Thinking cranky thoughts
By Johna Strickland
Sunday, December 30, 2007 2:56 AM PST
I had two thoughts this week: “Why does the only female presidential candidate have to be Hillary Clinton?” and “Pakistan’s former prime minister is a she?” I guess those are more of questions, but when you don’t have a lot of spare time to be brilliant, you gotta take what comes to you.
So I took them.
First, I thought, the time for women to gain the United States presidency has already come. Like 50 years ago. Seriously.
American women started their organized fight for suffrage and equality in 1848. Twenty-one years later, the first state, Wyoming, gave women the vote. Idaho came around in 1896, Oregon in 1912.
In 1920, Congress got around to passing the constitutional suffrage amendment first introduced in 1878.
The first woman, Rep. Jeanette Rankin, R-Mont., arrived in Congress three years before that amendment.
To date, 244 women have been members of Congress. The 110th Congress has a record 90 women — 74 in the House, 16 in the Senate — serving this year. Congress has something like 530 members in all.
All this struggle for women to have a place in government, and the only hope for 2008 is Hillary.
I never did like that woman. I can’t figure out why either.
I tried arguing that she was too aggressive, but a professor of mine said, “Honey, a woman who is strong, knows what she wants and goes after it is what y’all keep talking about admiring, so why hate Hillary?”
That stalled me for a while. Hillary is the only woman in this nation taking on the gazillion male candidates. I decided to respect her, but that doesn’t mean I like her.
I turned my brain cells to Benazir Bhutto.
Although, I have friends from the Middle East and intellectually know the area is not backwoodsy, I still categorize Pakistan as rather second world-ish. Yet the country had a female former prime minister. Is that not beautiful?
Sri Lanka gave the world its first female elected premier minister in 1960. Argentina elected the first female president in 1974.
Today, women have led Liberia, India, Finland, Israel, Bosnia and other countries. But a female hasn’t commanded the White House, even as vice president. Only recently has a woman, Nancy Pelosi, been a speaker in a house of Congress.
Drat. I’d thought reading up on women in government would contribute to this week’s thoughts. Not so. I just feel cranky now.
I’d come to the crux of my thoughts: Women in the U.S. may feel free and powerful, but they aren’t.
This country likes to tell us we are the greatest nation on earth: the most powerful, the most technologically advanced, the most civilized and the most helpful to our neighbors striving to build democratic societies of equality. Yet, women don’t get to lead.
In the war on terror, the U.S. has assisted Afghanistan in writing a constitution. This document gives the president the power to appoint 1⁄3 of the House of the Elders in the National Assemble and 50 percent must be women.
Nice to see American leaders helping women somewhere, huh?
I don’t know what all this means. Probably that I should stop complaining about the lack of women in government and do something. Like voting for Hillary ... maybe.
