Tough Enough

My favorite passage in Insurgent Mexico is this one, in which John Reed argues the Woman Question with Pancho Villa:

Once I asked him if women would vote in the new Republic. He was sprawled out on his bed, with his coat unbuttoned. "Why, I don't think so," he said, startled, suddenly sitting up. "What do you mean--vote? Do you mean elect a government and make laws?" I said I did and that women already were doing it in the United States. "Well," he said, scratching his head: "if they do it up there I don't see that they shouldn't do it down here." The idea seemed to amuse him enormously. He rolled it over and over in his mind, looking at me and away again. "It may be as you say," he said; "but I have never thought about it. Women seem to me to be things to protect, to love. They have no sternness of mind. They can't consider anything for its right or wrong. They are full of pity and softness. Why," he said, "a woman would not give an order to execute a traitor."

"I am not so sure of that, mi General," I said. "Women can be crueller and harder than men."

He stared at me, pulling his mustache. And then he began to grin. He looked slowly to where his wife was setting the table for lunch. "Oiga," he said, "come here. Listen. Last night I caught three traitors crossing the river to blow up the railroad. What shall I do with them? Shall I shoot them or not?"

Embarrassed, she seized his hand and kissed it. "Oh, I don't know anything about that," she said. "You know best."

"No," said Villa. "I leave it entirely to you. Those men were going to try to cut our communications between Juarez and Chihuahua. They were traitors--Federals. What shall I do? Shall I shoot them or not?"

"Oh, well, shoot them," said Mrs. Villa.

Villa chuckled delightedly. "There is something in what you say," he remarked, and for days afterward went around asking the cook and the chambermaids whom they would like to have for President of Mexico.

That was nearly 100 years ago. This, unfortunately, was two days ago:

MORRIS: You know what, Hillary will not withdraw from Iraq. As a woman, she would not want that record.

That's 'Tiny' Dick Morris, by the way--he of the undying venomous hatred for Hillary Clinton. It isn't just him, though; for as long as she's been a potential candidate, there have been articles about her having to prove she can be 'tough enough' ("Clinton knew she could never advance her career — or win the presidency, especially — if she didn’t prove that she was tough enough to be commander in chief"). As, in fact, would any woman running for president, simply because she is female. We may be living in another century, but women still face the necessity of (figuratively) executing the traitors.

Now, you could say that all of the above, including Morris' comments, are merely observations about public sentiment. The problem is that these 'observations' serve mainly to reinforce the media narrative that helps to shape public opinion. They aren't detailed statistical analyses of copious polling data; they're top-of-the-head conventional wisdom, which may or may not be true to begin with, but tends to have its own momentum and create its own reality once it's out there. To say that candidate X will be judged on criterion Y is, in fact, to do exactly that judging.

And that's the problem. If everyone is reporting that 'Hillary needs to prove she's tough enough' and nobody's saying 'this is not just egregiously sexist but also completely insane', that makes it a whole lot harder to get beyond a culture in which women have to live up to Pancho Villa's standards.

(Hat tip: Jessica.)