Moms for congress

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi attempted to remind a Denver audience yesterday that feminism is still significant. Pelosi, on tour promoting her new book Know Your Power: A Message to America's Daughters, was interviewed briefly by Mayor John Hickenlooper on her path to political power. In attendance were those who had purchased the $23.95 books (which made them eligible for free tickets.) Ticketless, I listened in from a couch in The Tattered Cover bookstore's health section.

Pelosi spoke at length about motherhood (she had five children in six years) as ideal professional preparation for public service. She learned discipline, focus, tirelessness, and the abilities to multitask and to listen. First elected to represent California at age 47, Pelosi got a relatively late start on her career. This rise to office, despite her populist mantra to "know your power," is not one that translates easily to the common man or woman, but one that relied on luck, financial security, and a recognizable name (her father preceded her as a congressperson.) 

She is awed, Pelosi said, by the young women today who work full time and raise a family simultaneously. Awing, indeed. But many women do not have the economic luxury of choosing not to work while raising children. And for women who may want to enter the private sector, there is no democratic election--there are resumés, which decades of child rearing will not compete with compared those who have spent years honing professional skills in the workplace. 

Pelosi claimed that the secret to her success (she spoke a bit incoherently about some kind of "special sauce" with a secret recipe as part of any woman's route to success) was the sequential nature of her motherhood-to-congress path. While Pelosi merits much admiration, this is not an inherently feminist path. It is one that perpetuates the notion that women serve for at least some portion of their lives as housewives, and that the work of raising a family is a woman's, rather than a shared duty. 

To argue to being a woman who is a wife and a mother and not a member of the workforce does not exclude the option to become a leader is indeed an empowering one, but it does not actually serve as a decision-making template that reaches into the home and allows women to make choices--it governs and confines a sequence of events that men are not equally subject to, relegating (as usual) household duties to the realm of the matriarch. 

Even after arriving on Capitol Hill, Pelosi had her work cut out for her. She recounted dinner after dinner at which congressmen would neglect to ask women for their opinions. Hickenlooper jumped in, offering some trite insight on the "difference between prejudice and ignorance." Men who ignore women as capable and intelligent are just ignorant, he said. Essentially, free of blame--who's to blame the uninformed? Well, Hickenlooper, there is no feminist literature required to inform on basic fair treatment of women and men, and pleading ignorance is strikingly like a guilty tiptoe out the back door. 

Besides Hickenlooper's pedantic moments, a few protesters in the audience intermittently shouted, "Traitor!" or, "War Criminal!" The same rhetoric was used at Pelosi's book signing in San Francisco, where critics argued that as a feminist she is obligated to stand up to President Bush and push for his impeachment. Blogger M. writes that "it is not feminism to keep silent in the face of atrocities and war crimes" in a critique of Pelosi's stance on the war in Iraq and subsequent federal actions. 

Politics aside, to argue that Pelosi is not a feminist because she has played the political playing field to her advantage is totally ignorant. There are steps forward, backward, and sideways in our government every day, and to move on to become the first woman Speaker of the House is unquestionably a feminist accomplishment. Pelosi has watched the number of women in congress quadruple during her public service. 

Feminism does not, and should not, make Pelosi immune from the criticism that all of our politicians duly deserve. But to chastise Pelosi on the grounds that she is not a feminist, when she proudly tours the country telling her story (albeit a bit of a cheesy and sometimes irrelevant story) of moving up through congressional ranks as a woman on a men's playing field, I cannot help but recognize her as a significant leader. -Sara