She made these remarks
on the suppression and unfulfilled possibility of
females, essentially feminist comments, from a fundamentally
patriarchal and anti-feminist platform — that
of prospective first lady. The moniker itself baldly
implies that the bearer, due to mere intimacy with
a powerful man, precedes all other women in importance,
despite whatever individual accomplishments have been
amassed.
Congruously the populace reveres and adores the president’s
wife simply because she is supposed to know him more
intimately than anyone else; because she is the woman
“behind the man.” Obviously, successful,
assertive first ladies, like Hillary Rodham Clinton
and Eleanor Roosevelt, gained ample recognition for
their independent achievements, but their efforts
did not create their fame; they only augmented the
initial fame of being the president’s wife.
Sen. Clinton could have chosen not to pursue a distinguished
career, or Roosevelt could have chosen not to become
a stateswoman herself and both still would have been
exalted for being the president’s supplement
alone.
In contrast, no one would have allowed Heinz-Kerry,
with her many credentials, to speak at the convention
if she were not a presidential nominee’s wife,
regardless of her personal stature. She was, like
every first lady at a political party convention before
her, a foil character whose primary purpose was to
make a necessarily aloof leader seem “more human.”
It should be abhorrent to any advocate for “women’s
voices” that Heinz-Kerry and Elizabeth Edwards
received infinitely more media coverage than every
other female speaker at the convention besides Clinton
— a former first lady to one the most popular
presidents in recent history — including two
governors and a former secretary of state. If we assume
that media respond to demand, the dearth of public
conversation about these “lesser” ladies
intimates that viewers, consciously or unconsciously
accepting of the first lady’s underlying meaning,
must have considered the words of statesmen’s
wives more important than those of stateswomen themselves.
Even if we take the liberal, more cynical position
that media shape demand and the public’s opinions
in accordance with a conservative status quo, we still
would have to ask ourselves the difficult question:
How complicit are we in the reproduction of societal
norms?
The most important question is how does Heinz-Kerry
reconcile her call for robust women’s voices
with her own mantle, which insinuates that a woman’s
most significant accomplishment is whom she marries?
Did she intend for her words to be subversive, despite
the knowledge that in a world that doesn’t discount
women’s voices, she would not receive nearly
as much attention? How does she plan to work toward
creating a society that embraces women’s voices
from behind a man? These are the poignant questions
to which we, unfortunately, are not likely to ever
have answers.
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