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Political scientist Jo Freeman says there may well be more overt expression of sexism than racism in American society today but the very fact that a white woman and a black man are finalists for the Democratic Party nomination represents a sea change in attitudes. “It reflects a turning point in American attitudes about race and sex,” she said. She said the changes most likely “were actually happening in the 1990s,” set in motion by events that began in the 1960s and affected people as they grew up over the decades. As a result, society’s view has broadened regarding what is “permissible” for women and blacks in terms of achieving “positions of power and responsibility.” “This is the polar opposite of the 1920s,” reflecting an enormous shift in 70 years in “attitudes on what is socially acceptable,” Freeman said. She conceded she had been proven wrong when she wrote an op-ed article in 2000 saying Hillary Clinton would not run for president. On the other hand, she said, the reasons she gave then still hold up, in her view: that “she’s a political wife, not a political widow without the baggage of being married to Bill Clinton. Anyone coming from New York is too liberal [for much of the country]. And there still is latent prejudice about women exercising executive power.” Freeman spoke recently at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, in Washington, D.C., where she is in residence this year, and at a brown-bag lunch for the Clearinghouse on Women’s Issues. She said that, historically, blacks usually advance first, women next, with their progress or retrogression made in tandem. She trod carefully when asked whether the primary elections show evidence of more sexism or of racism. “I think it is more socially acceptable to express sexism [versus] racism, without being condemned,” she said. “I hear things and, if you changed the words and made it about race, there would be an outcry. You see or hear more about sexism.” Despite that, she said “sexism and racism are much reduced from when I was a child. And I don’t know how to measure them—so there’s no point in talking about it.” About the down-to-the-wire contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination, she said, “while I have some personal opinions, I’m just glad I lived to see it. And I liked all the white guys. I could have voted for any of them.” She worries some about the hostilities between the two camps but doesn’t think it is fatal to Democratic hopes, in terms of the fall campaign. “It’s more a squabble among siblings. I could do without some of the remarks by supporters on either side. Some are acting like two-year-olds.” Nevertheless, she says, “this is the election I’ve been working for my entire life. I would be delighted with either. And I’m delighted that the American people chose these two in the Democratic primary elections.” Freeman’s latest book—We Will Be Heard: Women’s Struggles for Political Power in the United States—dissects the more than 120 years in which women have been involved in mainstream political life. “It’s a myth that women got suffrage and then went into politics. It was the reverse,” she said. In the 1890s there had been parallel movements of suffrage and of women going into politics. They didn’t mesh on many issues. “They did work together on political reform and so when women got the vote, there already were some experienced women in politics,” she said. They could move right into it with a minimal learning curve. The Republican Party recruited the first women into serious party politics, partly because “they were afraid that women would work for a prohibition party and would take votes away from the GOP. They knew women were very active in temperance issues.” That’s how Iowa lawyer J. Ellen Foster, a founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, became the first woman in electoral politics, organizing women for the Republican National Committee, starting with the 1892 Republican convention. After winning the vote, the suffrage movement splintered, however. One sizable segment reformed itself as the League of Women Voters, “keeping many goals of the progressive movement but explicitly aimed at women. They were very concerned about the ‘plight of the working girl,’ which was the phrase at the time. They saw her as a victim of the capitalist movement, overworked and underpaid.” The labor movement shared this view. With the League of Women Voters (LWV), they pushed states to pass protective laws affecting women. Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party, meanwhile, “resurrected the framework of equality and decided what should happen next was a constitutional amendment for women,” to outlaw laws that treated women differently than men. That put them on a collision course with organized labor and the LWV—and, as events proved, with Eleanor Roosevelt. “They battled each other to a stalemate,” Freeman said. Despite that, women have made it across the threshold of politics. “They’re inside. That is not to say there is parity.” As elected officials, she said, “women are one-third of the Democrats and usually about 10-15 percent of the Republicans.”
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