A Place in the Sexist Hall of Fame?
July 15, 2009
by Nora Bredes
|The following is a letter written by Nora Bredes, Director, Susan B. Anthony Center for Women’s Leadership at the University of Rochester, in reaction to a cartoon yesterday in the NY Daily News depicting Senator Gillibrand. Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and not necessarily The New Agenda.
To the Editor,
The cartoon you published today depicting Senator Gillibrand speaking at the Senate’s confirmation hearing for Judge Sotomayor deserves a place in the Sexists’ Hall of Fame.
For more than 200 years, the 11,648 men who have served in the US Congress have held the floor. Senator Gillibrand, one of only 255 women who have served in our country’s history, might have assumed she would have the same ten minutes her colleagues were given to speak. Senator Leahy interrupted her, rudely and arrogantly asserting his “privilege”. So you ridicule her?!!?
Senator Gillibrand is New York’s senator. She was speaking as a well-informed advocate for another New York woman in an historic moment for New York and the country. You’d think that a New York paper would stick up for them both. But, unfortunately, your cartoon reveals another historic truth: women in politics – from the suffragists to our 21st century leaders – are routinely stereotyped in ways meant to demean them and deny them power.
Your cartoon is one of the worst examples.
Sincerely,
Nora Bredes
Director
The Susan B. Anthony Center for Women’s Leadership
University of Rochester
———-
If you would like to join Nora in complaining about the cartoon, here’s the info:
Email: voicers@nydailynews.com
Fax: 212-210-1505
Also, please contact Senator Leahy here.
The New Agenda is thrilled to have NOW NY as an ally in this battle. We fight on together!!!
Nora,
Sadly, I don’t think this particular cartoon would be in the Sexist Hall of Fame (or Shame?)- there is simply too much sexist material out there to keep track!
That is our work here together. To speak out and make this type of “media” unacceptable.
Please keep in mind that all of this sexism and even the inability to deal with women in elected positions of power is an east coast phenomenon. The sexism in the corporate media also comes to you from the east coast. In Washington we have a female Governor, two female Senators to the federal government and nearly half of our state supreme court judges are female. No one thinks this is strange and our men have not had their nuts drop off. Our news papers are actually able to carry on intelligent discussions based on peoples policies. You can not imagine how odd this all seems to us.
Why are west coasters participating in this? Why do we need these people?
Bes,
Well you are a model state then for sure! New York would seem from the outside to be so progressive and evolved – but in actuality last I checked NY was #27 in the country in terms of women in politics. Long way to go!
And surely our national situation is well, pitiful!
Here in California we have two women senators( who have held those seats for decades). The Assembly Speaker is Female and of Course Pelosi hails from Calif. Were Feinstein to run today she would win as governor. The Leahy statement sums up the” Obama Era” view of Women. Liberal men are sexist. That is why you can not rely on party name and agenda when you vote – just vote for women. A liberal man is not better than a conservative woman as the Liberal Leahy’s performance yesterday shows.
Have you seen Bramhall’s defense of the offensive cartoon?
“The cartoon is about a politician with diarrhea of the mouth, not about her gender,” Bramhall told Rob Tornoe of Turnoe’s Cartoon News Web site.
This reminds me of last year when there were abominable sexist attacks against Hillary on a regular basis, and the media talking heads were looking at each other, baffled, and exclaiming: “I don’t think we’re sexist–do you?” To which the cohort would respond: “Why no! They are reading too much into it.” To those of us who live as women in this culture, it is blatantly obvious. This is just another message that screams: “KNOW YOUR PLACE!” Leahy’s condescending expression alone spoke volumes. Would he look at Ted Kennedy like that if he went long?
p.s. Thank you for speaking out about this!
So those of you in Vermont, of either party…get rid of Leahy so you can have Finestein
Are the N.Y. Times and N.Y. Daily News pubishing their rags in Arabic yet?
Bes,
Just to make a slight correction. Your governor was the assistant Attorney General who wrote the appellate brief that killed comparable worth as a legal remedy for women throughout the U.S. in 1984 (AFSCME v. State of Washington, 770 F. 2d 1401 (1985)). Among other things, her efforts cost the women who worked for Washington state’s largest employer over $300 million dollars they had been awarded in back pay by Judge Jack Tanner.
Perhaps due to her stellar work in saving her employer such a substantial amount of money and giving then judge, now Justice, Anthony Kennedy the brief on which he founded his decision that “the market does not discriminate”, she became Washington State’s Attorney General. As such, she defended and maintained a workforce so sex segregated and unequally paid that it became one of four nationwide paradigms in a 1999 study “Legalizing Gender Inequality” (Robert L. Nelson, William P. Bridges, Cambridge University Press, ISBN-13: 9780521627504 | ISBN-10: 0521627508).
From Dixie Lee Ray to Linda Smith to Christine Gregoire, Washington State has proven over and over again that female representation in government does not translate into equality for women.
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