By Jo Freeman
It’s time for a new Constitutional Amendment. We should modify the 19th Amendment to allow states to limit the franchise to women. Too many times men have shown that they lack the emotional balance to cast a reasoned vote for candidates for public office. When at least one of those candidates is a woman, their hormones take over.
The recent spate of sexist comments about women running for office is proof of this. Male commentators are inordinately focused on how “hot” a woman is, rating her “tight little butt” rather than her policy positions. Way too many men believe that Palin’s ability to attract crowds is due to her “babe factor,” or that “right-wing cuties” are what’s new in politics today. The list of comments about Hillary Clinton when she ran for President which had nothing to do with her mind or her views and a lot to do with her body is too long to even summarize.
Before 1920 anti-suffragists argued that women were too emotional to be trusted with the vote, that the female brain was incapable of the rational judgement necessary to participate in the polity. Even after years of voting, men still thought that women voted for (male) candidates based on their physical attractiveness. In 1960 Republican managers publicly worried that Kennedy would get the woman’s vote because he was better looking. (More women voted for Nixon).
Now that women are running in large numbers we know that this was just a projection – it’s men who are fixated on a woman’s physical appearance. When Rush Limbaugh said Christine O’Donnell was “kind of cute,” he spoke for many men for whom what a woman looks like is more important than what she says.
Nor is it only conservative men whose judgement is clouded by testosterone. In 1970, in response to Rep. Patsy Mink’s urging the DNC to make women’s rights a priority, Dr. Edgar Berman, DNC member from Maryland, retorted that women were incapable of holding executive jobs because of their “raging hormonal imbalances.” He worried about what would happen if a woman holding power was menopausal.
Now we know that it’s men who have these raging hormones, only they don’t seem to stop. If only men would go through menopause, perhaps they would reach a point where they could see beyond a woman’s sexual attraction when assessing her suitability to hold office.
Barring that, we should seriously consider limiting the franchise to women, who have shown themselves much better able than men to keep their hormones under control.
©2010 Jo Freeman for SeniorWomen.com
