Want To Read Linda Hirshman’s Political Analysis?

You just know it’s going to include copious women bashing, based on her own special brand of “research” which included: “contact[ing] half a dozen members of the Wednesday Morning Group, a D.C. area organization that provides speakers and programs mostly for stay-at-home moms.” She recently had a piece in the WaPo entitled “You’ve Come A Long Way, Maybe.” Here are some excerpts from her essay (indented), with a little acidic commentary interspersed by me:

In every election, there’s a chance that women will be the decisive force that will elect someone who embraces their views. Yet they seem never to have done so, and I’ve never seen a satisfactory answer as to why. My own theory is that women don’t decide elections because they’re not rational political actors — they don’t make firm policy commitments and back the candidates who will move society in the direction they want it to go. Instead, they vote on impulse, and on elusive factors such as personality.

Must be our hormones? Our laziness? Or our general lack of brains? Yes of course all that, and also, says Hirshman, our failure to read the correct periodicals:

Most of the women read People and Real Simple magazines. They all listen to news on the car radio, mostly National Public Radio. And almost all their full-time working husbands consume immeasurably more political information than they do (“He reads 10 times what I do,” one told me), reading news magazines and political Web sites and bringing home political information from their jobs. The women gather little information from their almost exclusively female society of other stay-at-home mom…

… As a 2006 study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press put it, American adults live in “A World of His and Hers.” Two million more men than women read either Time or Newsweek; more men listen to radio news and talk radio, read the paper and get news online. Only broadcast television news plays to more women than men, and a lot of that is TV news magazines and morning shows. Not only do fewer women read the newspaper, but almost half the women surveyed said they “sometimes do not follow international news because of excessive coverage of wars and violence.”

And most unfortunately of all, we suffer from not being men. Linda wants to like us, but…

I had such mixed feelings listening to these women describe their political selves. They’re clearly idealistic, want to be good citizens, make an effort to get the information they need. It was hard not to like them. Their delight in seeing a woman so close to real power was palpable. Yet I couldn’t escape the fact that they took in little of politics, especially compared with their husbands, that their decision-making seemed impulsive and that their response to Clinton’s candidacy was driven to an amazing extent by personality. …

… To this day — as even my D.C. area correspondents seemed to confirm — women just aren’t as interested in politics as men are. The Center for Civic Education recently reported that American women are less likely than men to discuss politics, contribute to campaigns, contact public officials or join a political organization. About 42 percent of men told University of Michigan researchers last year that “they are ‘very interested’ in government and public affairs, compared with 34 percent of women.”

Worse, women consistently score 10 to 20 percentage points lower than men on studies of political knowledge, regardless of their education or income level. Studies dating to 1997 have shown that fewer women than men can name their senator, or know one First Amendment right. They even know less about the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade than men do.

So Linda Hirshman has found “studies” that validate her vitriolic claims about how dumb women are. Guess what, though? We actually register and vote in greater numbers than men do. For example, this site notes:

For six decades after women obtained the right to vote in 1920, they voted at lower rates than men. However, in the 1980 election women caught up with men, and according to U.S. Census data, in every subsequent election women have voted at an increasingly higher rate than men. In the 2000 elections, 56.2% of women reported voting, compared with 53.1% of men. Because women are a larger proportion of the population and vote at higher rates, about 7.8 million more women than men voted in the 2000 elections…

And this site reports: 8.8 Million More Women Than Men Voted in 2004 Elections. And, see also: (“Civic engagement among young men and young women, while similar, is not equal. In recent years, young women, particularly college educated young women, have voted and volunteered more and been more civically engaged than their young male counterparts.”)

But, I guess Linda Hirshman wishes we would just stay home on election day, given our obvious gendered ignorance and stupidity.

–Ann Bartow

UPDATE: Over here Linda Hirshman has been debating her critics, and she came up with a link to putatively support her assertions. The focus of the study she links to is Indonesia, but it does contain paragraphs like this:

Political knowledge varies across groups, with studies finding that women consistently score below men on knowledge tests (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996, Garand, Guynan, Fournet 2005, Verba, Burns and Schlozman 1997). In their review of the literature, Mondak and Anderson explore why the knowledge gap in political knowledge is about twice as large as gaps found in interest in politics and political efficacy among Americans (2004, 509). However, in this study the authors find that up to 50% of the gender gap in political knowledge stems from male respondents’ reluctance to pick”don’t know;”in reverse, females are ready to select”don’t know”rather than guess. The authors don’t deny the existence of a gender-based knowledge gap, but suggest that the measurement is flawed due to differing response patterns by gender.

For more reactions to Hirshman’s column, go here, here, here, here, here and here.

As far as the studies about women’s ostensible lesser political engagement, I’m very curious about what questions were asked, and how the answers were categorized. For example, Hirshman says studies show that women “know less about the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade than men do.” What kind of knowledge was being tested? The ability to paraphrase the Court’s majority opinion evidences one kind of political knowledge, but the ability to explain how a person might actually go about obtaining an abortion is another kind of political knowledge that women may possess in far great quantities than men. My guess is that only the first kind registers with some of the researchers.