Women's Crossroads

What’s up with New York Times columnist John Tierney? Clearly, things are really bad in the Republican / conservative world, because instead of his usual cheerleading for Bush Administration policies, he’s feinting with unwarranted attacks on women and girls.

First a column last week arguing that Title IX is no longer necessary, since girls are succeeding so well at school now—let the boys rule the one place they excel, he whines, on the playing field!

And the very next column goes on in the same vein. After dismissing the outraged outcries of respondents to his Title IX column, he goes on to argues that “the gender-equity programs established in the 1990’s, besides perpetuating a bogus crisis, mainly served the cause of girls who didn’t need it”—ie, middle-class white girls.

This is Rove-style bait-and-switch at its best. Let’s distract our (upper) middle-class white New York Times readers from the real news at hand—the disastrous unfolding of events in the Middle East this week, coupled with a steep plunge in the stock market—by getting them into a tizzy over the always-juicy sport of taunting the ladies. And don’t waste any more than a throwaway line over the fate of those even Tierney admits are being “shortchanged,” African American and Latino/as.

Last summer, Larry Summers of Harvard tried something similar, baiting women by tossing off a remark about how we don’t succeed in science because we lack scientific brains. Tierney is more subtle—he’s purporting to stroke women’s egos by telling us how well we’re doing in school, while actually making a case for restoring the playing field to the way it was in the good old days, when women were cheerleaders and men ruled the field.

Anyone who has taken a look at professional sports lately knows that women are still remarkably handicapped in sports. No women’s pro teams come anywhere near men’s pro teams in terms of sponsorship or popularity with the public. A few women make it in individual sports like tennis, swimming, gymnastics, and track—but by and large ours is a culture that still prefers its women on the sidelines cheering in ridiculously short skirts.

The fact that women are doing so well in school is something to be proud of, but we also have to ask why this success at the undergraduate level and below isn’t translating more readily into professional success once young women graduate. Remember that long, front-page Times article last spring interviewing women undergrads from Ivy League schools, all of whom claimed to have gone to college primarily to find a husband?

Our culture still insists that strong, successful women, like Meryl Streep’s character in “The Devil Wears Prada,” are fearsome dragon ladies, objects of dread and something like scorn. Until that cultural attitude changes, young women are going to continue to sabotage themselves intellectually in order to please the men in their life, who, like Tierney, wish for a 2010 that looks like 1950, bobby socks and all.

# posted by Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez @ Saturday, July 15, 2006