AGA Roll Call: Ms. President

“I don’t run a woman government. I run a government of people. Of course, I am the first democratically elected woman president in Africa, and that raises a lot of expectations. Because I represent the aspirations of women all over Africa, I must succeed for them. I must keep the door open for women’s participation in politics at the highest level. That is both humbling and exciting.”

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf beat ex-international football star George Weah in a 2005 election for the Liberian presidency. That was the easy part. Now the world waits to see if ‘Ma’ Sirleaf can bring economic success to a country torn by a history of class divisions and civil war.

A woman is running for president. She advocates for fair labor practices, social welfare programs and women's rights. She also appears a bundle of contradictions -- she is anti-abortion (as are most at the time), but pro-free love; a eugenicist, but also a civil rights supporter and socialist; a suffragist and a spiritualist. She has worked as a stockbroker, a lobbyist, a businesswoman and a newspaper publisher. She is both admired and despised by many. Nominated as her running mate is an African-American man.

No one really thinks she will win. However, everyone who nominates and supports her, including she herself, feels that it is important a message be sent to the U.S. government that it is time for a woman in government and in the White House.

During her run, personal -- rather than political -- attacks are made on her from all sides, in all the ways women who threaten the status quo, women who dare, are typically attacked: she is painted as a witch, a bitch, a prostitute, a woman of "loose morals." Her politics and platform are not critiqued: she is a woman, and so it is her person which is maligned and demonized. She is purposefully scandalized by people -- primarily men, or women acting as protectors of men -- with power to prevent her and any other woman from having any chance at all.

Sound kind of familiar? But it isn't 2007. It's 1872.

Clinton was president when I was pretty young – but I can still remember appreciating Hillary Clinton, for refusing to be among the cookie-making, hidden-in-the-shadow First Ladies. I think that the mere possibility of a woman president is exciting, though I don’t know how well Hillary Clinton would be received. The ‘Clinton’ name just kind of brings up this stigma, which I’m not sure people appreciate…I don’t think that the average person is yet ready to support a woman whose family has fallen apart in the public eye, even though the average person could definately identify more than they could with a gee-golly-gosh rancher with a drawl.

It's always good to see a woman get in and shake up the old boys' club that is Washington, D.C. In a city where the intern is the pinnacle of the gossip sheet for most women, seeing females eligible for major offices is a breath of fresh air and a heartening sight.

But it's hard to fit in, as you can imagine, and you have to wonder if your candidates are "in it for the money or in it for the love" (if you will). The active feminists of Washington seem to have died with ERA and the vice-presidential bid of Geraldine Ferrarro. Every major feminist initiative has been shuffled off to the far left, the polarized issue of sexuality (orientation, education, pregnancy, etc) the obvious and lone exception. And the dreaded 'f word' has been eradicated from the political vocabulary. How can we trust politicians who can't even name one of the biggest movements of the twentieth century?

http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm?aid=2790

"I would be really disappointed if Hillary Clinton were the first woman president," said Medea Benjamin, a self-described feminist and founder of Code Pink, a women-initiated antiwar group based in Venice, Calif.

Molly Ivins, the Texan who routinely blasts President Bush, declared that she would not back Clinton for president in a January column published by The Free Press, a nonprofit organization sponsored by the Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism in Ohio. "Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation," she wrote. "Enough clever straddling. Enough not offending anyone."