Gender Stereotyping of American First Ladies - Term Paper Example

Gender Diversity: Gender Stereotyping of American First Ladies In contemporary America there are many stereotypes of women in the media, but one that appears to be changing is that of the President’s wife, or the “First Lady” as this role has come to be called. In the absence of a female president, this is the most revered role in establishment circles. The First Lady offers the media an ideal successful American woman, a stereotype that represents what American woman should aspire to be. The question that interests me is how this stereotype is changing now that the Obamas are in the White House. Writing in the year 2000 Houchin and Winfield noted that “Twentieth –century coverage of the President as the symbolic Head of State has extended to his wife.” (p. 548) They summarized previous studies on the way that the media reported Nancy Reagan, Hillary Clinton and Barbara Bush and agreed with the observation that journalists tend to use one of four different “frames” for viewing the first ladies, namely as an escort for her husband, as a style-setter for fashionable society, in a “noblesse oblige” role doing charity works or taking a political role as a policy advisor. Earlier studies had shown that the more politically involved the presidential wife was, the less positive the new reporting was. Houchin and Winfield then analysed media coverage of the wives of presidential president and vice president candidates in the 2000 presidential election, hoping to establish what frames were being used and how the First and Second Ladies’ roles are evolving. The data used in this study included personality profiles, new features, interviews, opinion columns, and campaign updates. It is clear that the wives were involved in the whole electioneering process. At first the escort role was stressed, and then over time an element of sacrifice was introduced, since some of these wives had given up high powered careers to support their electioneering husbands. By the end of the election campaign the press had developed a new frame: “The Anti-Hillary.” What this study shows is that Hillary Clinton, a strong, capable politician in her own right, is seen as a negative asset to a president. One cannot help wondering what the situation would be if the roles were reversed, for example if a woman were running for office and her husband came under press scrutiny. This is not a scenario which occurs very often, and when one looks at international examples, such as Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, and Indira Ghandi in India, one finds that the press is not interested in their husbands as much because they are either dead or seen as irrelevant. There seems to be a double standard going on here, where women are required to sacrifice their own individuality in order to fulfil certain acquiescent roles for their husband A little later in 2004, Karen Vasby Anderson wrote a very insightful introductory article to a whole book about what it means to be a First Lady, not only for herself as an individual, but for others in America who are looking on. The role has become a barometer for America’s treatment of women, and particularly middle class educated women, who are set up as a role model for the whole of society to follow. What comes across in this article is the insistence that first ladies (and by implication successful American women) are under tremendous forces of control, some of them imposed by their husbands, the conventions of the husband’s workplace, the press, the expectations of others, but many of which they impose upon themselves out of a desire to conform. First Ladyship is called “A position of constraints and opportunities” where “silence and measured speech” are required more than any individuality or self expression (p. 2). The power of the first lady is emphasized, along with a necessity to curb this power and use the techniques of rhetoric, carefully and in a targeted way, so as to support her husband’s presidentship. The overwhelming message that the media reports to Ameerican society appears to be that Hillary Clinton’s confident, assertive style is not acceptable, and something quieter and more submissive, like Laura Bush, is what is required. Now that the White House has the Obama family in place, it is tempting to think that perhaps a new age in the stereotyping of American women has arrived. Ann McGinley studied Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama in the 2008 presidential campaign, where for the first time women were running seriously for office themselves. She looked at how these three clever, experienced women performed their gender identity in a knowing way before the public eye. She explains that these women walked a tightrope, or in other words, coped with a double bind: “if they are too feminine, they are deemed incompetent. If they are too masculine they are deemed not likeable” (p. 710) Hillary Clinton, for example, was deemed too strident and masculine until she was perceived as a victim because of her husband’s infidelity, at which point she gained in popularity. The point here is that is her husband’s achievements (or lack of them!) that influences her ratings, and not her own efforts. Palin, it is said in this article, performed her gender through her role as mother, being tough when necessary but stressing her five children at home, and maintaining a feminine image with lipstick, long hair and smart suits. McGinley trances the transformation of Michelle Obama from Hillary lookalike,with similar social and educational background to a meek and subservient supportive wife and mother much more in the tradition of Laura Bush. The paper concludes that the stories of these three women “raise many questions about whether the country is ready to accept women as equal players in the highest political offices” (p. 724). The outcome of this research has been rather discouraging for me, because it seems that little progress has been made in the last 50 years. If president’s wives are not allowed to have an opinion and visible career of their own, and someone as competent as Michelle Obama is forced to hide her abilities in order to be acceptable, then it seems that Americans are being denied a wonderful opportunity to see women as partners and every bit as competent as men. The depiction of Hillary Clinton in the press, and incidentally also Condoleeza Rice, seems to me to be unfair, but it is hard to know how to deal with this, since any kind of opposition to the stereotyping is interpreted as yet more reason not to respect these women. References McGinley, A. (2009) Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama: Performing Gender, Race and Class on the Campaign Trail. Denver University Law Review 86, p. 709 ff. Available online at: http://law.du.edu/documents/denver-university-law-review/mcginley.pdf Vasby-Anderson, K. (2004) The First Lady: A Site of “American Womanhood” in Molly Meijer Wertheimer, Inventing a Voice: The Rhetoric of American First Ladies of the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 17-30. Winfield, B. H. (2000). Gender Politics: News Coverage of the Candidates’ Wives in Campaign 2000, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 80 (3) 548ff. Read More