The 2008 landmark election cycle marked the first in which a white woman and a black man threw their hats in the ring to compete for the highest office in the land. Predictably, these acts opened America’s Pandora’s Box of racism and sexism, enthralling the nation and reverberating even in these 2010 midterm elections. Salon.com’s political grand dame, Rebecca Traister, covered the race — and along the way found herself questioning everything from her political views to the nature of feminism in politics.
I also blogged about the election, race and gender at Racialicious.com, so our paths crossed again and again. In 2009, Traister asked to interview me for her project, which became the recently published “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” Earlier this month, we caught up at Politics and Prose, the night she gave her inaugural reading from her critically acclaimed first book. Speaking loudly over the clanking of silverware and the din of the cafe, we talked a bit about the state of the media, gender politics in the press corps, and fantasy worlds. An edited version of our conversation is below.
Election as a prism through which to see American women’s history
Latoya Peterson: Why did you name your book “Big Girls Don’t Cry?”
Rebecca Traister: Well, I didn’t think of writing this book until very, very late in the election. I wasn’t reporting on Hillary Clinton and thinking, “This could be a book.” I was reporting on Hillary thinking, “No one is ever going to want to hear about Hillary again after this.” Boy, was I wrong about that — two years out, and people can’t get enough of Hillary.
But then, when Palin came on the scene, what I began to see was the story of the election was a prism through which to look at a much bigger story of American women’s history. A history that went back 150 years, longer actually, went back to Abigail Adams’ complaints about how the men who were securing rights weren’t paying much attention to their wives and the rights of their wives. It stretched back through the divisions between suffragists and abolitionists, over the 14th and 15th amendments.
It definitely stretched through the social movements, and through the mid-20th and 21st centuries, and it started to explode and continues to explode, as we listen to people talk about the purported year of the woman, and “mama grizzlies” and Sarah Palin, who is going to shape how we think about women in public life into the future.
So I had this idea one day after watching television, sometime after Palin had come into the race, and I thought “Oh, this story is epic.” Ironically, it was Palin’s entrance that made it epic in my mind.
…She changed everything. And a friend called me as I was tossing the idea around in my head. And she said “Oh, you could call it ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry.’ ” And of course, when she said it, the image it evoked was the image of Hillary not really crying but getting bashed for crying. And I was like “God, that’s a great title.”
And the title is all about the expectations that once you’ve matured to a certain point that we should be over this, we should be over gender, over this stuff — and that, you know, you’re not supposed to cry, you’re not supposed to become attached, you’re not supposed to become emotional about these things.
For any of us who did connect to Hillary — as a hero of some kind, or as someone who we connected to because she was a woman doing something we’d never see a woman do before — there was a sense that somehow we were regressing to childhood. That [crying] was this feminized, devalued, immature reaction, like we were supposed to not care about this stuff. It was just supposed to be about policy and we weren’t supposed to care about identity politics.
People who tell you that it’s stupid to care about identity politics are almost always people whose identities have been very adequately represented historically.
This is exactly the story I wanted to tell because we were not supposed to be attached to this. And yet so many people did get attached. Whether or not they were supporting her, whether or not they were supporting him, it became such an emotional, identity shifting experience for America. And that title, for some reason in my mind, captured that. Now, ironically, and I had no idea this would happen, as I started writing the book and reporting it, like every character in the book cries.
…Geraldine Ferraro talks about crying when she goes into the voting booth to vote for Hillary, there was the moment of Hillary crying, I cried after Hillary’s concession speech, Sarah Palin cries because Gloria Steinem hates her —
Wow, everyone does cry. The only reason I don’t cry is because I hate politics.
Traister: (laughs) There’s also a scene that I go back to that Nora Ephron wrote about in 1972, about Gloria Steinem crying at the Democratic Convention, Miami Beach. It was the year that Shirley Chisholm won, and the women’s caucus, which was new that year, got kind of screwed over by the Democrats. There is this incredible scene of Gloria Steinem crying, that Nora Ephron wrote about some 40 years ago. That is contrasted with a woman named Shelby Knox, who is a young feminist, who lived with Gloria, crying, and Gloria saying, “I don’t understand, why are you crying?”
Gloria actually is the big girl who learns to stop crying about politics. But I didn’t know that going in, I didn’t know those stories. So there’s this irony that practically everybody there cries.
Fallout from ’08 has been rise of women on the right
So how have you seen the landscape shift post-2008 election, particularly in terms of media?
Traister: If I have one serious complaint, it is that … [Obama] is doing this magnificent thing, which was engaging a whole generation and so many people who have never been engaged before. You’d better follow through dude. Because if not, they’re never going to believe in anybody ever again. That is my fear.
… The other part is that Hillary has sailed out of this thing. … The warmth toward Hillary right now is so intense. Whenever anybody ever says ruefully “Oh, Hillary wouldn’t have given up the public option going in,” or whatever they say, I tend to think Hillary would have made almost exactly the same choices as Obama. So I don’t have any great fantasies about things being different. But the fact that people even say that… mean, I feel so much more warmth toward her now from the people who have hated her that it’s kind of amazing. So there’s been that.
But most of the fallout from the election — and I’m sorry to say this because I wish I’d seen more fallout in the democratic party actually — has been this rise of women on the right. Or the purported rise of women. There are a few female figureheads, who are, unfortunately, nuts.
I am a big believer in the idea that if we were going to get closer to gender equality in politics of course, you’re going to have female nuts. There needs to be good and bad of everything. So I don’t begrudge these women at all, I just wish we had a more varied spectrum at the moment.
And do you think that the media has played any role in influencing how political women are perceived, and who is considered a contender?
Traister: Let me tell ya, I have not been thrilled about the approach to Christine O’Donnell over the last few days. And in part, it’s because do you people learn nothing? This kind of overconfident, oversexed, prurient … look. She’s an eccentric and unusual candidate who I disagree with every fiber of my being. But when I watch some of the coverage of her, and the behavior — the sort of overconfident assumption that this woman is so laughable. This is how they talk about Sarah Palin too, and Sarah Palin is still behaving as a tastemaker within her party.
When I was in the middle of writing this book, and last summer, Palin quit the governorship, I thought to myself, “Well, shit.”
In more than two centuries of American political history, there are some things that are just givens. And one of them is that when you quit your term as governor, halfway through, for no discernible reason, you are no longer a political contender. And I thought, writing my book, “No one will ever read this book, because in a year, no one will care about Sarah Palin any more.”
So, we now know that’s not the case.
… It hasn’t stopped her. Nothing will. So all this stuff about “Ha-ha-ha, Christine O’Donnell, she’s an idiot, oh look at this funny thing,” the question about whether she’s a virgin… I’m sorry people, but are you really talking about whether or not she’s a virgin? Seriously? Because she might be in Congress. Why don’t you learn that laughing at these women just pisses people off, and gives them more fuel? That lesson does not seem to have sunk in.
I mean, am I crazy that the Christine O’Donnell coverage is a little over the top?
It is over the top, and you can bring that back to the press corps. There’s this idea that there are folks who are political tastemakers, and they know everything, have seen everything, and they can dictate then who the country will vote for. And I think that the rise in women candidates who aren’t conventionally qualified (to steal a term from “conventionally attractive”), who aren’t politically clear from skeletons as their predecessors have had to be — where are we headed, coverage wise?
Traister: I think we are in the same place with male candidates too. Bill Clinton still had to pretend he didn’t inhale. And Barack Obama has written a memoir where he described his experimentation with drugs. The only scandal that could bring someone down anymore, I believe, is John Edwards style sexcapade … That involved an illegitimate child and an ill wife. That was so morally reprehensible, it went beyond just garden variety cheating. It was epically immoral.
Media coverage then and now
As a member of the media, how does it feel to be writing what is largely a media critique of the way the 2008 election was covered?
Traister: It feels like I’m probably not going to be invited on MSNBC a lot. There’s an enormous amount of navel gazing that goes on the media, and I’m not the first person in the media to be critical of it. But you can catch yourself. I found myself in an interview the other day about the sexism that faces Sarah Palin, and the ways in which instead of just reasonably questioning her credentials and abilities and experience, we fall into this kind of pointing, hooting, punch-line, knee-slapping thing with her that is definitely gender inflected. I have certainly been as guilty of that as anybody. When you’re doing a critique of the media, its important for you to be aware of the ways that you fall into exactly the same patterns that you’re calling out in other people.
It forces you to reckon with your own things. I write about that in the book, how I was extremely aware that the intensity of my reaction to Palin was really tied up in the fact that she was a woman. I didn’t care about how she was dressed, I wasn’t making fun of her high heels — which a lot of people were doing — I wasn’t questioning whether she could be a good mother. There was a whole strain of that stuff that I wasn’t participating in.
But the power of my antipathy toward her … of course, that had to do with her gender. She was being presented as someone who I was supposed to respond to in a certain way. There was a perversion of the whole language and sense of women’s empowerment and women’s history. I was so much more intensely engaged in being critical of her than I would have been had she been a little-experienced man. You have to sort of cop to that too, and say – look, I do these things that I also criticize others for.
Also, the media is an ever changing beast. We saw it change in many ways during 2008. Rachel Maddow, for example. Can you imagine we live in a world that two years ago, three years ago, didn’t have Rachel Maddow as a regular voice? That changes the landscape. …
On the other hand, Campbell Brown, who did all this great work during 2008, just stepped down from her show because she didn’t have any ratings after she came back from maternity leave. So it’s not as though the kind of expansions of roles for women in the media were all permanent.
On the other hand, Christiane Amanpour has a Sunday morning show, Candy Crowley, who did incredible election reporting, now has a Sunday morning show.
Things expand and contract. There seems to still be an overall expansion of the voices of women. Not necessarily women of color or people of color, really. Not seeing a lot of that. Which is interesting, considering that our President is a man of color.
One of my arguments in the book is part of the reason you have more women’s voices, was because you needed women to talk about women. One of the arguments that Katie Couric makes in my book is that you needed women to talk about women and you needed black people to talk about black people. In fact, that expansion didn’t happen so much for people of color. Melissa Harris-Lacewell has become one of the most prominent pundits, and she was not so prominent before.And she’s certainly still out there -– she was just on Maddow.
Right, but she gained a lot of prominence on Maddow, and Maddow helped hold open that door.
Traister: But that’s another part of the process that we need to be considering. That when you get those people through the door, they then give a hand up to other people. Maddow has expanded the number of young people who wouldn’t have a platform, who [now] totally have a platform thanks to Maddow.
