Get Herald RSSI've been thinking a lot recently about femininity. Maybe it's because a woman whose bravery and beauty I admired was gunned down in Pakistan last month. Maybe it's because a woman whose raw ambition I'm learning to love got off to a rocky start in the presidential primaries. Or maybe it's because the political flavor of the week is a man who is decidedly un-macho.
Allow me to explain: In early January, I began a prolific newspaper-reading spree, trying simultaneously to get my head around Benazir Bhutto's assassination and Hillary Clinton's loss in the Iowa caucuses. Amidst countless articles on how Benazir's security could have been better or what Hillary did wrong was one piece on what Barack did right.
Barack, most analysts now agree, won in Iowa because women under 50 preferred him to Hillary. Presented with the chance to elect a female president, the third-wave feminist generation chose a man. According to Lucy Berrington and Jeff Onore of the New York Post, this is exactly what feminism is all about: Revised conceptions of what is acceptable in a woman have resulted in a parallel revision of what is desirable in a man.
Our mothers' feminism told women that to be as successful and powerful as men, we'd have to be like men - burn our bras, wear pantsuits and cut our hair short. We'd refuse to stay home with the kids, and insist upon seats in the boardroom instead.
To family-values conservatives in the 1980s, that model posed a problem: If men were still being macho (and they were), and women were trying to do the same, who would babysit? Thus was born a new feminism that said women could make individual choices. Enter the fashionista-meets-chairwoman of "Sex and the City."
As ambition ceased to be a masculine virtue and trendiness a feminine instinct, men acquired the right to make individual choices too: to be metrosexual dressers, devoted househusbands and still claim their manhood. Moreover, Berrington and Onore argue, to the latest wave of feminist women, these new men are the most attractive sort. Barack's appeal to young women is his androgyny, his "nice guy" optimism, his slender, lanky frame. This is the 21st century jock. Looking through current teen magazines, filled with pictures of puppy-dog types like Jake Gyllenhaal alongside older muscle-men like David Beckham, I'm inclined to buy the argument.
If the new feminism has succeeded, as the Post article claims, women should benefit from the same right to choose, to be judged no less feminine as wives and mothers by their decision to play the power dynamics of Congress, and no less legitimate in the workplace by the decision to wear delicate high heels.
For most of my adolescent life, I've been a proud proponent of this brand of feminism. I've written on this page before about female friends who speak openly about making individualized choices about career and family and see neither path, nor any combination of them, as the necessarily correct or womanly choice. I've become a staunch believer in the new feminism's success at improving women's lot in life.
The last few months make me question that judgment. When Benazir Bhutto was shot, critics immediately cited her foolhardiness in campaigning for reelection out in the open and among the crowd. Yet the same critics blamed her for feminine cowardice during her years in exile. When she came back to politics, they called her a bad mother. When she spoke of her family life, they called her nothing more than a political heiress.
In a less fatal way, Hillary Clinton is in a similar box. When she stayed with Bill after his affair, she was lambasted as a shameless political opportunist and a "bad" woman. When she showed up in New York to run for the Senate in 2000, she was seen as too womanly - just Clinton's wife, and not a professional. When she asserted her independence by playing the moderate hawk in the Senate, she was pegged as heartless and unfeeling, once again not womanly. When she finally broke down on television, her opponents denounced her feminine weakness - she croaked when it counted most.
While the blurring of the gender line has opened the door for men to have it either way - macho or sensitive - it may have closed more doors to women by requiring us to be both. In our effort to eliminate the double-standard of differing standards for men and women, we have only squared it: Now there is also the doubleness of the contradictory criteria a successful woman must meet.
My vote in the Democratic primary was with Hillary on policy grounds long before these dismal reflections on modern day femininity set in. But my support for her has acquired a new fervor as I've watched her candidacy become inextricably bound to her gender. She's tried to be both womanly and androgynous and neither path has proven the "right" one in America's eyes. Nor has public dialogue respected her right to choose her own brand of femininity, the way we've done for everyday women or television characters. Instead, what I read and hear about Hillary suggests that her run is becoming an emblem of the impossible: In politics at least, the glass ceiling is as strong as ever.
When I vote on Feb. 5th, I'll be voting for Clinton because I need to believe in the possibility of individual choice feminism in the upper echelons of power. And I'm meeting more and more women who say the same. Clinton's supporters are not sellouts to cynicism, but idealists with hopes as audacious as her opponents'.
Maha Atal '08 is an "agent of change."
