Why Women Finally Are Winning

By Barbara Ehrenreich

This has been declared the "Year of the Woman," the others having for millenniums belonged to the men. From Geraldine Ferraro in the East to Dianne Feinstein in the West, with plenty more in between, female candidates are challenging the principle that it takes a real manto bounce checks and deliver monologues on C-SPAN. Some observers are already heralding the feminist revolution in which, after centuries of producing the babies that male politicians are required to kiss and attempting to humanize such characters as George Bush and Michael Dukakis, women will finally seize power for themselves. But the optimists are forgetting what might be called Murphy's Law of feminist struggle -- if the very word Murphy hadn't become so politically charged in the past few weeks -- which goes like this: When women get to take over some field of human endeavor, it is usually because that field has been downgraded to the level of broom pushing.

Clerical work is the classic example -- a once prestigious occupation for males that was rendered female and unremunerative in one fell swoop roughly 70 years ago. Even child rearing may be a case in point. The courts started favoring mothers in child-custody suits soon after the turn of the century, which was about the time child labor was outlawed. Women got to keep the kids, in other words, just as they ceased to be moneymakers and became the tiny parasites clamoring for Nintendo that we know so well today.

The same principle applies to religion: by the time women climbed into the pulpit, the real action in the religion business had shifted to televangelists in their TV studios. Or the military: just as women finally got to participate in combat-like roles, the old heroic concept of war was replaced by televised fireworks and the mass bulldozing of enemy infantry.

The list goes on. Women poured into the legal profession only to find that Dan Quayle, Esq., had got there ahead of them, and was campaigning for Malthusian measures to shrink the profession. Or they elbowed their way into male-only clubs -- where they found the huge leather armchairs empty and the air strangely clear of cigar smoke. The men had already run off to the woods, half naked, to pound on drums with Robert Bly.

Most analysts hesitate, of course, to attribute the Year of the Woman to the mounting worthlessness of political endeavor. More commonly, they point to the restiveness of the female electorate, for which we can thank those great feminist organizers -- Clarence Thomas and William Kennedy Smith. We all recall the Hill-Thomas hearings and the ineradicable image of 14 white men forcing one petite black woman to recount porn-movie plots over and over while they endeavored to keep from licking their lips.

The Year of the Woman is long overdue, the optimists would argue, pointing to the curious fact that America, with the largest and most entrenched women's movement on the planet, has also had proportionately fewer female legislators than almost any other Western nation. No one knows exactly why, though many plausible reasons have been advanced. There is the understandable reluctance on the part of many women to venture into a building already occupied by Jesse Helms or Bob Dornan, a building that was designed, for all we know, without a single ladies' room in the floor plan. Plus there has been the chilling effect of male politicos like former Republican Party chairman Clayton Yeutter, who reportedly addressed a high-powered donor as "little lady" and inquired as to whom she "belonged to" -- thus sending a generation of Republican women out to join militantly separatist rural communes.

But the real reason women may finally be let into the political process is that the men are moving on to better things. Politics has become too loathsome, degrading and of course devoid of any discernible impact on the world. As William Greider explains in his new book, Who Will Tell the People, & the actual function of our elected representatives is to serve as lunch companions for the hordes of corporate lobbyists who would otherwise be lonesome and pitiably hungry. Leadership has long since passed out of the political sphere, which is why, in times of crisis and civil disorder, we turn not to our President but to the notoriously lite-minded Arsenio Hall.

Hence the mass exodus of male politicians just as the women come tearing in. Male incumbents in Congress -- 51 at last count -- are fleeing as fast as they can, searching for meaningful work. Sorry, Ross Perot is only further evidence of the ongoing political decline: our first generic candidacy -- no party, no platform, no issues -- just the first guy to come along with the incontrovertible means to buy his own lunch.

There is always the possibility that women will get in and somehow transform politics, making it meaningful again, restoring antique notions like "democracy" and "representation." A study from Rutgers University claims that female officeholders have already shown a radical tendency to recall who their constituents are and even bear them in mind during the framing of legislation. Plus there is reason to hope that no elected woman will ever feel obliged to prove her "manhood" by calling out the troops.

So a woman is well worth a vote. And if the Year of the Woman is a flop, if politics continues to decline, finally reaching the point where even women, as a class, don't want it, then we will have only one place to turn: to the people who already perform all those tasks -- like busing tables and sewing garments in sweatshops -- that native-born Americans disdain. It will be the Year, sooner or later, of the Undocumented Immigrant from south of the border.