It’s still too soon for celebration

I must admit it: When I heard the news that Michele Bachmann had decided against running for re-election, I felt a sense of glee. It was as though a certain green-beaked, black-hatted sorceress had just melted in a nobly inspired water-bucket attack.

But why did I have such a strong reaction?

At first I was convinced that it was simply a sign that women politicians have reached a kind of parity. Now, finally, I reasoned, we have enough women leaders that they’re as likely to be dim and incompetent as they are to be exceptionally capable.

But not so fast, warned my grad student daughter. Her research has centered on women political leaders.

Female politicians, she has found, are enormously polarizing. We love ’em or we hate ’em, but rarely are we indifferent.

When former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died earlier this spring, the news sparked an unusually vitriolic reaction, particularly in Great Britain. Readers filled the comment boxes at the Daily Telegraph’s news site with abuse. Many demanded her state funeral be privatized, in keeping with her public policies. “May she burn in the hellfires,” one British politician tweeted.

You’d have thought a serial killer had just been executed.

Meryl Streep, who portrayed Thatcher in the film “The Iron Lady,” pointed out that fact. “To me she was a figure of awe for her personal strength and grit,” Streep said in a public statement. “To have come up, legitimately, through the ranks of the British political system, class-bound and gender-phobic as it was, in the time that she did and the way that she did, was a formidable achievement.

“To have withstood the special hatred and ridicule, unprecedented in my opinion, leveled in our time at a public figure who was not a mass murderer; and to have managed to keep her convictions attached to fervent ideals and ideas – wrongheaded or misguided as we might see them now – without corruption, I see that as evidence of some kind of greatness, worthy for the argument of history to settle.”

Today, Australia’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, faces a similar vitriol. Her elevation, according to Australian journalist Anne Summers, was celebrated by citizens who saw it, like the election of President Barack Obama in this country, as a historic landmark.

Two years later, Gillard was the victim of sexism perhaps even more blatant than the racism that targets Obama today. “Ditch the witch” was one of the few public slogans that can actually be printed in a family newspaper.

Bachmann is a former tax attorney and state legislator. She makes statements no more outrageous than those of any other prominent tea party politician.

The male politician most analogous to Bachmann may be Texas Gov. Rick Perry. He, too, made well-publicized statements that were highly inaccurate, and he espoused a similar political philosophy.

As he left the national stage, he was seen as a benign political doofus, not the archenemy to all that is good and right in America.

Years ago, I belonged to a women’s reading group that debated these issues. Women, we knew, had to be more competent than the average male politician simply to make it to the ballot.

A mark of progress, we felt, would be that women leaders would one day be as likely to be misguided, ignorant or just plain awful as some of the male politicians we could name.

For one short moment, I thought Bachmann exemplified that progress.

But we haven’t made it there yet.

Only 18.3 percent of the members of the U.S. House and Senate are women, according to the Center for American Women and Politics. As a few more women have risen in public life, we’ve seen even more examples of the visceral hatred their power incites. Think of conservatives’ reaction to Nancy Pelosi, for example. Think of the deep scorn directed toward former Spokane Mayor Mary Verner as she left office. Think of the right-wing fury against even Michelle Obama.

This is no time to break out the champagne.