It was inspiring to watch the Obama inauguration. Those two million people in Washington, so moved, so joyous at having finally “overcome” – made me sort of wish I could have been there and have fully gotten into the spirit of it all. And I do think that Barack Obama will make a good President.
I think he’ll be more of a true statesman than we’ve had in a long time. He has the right temperament for the job. He won’t go off the deep end, feeling a need to assert our American supremacy over other countries and cultures. He won’t make rash, pressured decisions. To piggyback clichés – I trust that, as much as is possible, Obama will steer the ship of State successfully through rough waters and keep it on an even keel.
Having said all that, I hate to be a naysayer by raking up anything negative about Obama, especially since my objection might at least initially appear to be a quibble. However Obama said something along the way that gave me a glimpse into a prejudice he’s harboring and that really saddened me – because I believe it’s a prejudice we must to work harder to eradicate.
When Barbara Walters was interviewing Obama and his wife, she brought up the jolly topic of the dog he intended to adopt for his daughters. Since there are allergy problems in his family, he initially said a shelter dog probably wouldn’t be an option. With that, Walters suggested a few breeds such as poodles that don’t shed, but that are incidentally rather petite animals. A dismissive look came over Obama’s face, and he said that anything like that would be “too girlie” for him.
My heart sank. In that moment, I knew for sure we still have a lot more to overcome. It might seem I’m making a mountain out of a molehill when I take someone to task for dismissing a dog because it is too “girlie.” But in that remark, I do see a mountain that women still have to climb before they can stand on an equal footing with men in this country and in the world.
Just imagine what would have happened if Walters had suggested some breed of dog that has long black strands of hair, and Obama had dismissed the idea of getting any such breed because it was “too pickaninny.” A wave of shock and protest would have rolled around the world. And rightly so. Whether you dismiss something as “girlie” or as “pickaninny” – you are applying a diminishing, infantalizing term to a whole group of people, and you are floating the presumption that it’s OK to feel disdain for that group based on such a stereotype. Both “girlie” and “pickaninny” carry connotations of being laughable and lesser.
When Arnold Schwarzenegger refers to someone disparagingly as a “girlie-man,” I might be inclined to take it more in stride, considering the source is a former bodybuilder who no doubt had some habitual competitive reason for sneering at anyone less muscular. However, the usage is never really acceptable. Every female is or was once a girl, just as every black person is or was once a youth. So to use slangy, demeaning terms for that state of youth in whole segments of the population can’t do anything but reflect and perpetuate prejudice.
The only difference between “girlie” and “pickaninny” as pejoratives is that the former is so ubiquitous a usage, we accept it and have largely become deaf to the dismissal inherent in it. That fact that Michelle Obama and millions of other women sit by in cheerful, accepting silence when men disdain something because it’s “girlie” - i.e. because it has the assumed frivolous, feeble, second-class qualities of a girl – is testimony to how embedded this form of prejudice is in our culture. We’ve become deaf to the barb in the usage. We’re inured to it. Men automatically get away with using the term, and women themselves will play along and even bandy the term among themselves, although usually in a slightly different, “Hey, girlfriend,” context.
I’m not accusing President Obama of having any deep antifeminist streak. But I did feel that pinprick of disillusionment - that “Oh, no, not you too” regret when I heard Obama toss away poodles as an option because, being girl-like, they were beneath him. And his off-handed comment reminded me of the larger battle women have had to fight to attain some degree of equality. I was reminded of how historically in the U.S., women have had to wait, and wait, and wait, and wait… to gain respect. They have again and again deferred their dreams in order to allow black men to advance theirs. Black men have preceded women in being recognized as full human beings – in law, and in language.
Before the Civil War, it was primarily women who spearheaded the abolitionist movement. However, these women often felt they were fighting for a package deal. They felt that when slaves gained their freedom and were given the vote, women would automatically be included in this enfranchisement. They felt that with abolition would come an across-the-boards recognition of human rights. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other suffragettes organized the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 with high hopes that their arguments would be heard and that all the oppressed would soon be liberated in unison. Women, especially Southern women, joined hands with African-Americans (in spirit if not always literally), to march forward toward this goal of universal suffrage.
However, there was a lot of pressure on the women to take a back seat. It was felt that if they pushed for their rights, they would trivialize the whole effort to extend civil rights to others and would jeopardize the more crucial abolitionist movement. Many women reluctantly did defer to this sentiment. They agreed that slavery was the greater evil and that they shouldn’t do anything to jeopardize the eradication of that institution. If the world thought that women’s demands for the vote were silly, just so much more “girlie” nonsense, it would be counterproductive to link those demands to the more legitimate claims of black males.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other more militant suffragettes continued to press for equality, even in the face of all the urgings they received to “cool it.” But indeed they were headed for disappointment. The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, granting black American males the right to vote, was ratified in 1870. Women’s claims, still deemed by the majority to be ridiculous, were ignored. Worse yet, the black men who had been women’s comrades throughout the years of struggle for abolition and equality - almost all abandoned women after 1870. Once they got the right to vote, most of them never looked back. They didn’t extend any helping hands back to women in their on-going struggle.
Some say it was that betrayal that hardened the hearts of many activist Southern women against blacks – and that ultimately fed into what became the South’s uniquely virulent form of discrimination against blacks. On the whole though, it wasn’t so much bitterness that the women felt, as disappointment, depression, and even heartbreak. Although Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and others continued to write, speak, and organize on behalf of women’s suffrage, many women just gave up after the Emancipation Proclamation and the 15th Amendment so pointedly failed to include them in the new liberties. Much of the fighting spirit went out of the movement.
It wasn’t until the turn of the century that the movement was re-energized by a new wave of feminists. Then women such as Alice Paul in the U.S. and the Pankhurst family in England started a radical assault on the bastion of male supremacy. They chained themselves to pillars; they marched. In the U.S., they appealed to President Wilson over and over again to consider their claims.
Woodrow Wilson was another intelligent, essentially decent President who fought for an end to all imperialist presumptions – our own and those of other countries. He gave his all to trying to establish the League of Nations on a sound footing, with U.S. participation. However Wilson had this one blind spot. He couldn’t see women as true equals. He probably never used a word such as “girlie.” That wasn’t a word in such currency then. But records show that he at least privately thought women’s claims were “frivolous, flibbertigibbet, ludicrous.” He consistently refused to even give the suffragettes a hearing.
It took a long time to wear away his reluctance enough to get him to lend his support to the push to grant women the vote. It wasn’t until 1920 that women finally, finally won that right – with the 19th Amendment. This was a full 50 years after black men had been granted the legal right. I’m not so old, but my mother was the first woman in my family who could vote when she turned twenty-one. My great-grandmother and grandmother, although born in the U.S., could not.
And although women now have the right to vote and a variety of other legal rights, they are still pervasively devalued in so many social ways. Black men seem to have preceded them once again in commanding respect.
If a man were to complain, “I just can’t figure blacks out. I don’t know what they want,” there’d be a riot of protest. He’d no doubt be roundlytaken to task for the remark. Since he’d be assuming that all blacks are alike, all inscrutably erratic and whimmed, he’d probably receive a lot of lectures about the need to remember that black people are individuals and that any right-thinking person would know to consider them on an individual basis, not to lump them as a homogeneous mass.
However if the same man complains, “I just can’t figure women out. I don’t know what they want,” it’s taken as a perfectly acceptable piece of barroom philosophy. In that case, he probably receives a few commiserating pats on the back and responses of, “I hear you, buddy.”
Similarly, if a little boy were to announce, “I hate blacks! They’re icky! They’re stupid,” he’d no doubt receive some swift attitude correction, if his parents were the least bit modern and liberal in their thinking. However, when the same little boy announces, “I hate girls! They’re icky! They’re stupid,” most parents think it’s cute. They view such an attitude as a normal phase, one that every boy passes through on his way to taking the obverse view of “liking the girls” and vigorously pursuing them – all of them - one big, fabulous, indivisible conquest for him.
Which brings us back to the original point. If a man were to disdain something because it was “too pickininny, too Buckwheat, too blackie,” he would probably be branded as a racist and ostracized by most informed people. However, when he disdains something because it is “too girlie,” almost no one even notices, least of all the woman sitting next to him through life.
It’s not that I want to add another brick to the heavy load of political correctness that we’ve been hauling lately. I’m all in favor of wild, offensive, irreverent talk that’s recognized as such. I’m in favor of agreeing with and playing into stereotypes in order to float them up there for all to see and puncture. But when diminishing references are passed off and passed over as commonplaces, when they are scattered over the ground as prosaic as pebbles – that’s when I object.
So Barack Obama’s election signaled a major victory against prejudice. However, there are other battles against prejudice to be fought. There are all the casual, deprecating references to women, to old people, to other groups of people that are still routinely acceptable. And victory in all these other battles seems as if it might elude us for a long time to come.
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