The Other Side of Letterman: Why Women Don’t Run for Office…
June 10, 2009
by Amy Siskind
|Would you give $17 to get women above 17%. I’ll explain at the end. (Update: We are 53 donors away from reaching our goal)
Now many of us are outraged at Letterman’s comments about Governor Palin. Personally, I am even more outraged at his comments about the Governor’s 14 year-old daughter. Which brings me to another topic – why is women’s representation in our government so low?
For those of you new to our blog, one of The New Agenda’s main goals is leadership. Specifically, getting more women into positions of leadership in corporations, academia and the government. Did you know that only 17% of the US Senate and Congress is made up of women?
Why is it that we have so few women in positions of leadership? I believe one of the major reasons that women do not run is that they are concerned about what will happen to their children.
For those of you the tracked the Democratic Primary in 2008, remember MSNBC’s David Shuster saying that Secretary Clinton was pimping out her daughter Chelsea?
And certainly we will remember the constant attacks on Governor Palin’s children from the moment her candidacy was announced. Starting almost the next day, the media was questioning whether she could be in the White House and manage her children, especially since she had a special needs child.
A couple of months ago, I spoke out Bonnie Erbe’s television show on PBS, To The Contrary.
The subject of the panel was Congresswomen Loretta Sanchez, who recently was the first women in Congress to be pregnant out of wedlock. Rep Sanchez was engaged to be married and had been advised by her doctor that she had limited time to become pregnant given her age. The full story is below.
Skip to 8:10 and you’ll hear my point – the reason why we have such a “shockingly low” representation of women in government is that women are held to a different standard- not only for themselves, but also for their children. That if this were “Congressman” Sanchez, the media won’t even be bothered with this story.
I am troubled by the way the double standard with which our media treats female candidates. But I am OUTRAGED by the way our media views their children as open game. Can you imagine Letterman referring to President Obama’s or VP Biden’s daughters as prostitutes or in any sexual context? Can you imagine the national outrage?
So here’s what we must do. Forget Letterman – he is loving this. Call the sponsors (see our post below) and hit him where he lives – the pocketbook.
Now our efforts here are great, but this is like the game “whack the mole.” We whack sexism one place and it crops up the next. To make lasting change, this is what we must do. We need The New Agenda to continue to grow and have a national organization that will speak out for ALL women! We need hundreds of thousands of members. Then, when this type of thing happens, the media will book us and we will have a real voice. Now I know that many of you think that we get our share of media and we do – but in situations like Letterman we were ignored. The media is not going to ignore the phone call of a national organization with hundreds of thousands of members (e.g. consumers that buy goods that their advertisers sell).
Please donate $17 if you can today – or more if you can afford it. Sending out a press release costs money. Maintaining media lists costs money. Maintaining and updating our website money. Professional for accounting, lawyers, etc. cost money. We need your help. We are spreading our wings to become a national organization – and when we are there, let me tell you this: WE WON’T PUT UP WITH THIS SH*T!!!
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OK. Mailed my $17. Wish I could do more in the financial realm….
Alas, I will just spend another day rescuing dogs and bashing Letterman.
Believe me… the former is far more rewarding.
SYD
I just sent $17. The perfect amount.
Keep fighting the good fight!
Maybe you should boycott Huffington Post as well. They made a similar, if not worse, joke almost one year ago.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/....._8645.html
I mailed my check off today. The New Agenda is doing incredibly important work. I have three daughters, two granddaughters, and one great-granddaughter and we all need Amy Suskind and women like her. And someday we won’t have to put up with this sh*t.
i think the donate button on this page is broken – will donate via the homepage or regular mail. FYI, I just heard about this org thru HuffPo. Thank you for forming this group!!
proudtobeafeminist,
Welcome aboard!!!
We just fixed the donate link. Thank you for your support!
This is a repeat of the propaganda war of the 1960s and 1970s against the Second Wave. In 2008, a woman ran for President then VP so the MSM and netroots were misogynist and then race-baited. Replace “black men” with Obama and Obama supporters and black women with former Clinton supporters in these three paragraphs:
Just like in the 1960s and 1970s, all the focus is on racism and none on the misogyny underlying Clinton and Palin’s run for the Presidency and VP and the ensuing race-baiting.
For some historical and theoretical background, I recommend Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice as the problem and Michele Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power and Angela Davis’ autobiography, which combine feminism and anti-racism, as the solution.
If you read Wallace and Brown’s accounts of the CRM, you will see the black patriarchs were 100% at fault, black women were 100% innocent.
Similarly, Obots are 100% guilty, former Clinton supporters are 100% innocent.
Like the last pargraph says, propaganda won and made the CRM sweetness and light and white women racists.
Similarly, the netroots and Obots are 100% guilty of misogyny and the ensuing race-baiting and former Clinton supporters 100% innocent, but their propaganda is the exact opposite.
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[...] decide not to run. I wrote about this last month during the Letterman episode in a piece called The Other Side of Letterman: Why Women Don’t Run for Office : I am troubled by the way the double standard with which our media treats female candidates. But I [...]
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