The Sovereignty of Women
In less than a year, the United States may well inaugurate its first female President. This outcome isn’t inevitable, but it’s a few blocks uptown of probable. If the delegate leads of the front-runners hold, if their Conventions don’t unseat them, and if the latest polls are to be believed, Hillary Clinton will face Donald Trump in November, and she will defeat him. If that happens, it will have less to do with Clinton’s greatness as a candidate—she’s not a great candidate—than with Trump’s lousiness as one. Still, her election would be historic.
There hasn’t been much discussion yet of the “first female President,” except insofar as Clinton’s campaign and her supporters, most notably Gloria Steinem, have been by turns despairing and outraged that younger Democratic female voters prefer Bernie Sanders, notwithstanding Clinton’s attempts to reach them through Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer, and “Broad City.” Instead, there’s been a lot of discussion of how badly Trump does with female voters—much of it coming from Ted Cruz’s campaign, after a spat involving the candidates’ wives—because Trump can’t stop talking about how some people are dopey and how other people are disgusting. Clinton “got schlonged” by Barack Obama; Cruz is a “pussy”; Megyn Kelly bleeds from her you-know-where; and the man himself promises that there is no problem with the size of his whatever. Cruz is betting that he can defeat Trump by winning over women, but his victory last week in the Wisconsin primary did not draw on disproportionate support from female voters, and, in a race against Clinton, he’d have plenty of trouble.
Ugly as the primary season has been, there is every reason to believe that the general election will be uglier, especially if it’s Clinton vs. Trump. The election of the first African-American President was the occasion for a great deal of jubilation, but it also unleashed a series of attacks that drew upon a particular history. Trump, notably, insisted that Obama releases his birth certificate, arguing that the President was not a U.S. citizen but a Kenyan. Citizenship claims have been the elemental political and legal arguments of generations of African-Americans, none more important than that made by Dred Scott, in 1857, and denied by the Supreme Court, which ruled that no descendant of any “negro of the African race” could ever be a citizen of the United States. Attacking the legitimacy of Obama’s Presidency on the ground of citizenship, however lunatic, was by no means arbitrary. What, then, can be expected in the way of attacks on the legitimacy of a female ruler?
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The question has come up before. In 1553, Mary Tudor became the first ruling queen of England. This was a problem because she was, first, a woman; second, a Catholic; and, third, beginning in 1554, a wife. Protestants who opposed her used all three facts as arguments against her, but the first case was the easiest to make. In 1558, the reformer John Knox claimed, in his treatise “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women,” that for the weak to govern the strong was “repugnant to Nature” and “the subversion of good order.” Mary’s defenders tended to argue that, politically speaking, she was a man, “the Prince female.” After her death, Protestants who had opposed her were left to defend the coronation of her half-sister, Elizabeth, an unmarried Protestant, by arguing, begrudgingly, in favor of the female rule. John Aylmer, later the bishop of London, insisted that if God decided “the female should reign and govern” it didn’t matter that women were “weak in nature, feable in body, soft in courage,” because God would make every right ruler strong, and, in any case, England’s constitution abided by a “rule mixte,” in which the authority of the monarch was checked by the power of Parliament, and “it is not she that ruleth but the laws.” Elizabeth called on a different authority: the favor of the people.
The debate about a female prince advanced all kinds of political ideas, not least the rule of law, the mixed nature of the English constitution, and the sovereignty of the people. It also inaugurated an era of topsy-turvy play in everything from Elizabethan drama and French carnival to German woodcuts, as the brilliant historian Natalie Zemon Davis argued in a 1975 essay called “Women on Top.” Davis wrote that the fascination with female rule came at a time when men were asserting new claims over women’s bodies and their property. In 1651, in “The Leviathan,” Thomas Hobbes wrote about Amazons to support his claim that “whereas some have attributed the dominion to the man only, as being of the more excellent sex; they misreckon in it,” which is why it’s important that laws exist, to grant man that dominion. In 1680, in “Patriarcha,” Sir Robert Filmer located the origins of all political authority in Adam’s rule. Meanwhile, some theorists who imagined a state of nature, a time before the rise of a political order, became convinced that America, before Columbus, had been a “gynæocracy,” as one French writer called it. But the chief consequence of this debate was the Lockean idea that men, born equal, create a political society, to which women do not belong; women exist only in the family, where they are ruled by men. Hence, in 1776, Abigail Adams urged her husband, in a letter, to “remember the ladies” in the nation’s “new Code of Laws,” which he most emphatically did not. “Depend upon it,” he wrote back, “we know better than to repeal our Masculine systems.”
This might all seem ancient history, except that it’s also very much a part of the rhetoric that will likely characterize this year’s election. “Woman is man’s equal,” the first women's rights convention resolved, in 1848. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, but the Equal Rights Amendment, first introduced in Congress in 1923, was never ratified, and the League for a Woman President, founded in 1935, never saw success. As recently as the 2000 primary, a New Hampshire Republican said about Elizabeth Dole’s Presidential campaign, “The Bible teaches us that a woman should not have authority over a man.”
Who rules? Trump will want this to be an election about popular sovereignty: the people rule. Clinton will not be able to avoid making an argument about a female rule, because much in Trump’s campaign, and in Cruz’s, too, suggests that a woman should not have authority over a man, or over her own body, either. The candidates may not want this election to become a battle of the sexes, but the lines have been drawn, long since.
Source: www.newyorker.com
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