There’s a rule of thumb for media consumers: if the headline asks a yes-or-no question, you’re safe to understand that the journalist (perhaps the writer, perhaps the editor) thinks the answer is “no” and you don’t need to waste your time reading the piece.
You have been warned.
Now, in honor of us all having learned in recent days that Kamala Harris is likely to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for President of the United States in 2024, let’s do a little bit of time travel. In fact, let’s voyage back in time to that misogynist golden age of sixty years ago. It’s 1964 and Senator Margaret Chase Smith was seeking the Republican nomination for president. (She didn’t get it, so she went on to campaign for Barry Goldwater.) The fine fellows at The Dude magazine ran this illustration as a full page graphic in their September 1964 issue:
Are you ready for the misogyny yet? Because here comes the misogyny. This is the text of the accompanying two page article by one A. R. Devins:
This presidential year has been a milestone in American history. The reason does not lie in the identities of the men who have received their party’s nomination; or because the Democrats may be in or the Republicans out. Though the names and faces of officeholders change, the truth behind them remains ever constant. The really significant point about the political year of 1964 is that for the first time in American history, a woman has had the courage to announce that she thinks she ought to be president.
Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine has laid it on the line, and it is difficult to fault her. For if women run the country, why shouldn’t one of them live in the White House. That women do run the United States is beyond question. They boss their husbands; they control their children; they handle the door to door salesmen and manage the household accounts. It has been calculated that they are responsible for some 70 per cent of the purchase of goods. They also own well over half the country’s stocks and bonds, partly by nipping their husbands for fat divorce settlements, and partly by driving those who hang on into a premature grave, and thus collecting on the estate. There are woman judges, company directors, engineers and brain surgeons. In present day America, the only real advantage men possess over women is bigger biceps.
Now it may be argued that women are politically ignorant; we are all familiar with the party situation where the men retreat to one corner and debate affairs of state while women retreat to another and gab about babies. Possibly they should never have been given the vote. But this is a shaky argument since any Democrat considers all Republicans to be political imbeciles and wishes they didn’t have a vote either and vice versa. In fact, no one has come out against Senator Smith’s candidacy on the grounds that she’s a woman. For no one would have the nerve to tell the truth. There are only two reasons why a woman will not be sent to the White House. The first is based on hypocrisy: men are afraid to concede that a woman could do the job. And the second is based on petty envy. American women simply could not bear the thought that a member of their own sex had been elected president. They’ve spent their lives buying unnecessary hats, wall-to-wall carpeting, and electric stirrers for instant coffee in order to keep up with the Jones woman next door. But keeping up with a President Jones would be impossible. And as American women possess more than half of the vote like everything else, Senator Smith’s candidacy was doomed from the start.
But suppose we cut through the hypocrisy and the envy, and consider rationally whether there is any good reason why Senator Smith or any other woman should not be president. What do we actually expect our presidents to do? Remember first of all that Senator Smith is a Republican and therefore committed to the principle that the federal government should do as little as possible. Senator Smith is as capable of doing nothing as any man, even President Eisenhower, though he was admittedly a master of the art. We also like our presidents to be father figures. Senator Smith could not be a father figure. But she would make a fine mother figure; and motherhood is a lot more important to Americans than fatherhood.
A president – especially a Republican president – also has other vitally important functions. First of all, he has to explain regularly to the people that a government is like a family; it can’t spend more money than it takes in, otherwise it will go broke. On this subject, a woman can speak with authority because she has spent her life spending the family’s money and spending more than her husband earns. By doing so, she has proved that a family can, in fact, spend more than the husband brings home. That is the basis of the modern American economy which is known as going into debt; and the result has been fifteen years of steady boom. At the same time (the argument gets complex here but politics is complex – very complex) a president also has to explain that if people don’t spend money, the economy will go bust – that was the argument behind the tax cut. There is a contradiction here, but then one of a president’s major talents must be the ability to contradict himself. And there women excel. They are unequalled at confusing issues. Any trained wife can explain in one breath exactly why she must have a new dress while there is no money for her husband to buy a pair of socks. Just imagine the scene where President Smith appears on television to explain why the country must cut down on its spending and also spend more. There isn’t a husband in the United States who wouldn’t lean back with a sigh of relief at the familiarity of it all. He would feel completely at home. He’s been through it for years.
The president people to must also goad the people to work harder. “Increased productivity per man-hour” (per man hour, observe) – that is the constant cry. Who could cry it more convincingly than a woman? For the past two hundred years, American women have been goading their men to work harder. In fact, the main reason why this country is the richest in the world is that the women have been flogging their men on, like jockeys in the stretch. If a man tells you to work harder, you tell him to mind his own damn business. If a woman tells you to work harder, you go out and work harder. Other wise she’ll nag. Try to imagine, if you can, what it would be like to turn on the television set and hear a woman president nagging – on all networks simultaneously. It would be intolerable.
Four years of a woman president, and every production record would be smashed beyond recall. What else do we ask of our presidents? They have to make speeches. Has anyone ever argued that women can’t talk? A president has to tell the military they can’t have any more money. For this a woman is ideally trained by years of taking her children through toy stores and smacking their heads when they try to buy soldiers, rockets and space ships. A president has to receive Boy Scouts who have distinguished themselves by helping across the road old men who wanted to nip into a bar on the same side for a drink. Women know exactly how to handle Boy Scouts – they drove their own kids into the movement to get them out of the house. And presidents have to kiss babies. The case rests.
No, it doesn’t rest. For what else does a president do? What does he actually do, from nine to five? He tries to keep the peace between business leaders and trade unionists, between civil rights groups and white supremacists. In other words, he tries to keep the kids from fighting. A man has no experience at this kind of thing; he’s been too busy trying to hang on to his job (which, admittedly, also takes up a lot of a president’s time). A woman has spent her life trying to control the children. Suppose she gets lip from foreign prime-ministers? All she has to do is threaten to cut off their allowance. It worked with the kids; it will work with the prime ministers. And they can’t yell at her even if they want to; no gentleman raises his voice to a lady.
Clearly a woman in the White would confront some challenges. She’d have a rough time throwing the ball out at the beginning of the baseball season; but Truman and Eisenhower weren’t too strong in the arm either, and they got by. She might look a bit odd playing Commander in Chief at military parades, but the Waves looked a bit odd too, at the beginning of the war, and everybody got used to them. A much more severe problem is that if a woman were elected president, there would be no first lady in the White House. No one would be hanging about to work out the menus and dredge up the entertainment to lend class at state dinners by hiring Lawrence Welk, for example, in the style of Mamie Eisenhower. There would be no one to take the wives of foreign dignitaries by the arm and tell them how to get to the ladies room. However, Margaret Chase Smith had a lot of experience with that particular problem in the Senate, and she seems to have survived. Anyway, she might be able to rustle up some male relative to do the woman’s work: there are precedents. Adlai Stevenson used his sister.
Besides, the very fact that a woman was president would provide many compensating advantages. It would rescue us, for example, from having to watch the president acting lovey-dovey with his wife, especially while campaigning, surely one of the most loathsome exhibitions that democracy has ever foisted on its victims, the people. But suppose, you say, the president really likes his wife? There must have been such cases. This raises another question. It must often have crossed the average American’s mind that the coun- try was really being run-like most homes by the president’s wife. At least, if everything was out in the open, with a woman as president, we’d know where we were.
Certain other nagging problems remain. Could a woman get tough with Cuba – just assuming, for laughs, that any of our male presidents have? Could she take off her shoe at the conference table and outbang Khrushchev? Or could she win an argument with him in the kitchen, as that model of virility, Richard Nixon, always claimed that he did? The answers, I submit, can safely be left to husbands who have ever tried to outshout, outshoe, or out-tough their wives. The real danger of having a woman as president would actually be that she would get too tough; that she’d forget she was just a president and remember she was also a woman. The chances are that in no time at all she’d be telling us what to do, where to send our children to school, how much we could spend, and what to spend it on. In fact, the main drawback to Margaret Chase Smith as a presidential candidate seems to have been that she belonged to the wrong party. A woman president who believes the federal government should not exert too much power? The idea is laughable. If she would just switch to the Democrats and come out openly in favor of throwing her weight around, she’d fit inside the White House like a hand in a glove. And yet a woman president? No, we’re not ready for it. Just for a while, we still need to preserve that old, idle fantasy that there are still some things a man can do better than a woman.
