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Jessica Francis

Professor Malcolm Campbell

English 1103

9 February 2015

Extended Inquiry Project Topic Proposal: Gender Stereotypes in US Politics

Introduction/Overview

I am interested in understanding the ways in which female politicians in the US have

continued to overcome gender biases in their profession. In our patriarchal society, women have

only recently earned positions of high political power, much to traditionalists’ dismay. Many

sensationalist news reports about women in politics focus on physical appearance and wardrobe

more than the content discussed at the event the politician attended. Even still, these powerful

women refuse to allow sensationalist journalism and crude media humor deter them from

achieving their goals. It is their resilience from decades of patriarchal oppression that I would

like to further research.

Jeannette Pickering Rankin, the first female elected congressperson in 1916 said, “I may

be the first woman member of Congress but I won’t be the last.” Rankin was right in the fact

that she would not be the last female politician, but even she could not have predicted how many

obstacles women still have to face almost 100 years after her first term in office. Instead of

reporting news about a specific press conference Hillary Clinton held, for example, news media

will attack her wardrobe choices and how “haggardly” she looked. Even in satirical news

outlets, female politicians are mocked more for their appearance while male politicians are

mocked for the content of their speech. Despite all of the animosity the patriarchal media have

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toward women in the same position as powerful male politicians, today’s women have

persevered and continue to fight for future generations of powerful women.

I began my research without having any idea of a possible topic. All I knew was that I

like politics and I like gender equality, so I played around with those two ideas for a while.

Because of my women’s and gender studies courses I have taken so far, I knew where to find

information about any topics relating to women’s studies. From the school’s library page, I used

database search engines such as JSTOR and Project Muse to kick start my search. Because my

major is political science, I figured there had to be a way to connect my academic interests with

my side passion. I did a basic Google search of “women and US politics” and pools and pools of

web pages came up. Most notably, I came across a page called the Center for American

Women and Politics. This page embodies what I want to learn more about, so I spent a lot

of time going through it page by page. On the flipside to this scholarly website, I also found a

really cool Tumblr blog called “she-span.tumblr.com.” This blog posts sketches of female

politicians posted all around the D.C. area in the hopes of making female politicians more visible

to everyone.

With this topic, many academically based websites from universities come up along with

passionate yet biased opinions from individuals. The process by which I narrowed down my

findings took a while because I had to decipher what information pertained to my topic and what

information just interested me. The feminist community of course wants to see more female

representation in politics, and I align myself with that goal. With a topic about gender equality

however, there is bound to be dissenting opinions on the other side. Many people would argue

that in our age of 2015 women have total gender equality and should stop nit-picking at every

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little thing that doesn’t go our way. Another huge argument that has so far kept women out of

the Oval Office is the absurd fear that women act irrationally when they menstruate every month.

There are actual men with actual college degrees who believe a female president would make

more irrational decisions under duress than a male president. A documentary called “Miss

Representation” addresses in one of its sections how multiple conservative news publications

question the possibility of a woman president because of superficial gender roles imposed by the

media itself. The documentary also brings up the extremely real fact that countries some

Americans might consider “Third World Countries” have had female presidents with the highest

levels of success those countries have seen. So to argue that women are incapable of

handling a huge position such as president justifies the lack of research these jarheads have

done before running their mouths. It is obvious that women have faced decades’ worth of

sexual discrimination in the workplace through unequal pay, no mandatory paid maternity leave,

and even extreme examples of sexual harassment. Powerful positions such as lawmakers

undoubtedly have gender inequality because those who benefit from the patriarchy do not want

to see their advantages taken away from them.

!Initial Inquiry Question(s)

How do women in powerful positions such as US Congress manage to overcome gender

biases in their profession? In what ways do the media play a role in the portrayal of powerful

women? What message does always critiquing women of power on their exterior looks send to

young girls interested in politics? Essentially, my inquiry begins with questioning how

female politicians have progressed past patriarchal, chauvinistic opposition to excel in their

powerful positions?

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!!My Interest in this Topic

!I am a member in the Gender Excellence Learning Community on campus, and through

this learning community I have had so many eye opening experiences about how much gender

inequality still exists in today’s society. I came out as a self declared feminist this year, and it

has helped my self confidence dramatically. I have also been interested in politics for about

three years now, when I took AP Government in my junior year of high school. My teacher

made the class so interesting and attractive to me that I based my major on it. I don’t have many

passions and desires in my life; I love with a respectable degree of moderation. But when I

thought about the idea of combining my passion for gender equality with my academic interest

of political science, it was love at first sight.

!Next Steps

I bookmarked many of the resources I found helpful during the research portion of this

assignment, some of which include the Politics and Gender journal on Cambridge’s University

Press, and the Center for American Women in Politics. The online databases provided from the

library are also hugely helpful in my search for recent articles relating to gender and politics. I

will use these and other sources to pool together information about how women in political

power have been sexually discriminated against in the past and how they have persevered from

that injustice and continue to serve the American people with the utmost rationality as anyone

else.

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