as if they are just incapable of staying within the law.  I worked as a crime scene technician for a large police department for some time.  During that time I saw things such as white boys who stole a car being taken home by the police.  They would arrest black boys and hold them to the exact letter of the law.  Now with Martha, she is being held to the exact letter of the law.  I understand that she was aquitted of the orginial charges of insider trading.  The crime for which she is being punished is lying to a federal investigator.  Of course she would not have been talking to an investigator in the first place if not for the original charges.  So essentially she is going to jail for lying.  Interesting that President Bush has lied numerous times to us and is not under arrest.  Also interesting that he sat on the board of an oil company that was about to tank and that he unloaded his stocks just before that happened.  He then told investigators that he did not know it was going to happen.  So he gets rewarded for lying and Martha goes to jail.  Ah the rewards of being a rich white male.

  Posted by Michele Nichols on Mar 23, 2004 at 10:54 PM

  Poor Martha?  Any time a billionaire goes down, be they woman or man, that’s good news.

  No one “deserves” that kind of power and influence; no one earns it.

  Ruthless business people are to be despised. 

  Sure, it’s a shame Lay isn’t already serving a long sentence.  You could add quite a large number of people to that list.

  The U.S. prison population has grown enormously over the last decade or so…with many a wrong person sentenced via “the letter of the law.”  Why is Martha getting so much attention while each and every one of these gets ignored? 

  Posted by terry on Mar 25, 2004 at 12:59 PM

  Great article!  MsMagazine Online is running a poll on whether Martha Stewart is a victim of a Bitch Hunt.
  You can see it at www.msmagazine.com

  Posted by Jeanne Clark on Mar 25, 2004 at 10:57 PM

  Michele,

  Actually your understanding is backwards.

  Charges of lying to investigators were dropped.  She was convicted of insider ttrading.

  Posted by Nus on Mar 26, 2004 at 10:14 PM

  There are far more males than females in prison—yet another example of the war on boys.  Martha will get minimal jail time—a slap on the wrist.

  Posted by Pat on Mar 27, 2004 at 4:37 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 12 posts.

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