elections

Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

beth — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 08:00:00 +0000

As we entered our hotel after a day of sightseeing while on vacation in New York City in September 1984, my father lifted me onto his shoulders so I could see what the fuss was all about in the lobby. The lights were bright and there were lots of tall men in suits all around us. With my father’s direction, I could see the backs of the heads of the Democratic presidential and vice-presidential candidates trying to navigate the crowd. I can still picture the back of Geraldine Ferraro’s head; all I remember from that moment was that her hair was blond and in a hairstyle similar to my mother’s.

Rebecca Traister, a writer for Salon, introduces her blow-by-blow account of the 2008 presidential election with her first political memory from 1984: in the voting booth with her mom turning the lever to make a selection for the first female candidate to appear on a Democratic ticket for president. Traister and I are both in our mid-thirties, and I would argue that her experience in the most recent political election is representative of our generation of feminists.

Her book, Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women, provides a detailed and thrilling account of that epic race, including astute observations from a feminist perspective. She uniquely intertwines her personal interpretations with the nitty-gritty details of the historic campaigns, including critical reactions from feminists and women regarding the gendered nature of the media response and public debate surrounding Hilary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Sarah Palin, and other women involved in the election. She argues that the 2008 Presidential Race was a modern-day consciousness raising experience for a generation of women who grew up with easy access and little personal experience with—or at least little critical observation of—the patriarchal structures that surround them in the twenty-first century. She says that the story she tells is “about the country and its culture, how well we all reacted to the arrival of these surprising new figures on the presidential stage and what they showed us about how far we had come and how far we had yet to go.”

I found her internal struggle regarding which candidate to support during the primaries so similar to my own experience and resonant with the experience of many women in the United States during this election. She relies heavily on interviews with women—particularly feminists—from all corners of society. She interviews second wave feminists, pundits, journalists, bloggers, and newcomers to feminism as she exposes the gendered bias towards candidates that was not sufficiently or substantively addressed in the mainstream media during the election cycle. The overt sexism, the race/gender divide, and a nascent, conservative (and therefore questionable) feminist uprising are all analyzed ruthlessly and succinctly. Traister writes with command, intelligence, and a sense of humor.

Speaking of humor, she also discusses the role of comedians with a feminist twist, like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, as well as the role of women journalists, like Katie Couric and Rachel Maddow, all of whom were integral in the cultural interpretations of these political figures. Traister validates and applauds their roles in the process of influencing the electorate regarding gender interpretations of the election as well as long held biases against women in comedy and news.

The frequent refrain in Traister’s book is one in which she considers her mother. She tries to bring together the generations by using her personal connection to her mom’s politics along with the positions of second wave feminists and younger feminists like herself. She wonders how we can be dealing with these same issues that her mom dealt with so many years ago and she answers those questions both personally and politically. Though she highlights the differences in generations of feminists, she finds a way to unite their stories and experiences as they converge on this highly anticipated and much debated event in American history.

Written by: Ashley Josleyn French, November 19th 2010

Braking News: 1 Bus, 2 Girls, 15 Thousand Kilometers, 715 Million Votes

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Sunetra Choudhury

Hatchette India

Sunetra Choudhury’s Braking News takes the reader on a trip across India to find the elusive Indian voter in both cities and villages. As an anchor and TV news reporter, Choudhury was asked to cover the elections for NDTV on a bus. The election bus planned to travel fifty kilometers each day for sixty days covering 3,000 kilometers. Two teams aboard the bus were scheduled to produce a half-hour show every weekday prior to the May 2009 elections. Though the bus did not travel as planned, the stories and people that come to the surface are worth the adventure. The bus drove to places on and off the map. For locations neglected for years by politicians, just the fact that NDTV decided to bring a bright red bus to their constituency was a powerful symbol.

While the story is entertaining and the writing is clear, Braking News is less about the places and people Choudhury meets on the way, and more about her own journey. As a result, it is easy to become annoyed with the author and her desire for modern comforts, such as a clean toilet. Nonetheless, some chapters are more descriptive than others and reveal the heart of contrasts amidst the Indian subcontinent. The women of Gujjarland insist that Choudhury cut wheat before agreeing to do an interview. At one point Choudhury stops a man on a motorcycle who she believes to be a dacoit (thief) to ask him about the gun he is carrying, and in another segment she interviews people in the village of Shivgarh who have cell phones and DVD players despite having no electricity.

Choudhury touches occasionally on gender and the vast differences that exist for women between the cities and villages of India. For example, in the state of Haryana, she interviews young women who do not vote until they are married. But near the end she speaks to a woman who is living a privileged, single lifestyle. As a woman, Choudhury is allowed into private kitchen spaces where she meets village women on a level that would not be accessible to male reporters. And instead of seeing them all as exploited, she begins to see that they too have power and agency, albeit in a different manner than she experiences.

Choudhury concludes Braking News by arguing that if journalists truly want to report on what is occurring around them, they must go out and see the world. They must be willing to risk being dirty, hot, and tired, which on some level (despite the posh hotels) is exactly what the NDTV election bus did.

Written by: Lakshmi Saracino, July 19th 2010

Politicking Online: The Transformation of Election Campaign Communications

admin — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:46:00 +0000

Edited by Costas Panagopoulos

Rutgers University Press

By now, we are all so familiar with the way the Obama campaign used technology to revolutionize politics that it almost seems cliché. Media coverage of the campaign’s strategy has made it seem as if Obama invented Internet campaigning. On the contrary, Politicking Online: The Transformation of Election Campaign Communications points out that “the digital pulse” of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was significant not for its innovative tech-savvy approach, but for its ability to synthesize lessons learned from a decade of web innovations and missteps.

For the politically minded, Politicking Online is a treasure trove of case studies, statistics, graphs, and clear-cut analysis of what works (Ned Lamont’s winning Connecticut’s Democratic primary nomination was due, in part, to his ability to gain support from the progressive blogosphere), what does not work (a candidate’s Facebook profile page means nothing if it doesn’t motivate voters to actually get out to the polls on election day), and what we are still unsure of (do websites boost civic participation among the politically indifferent, or just rile up those who are already engaged?).

Panagopoulos breaks down the nebulous term “technology” into a variety of sub-categories—blogging, online fundraising, Facebook, campaign websites, text messaging—without getting too nuanced and without skimming the surface of these topics. This ultimately results in a book that flows well from one topic to another without seeming fragmented. The reader is able to analyze website technology in congressional and state legislative campaigns before entering into a discussion on whether these websites have an impact on civic engagement, looking at how campaigns use other technology, such as email, text messaging, and online advertisements, to enhance their web presence. Politicking Online concludes with a discussion of blogging, Facebooking, and YouTube—technologies that, when used correctly, can enhance a candidates’ appeal and, when used poorly, leave candidates unable to retain control of their image.

Two of Politicking Online’s pieces focused on international examples of online communications in political campaigns. These two pieces, which looked at blogging in German electoral campaigns and text messaging in get out the vote efforts in Spain, left me simultaneously eager for more examples of how online communications worked on a global level and annoyed that it was not a more robust investigation. Panagopoulos would have done well to either examine this topic more wholeheartedly, or leave it out altogether. Two chapters in a book that otherwise focused on American politics seemed like a distraction.

Despite this, Politicking Online is a book that experienced campaign workers, aspiring politicians, tech-junkies, and part-time political wonks will find intriguing, informative, and definitely worth missing a few Twitter or blog updates to delve into.

Written by: Gwen Emmons, October 14th 2009

Pearls, Politics, and Power: How Women Can Win and Lead

admin — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 22:56:00 +0000

By Madeleine M. Kunin

Chelsea Green Publishing

With the 2008 election, we saw the first woman candidate who could win, but why did it take this long? Too few women have run for office in both the state and federal level. Madeleine M. Kunin, the first female governor of Vermont and the Deputy Secretary of Education and Ambassador to Switzerland under former President Bill Clinton, explains in her book why women don’t run, and how they can overcome that and win in Pearls, Politics, and Power

Kunin discusses her own campaign and election, as well as other U.S. female politicians, and shows how women from different backgrounds and political views can become effective leaders. And it’s not just running for office! Kunin inspires women to be part of other campaigns or to be part of grassroots organizations, as this is part of the political process.

A nice bonus in the book is the section of small biographies on women who increased the presence of women in the political sphere: Mary Wollstonecraft, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Alice Paul, Gloria Steinem, Abigail Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Simone de Beauvoir. At the end of the book, Kunin also includes a list of resources that are helping to get women into office.

If you have ever considered running for office, or engaging in politics at any level, this is a definite must read. Even if you haven’t, Kunin might just change your mind.

Written by: Elizabeth Stannard Gromisch, June 8th 2008