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Sunday, February 18, 2007
A mother’s gut instinct in life & politics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Recently, my husband sent me an opinions piece from The Washington Post about how women, more specifically mothers, often decide their vote.
The story, by retired women’s studies professor Linda Hirshman, examined what it would take for women to sweep Hillary Clinton into the White House in 2008.
What interested (and angered) me in this article were the author’s criticisms about how women make up their minds at election time.
Her criticisms were two-fold: The first that women are not “rational political actors.” She says they do not make decisions based on political agenda, policy or program - instead they vote on personality and character. (Her conclusions were based partially on past research, and partially on some lame and admittedly unscientific interviews with mostly stay-at-home moms in the Washington D.C. area.)
Hirshman’s second criticism is that women make decisions not through research, but rather with their gut instincts. She says that women don’t read or study about the candidates.
She actually had some statistics to support this argument. For example, studies show that “women consistently score 10 to 20 percentage points lower than men on studies of political knowledge…” Some studies show that women more often than men can’t name their senator or a First Amendment right. A 2006 Pew Research Center study showed that “Two million more men than women read either Time or Newsweek; more men listen to radio news and talk news, read the newspaper and get news online.” Apparently, the ladies like their news from the TV. (I’m hurting my own argument by admitting that it was my husband who sent me the story from The Washington Post, but we’ll get to that later.)
I actually don’t disagree with the author’s premise that women, especially mothers, do use their gut instincts to make decisions about people (including candidates). However, I think she’s wrong to conclude that this is a bad thing.
Women are instinctual about people. They have to be. From the time they are young girls, they are constantly deciding if other people are safe to be around. They go off to college and they ponder the intentions of all the new people they meet. Is it safe to go that boy’s dorm or get in that car? What are the intentions of the professor who wants me to stay after class and, later in life, the boss who wants me to stay after work?
As a mother, you’re constantly evaluating, often in mere minutes, your surroundings for the safety and well-being of your children. Is that pediatrician right for us? What about the childcare worker, preschool teacher, school teacher, and even other mom friends? Do they have your child’s best interest at heart? A mother is constantly reading people - even her own children.
It is only natural that a mother applies these fine-honed skills to the people who want to run her government. She’s evaluating: Does this candidate seem trustworthy? Does he seem smart? Does he seem understanding and sincere?
Unlike the writer in The Washington Post, I would propose that this gut instinct is a valuable tool for women voters, not something to be belittled because the political machine can’t figure out how to control or measure it.
As to the point of being uninformed, it is disappointing to me that women do statistically and anecdotally read less and are less politically informed than men. I am guilty of this as well.
However, I would like to offer a defense to this criticism. It’s not that we are stupid or don’t care. It’s that we are holding in our heads every detail of running our family’s lives that often our husbands have no clue about. My husband can name our senators (I could too if you gave me a minute - two old white guys right?), but he can’t tell you which child reacts badly to which medicine, has no idea which pair of Mary Janes are the current shoes, has no idea when our child is seeing the dentist or when the dog needs his rabies shot.
This doesn’t excuse our lack of knowledge as a group, but it does explain why it’s developed that way.
While I would encourage women to continue to use their gut instincts to evaluate candidates, I would also challenge all the moms out there to make an effort to read more and be more informed this election season. Now, where did my husband leave the Time magazine?
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