Every woman knows that you can’t run in heels.
I mean, maybe if you’re an impossibly attractive, gazelle-like police officer on a television show or Angelina Jolie in every action movie she’s ever made, then you can look convincing enough running for a few paces. But in reality, and especially political reality, you’re more likely to land awkwardly on one of those stilettos, twist your ankle and fall down in one decidedly unfeminine heap.
Alison Lundergan Grimes, who lost her effort on Tuesday night to take the soon-to-be US senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s seat, ran in heels. In speeches, even, she made a point of “running in heels” – talking about how Kentucky’s soon-to-be-new senator was going to “proudly wear her heels into that chamber and let them know” that wage inequality was unacceptable. (Ann Richards of Texas, she is not.)
Her lipstick-feminist pride was a calculated move, given how often she said the heels line, to inoculate against the normal shit flung at political women like Hillary Clinton and every other strong, powerful woman in general: we are too unfeminine, too bitchy, too assertive, we’re not nurturing enough – the list goes on. Of course, the cure can often be worse than the disease – like being called an “empty dress”, for one.
In the end, the impossible sprint failed, and 2014 instead became the year of the female candidate who couldn’t. But maybe it can be the beginning of endless female possibility.
Grimes isn’t the only unelected politician who tried to be feminine enough to be considered worthy of a win, goodness knows, and she’s not only the only woman to try it either. We all find ourselves walking that invisible line between being too “girly” to be taken seriously as people, and not “girly” enough to be taken seriously as “women”. We have to be smart enough to be deemed competent, but not so smart that we’re deemed unfeminine. We have to be aggressive enough to compete with men, but not so aggressive that we are too much like them.
It’s less the Madonna-whore conundrum and more like the Ophelia-Lady Macbeth face-off.
And while we don’t often say it out loud, men are not the sole arbiters of where we fall in that binary. Inside and out of American politics, popular sentiment decrees that women and women candidates have to inoculate themselves against sexists attacks from men, but maybe – just maybe – it’s time for a reckoning among women, about women.
Why? In Texas, women – especially white women, especially married women – voted for the Republican, Greg Abbott, over Wendy Davis. In Kentucky, women – especially white women, especially married women – voted for incumbent Republican senator Mitch McConnell over Grimes. In North Carolina, women overall went for incumbent senator Kay Hagan over challenger Thom Tillis – but white women and married women broke for the man.
And let’s not forget that, in 2012, Obama carried the vote of women – just not, on average, the white and/or married ones.
The sisterhood might be powerful, but it’s not clear that we’re all part of the same one. From our various perches in liberal enclaves, it’s easy to dismiss conservative-voting women (and conservative women politicians) as outliers – though it’s a little more difficult after tonight, between Joni Ernst in Iowa and Mia Love in Utah and others. But as women of the left, we dismiss women of the right at our own peril because it’s clear that they’ve figured out, far less clumsily, exactly how much to cede to the mainstream expectations of femininity in order to get ahead with both men and women.
Meanwhile, 2016 is coming, and another Clinton candidacy is probably coming and with it another round of figuring out how to center her in a traditional enough model of womanhood to satisfy her sexist (male) critics while convincing her sexist (male) critics that she’s “man enough” to do the job. But it’s tough as it is to be Ginger Rogers, constantly keeping up with Fred Astaire while dancing backwards and in heels: nowadays, we ask women politicians to be Sandra Dee, too, and then subject them to criticism that they’re just so annoyingly perfect.
There’s a subtext to the Clinton chatter among certain women – that this is about to be “our time” or “our turn”, finally, that she’s our candidate, that she’s the one who can go all the way. It’s chatter that isn’t just about wanting another liberal in the White House, and it doesn’t just come from her ride-or-die fans, who were saying as much in 2008. We think it’s about time, and we want it to be our damn turn, to finally have a woman in the White House, and there’s a hope that Clinton can be the woman who finally walks the invisible line well enough that the rest of us might not have to settle for any line at all.
But we still all think Hillary Clinton has to walk the line in order to run. And that’s the problem.
