I don’t hold people’s social class against them, however, because she was born into this class. I was very angry that she had not supported Hillary Clinton for the presidency last year, and I was mystified as to why the Kennedys snubbed Hillary in the first place, since she was a very hard working Senator, who actually did campaign hard for real votes.

It is true that in male dominated institutions, women are simply not known are cared about at all. Catholic universities, Jesuits, you name it. Democratic women have to really push the patriarchs to the wall and then some. Women’s labor is used by both parties. Think Phyllis Schlafly being snubbed for a cabinet post in the Reagan administration, for example. Had she been a man with those credentials, she would have been secretary of defense in an Arizona minute!

It’s why I don’t support men running for office, because I know they don’t have access to women’s political, social and business networks. Male leaders continue to be tone deaf to women, and I don’t trust men, when I have a viable woman running for the very same job. I’ve been in a male dominated industry long enough to know how awful these guys really are. I guess women are fooled by the platitudes men lob their way– Obama being a prime example of this, by the way.

There are plenty of very good women candidates for NY Senator. Caroline Kennedy is about payback– once again, woman as object to be controlled by wealthy male members of the “Kennedy patriarchal Klan.”

Oh, I agree with you. My first paragraph didn’t come off quite right, obviously. I think Palin was unjustly accused being solely the product of Republicans’ contempt for women — the “fungible woman” thing. So, I was drawing the parallel — if it’s true for Palin, it’s true for Kennedy. But I don’t think it’s true for either.

So, my rhetorical skills need some work.

And, as you can probably tell, it offends my sensibilities as a Democrat, a democrat, and a woman who works. I know that makes me so incredibly tacky–that I have to work to make my living–but that’s life for most of us. A man’s work is never held against him, but it’s held against women in general–proof that we’re not genteel “true women.”

bruce–I wouldn’t worry about Clinton. She could get canned by Obama before the midterms, or at the end of his first term, but she knew the risks of being an appointee versus a junior Senator. I’m sure this suits her just fine, and unlike most middle-aged women these days, I won’t worry that she won’t have health insurance or won’t be able to pay the rent. Clinton has a constituency, but I don’t think she’s planning to run after Obama is done. It all depends on her job performance and his–but even presuming that he wins a second term, she’ll be nearly 70 in 2016, and in the past century, it’s been very difficult to win and have a successful presidency after one party has held the White House for 8 years. (See Al Gore, George H.W. Bush, and Richard Nixon in 1960, and Herbert Hoover, for example.) And, CK is already someone else’s heir!

When I was growing up in NYC, I remember my mother coming home from work one day and saying that she’d been standing at the bus stop when she realized that the woman standing next to her was Jackie Kennedy. She was struck by the fact that Jackie, like my mother, had her bus fare inside her glove. . . New York is a public transportation town.

I wrote a dissertation that was a study of patriarchy in marriage, family, and community politics in early New England, where almost everyone participated in marriage (unless they were profoundly disabled mentally or physically.) And then I took a lecturer position at a Catholic university, where there were many religious men on the faculty, and learned that there are men in this world for whom women are not a consideration in the least. Their discrimination against women came not out of animosity or resentment of women, rather, in their universe, women just didn’t exist in any ways they felt obligated to deal with. I’m starting to think that the Dem party takes women’s labor and votes for granted as much as some men in the Church do. We’re a critical constituency, but unless and until some of us are willing to make our support conditional, I don’t think we’re going to be treated like we matter.

Of course, Palin wasn’t patently unqualified to run for VP (being the democratically elected governor of a state) nor was she picked to appeal to women (it’s pretty clear she was picked to bring the right-wing christians on board which she did admirably). And, of course, Kennedy isn’t patently unqualifed to RUN for the Senate (a point Historiann made very well, IMO) nor is Kennedy being picked to appeal to women (she’s clearly being picked so that there’s at least one Kennedy in the Senate after Ted dies and to continue the welding of the Kennedy myth to Obama).

But, hey, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander: I think both the Republicans and the Democrats have fundamental contempt for women and that Palin and Kennedy are symptoms of that disease.