What does the emergence of a Hillary Clinton or a Barack Obama as serious candidates for the U.S. presidency say about progress toward equality in American society? While it is no doubt a positive sign, according to this analysis by Patrick Jarreau of France’s Le Monde, both the tactics of the Clinton campaign and the continued relative lack of women and minorities in positions of authority show that the United States still has a very long way to go.
“Confronted with the asset posed by Obama’s negritude, which is at once assumed and transcended, Ms. Clinton and her husband have tried, each in his or her own way, to send the young politician back to his ghetto … by dividing the electorate of their party, the two candidates could cause fractures that the one who is nominated cannot repair.”
By Patrick Jarreau
Translated By Kate Davis
February 3, 2008
France – Le Monde – Original Article (French)
In nine months, the Americans could elevate to the leadership of their country a White woman or a Black man, two “minorities” in the political lexicon on the other side of the Atlantic. The Democratic candidate for the White House at the end
of a competition that may well continue beyond the primaries on February 5 – “Super Tuesday” – when there will be votes in over 20 states, will be either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. With the Democrats in good position to win the presidency in November, the possibility of the dominant Western power being led by a man of African descent or by a woman is arouses curiosity on every continent.If Mrs. Clinton enters the White House on January 20, 2009, nearly 89 years after women’s suffrage was established in the United States, the march of women toward equality will have reached a significant milestone. However, her election would be more of an upheaval for America than for the rest of the world, where women have long since come to power; earlier in Israel, India, the United Kingdom and Pakistan, and today in Germany, Chili and Argentina. But if one of them reaches the summit of the American “superpower,” it would be a lesson to those who still doubt the capacity of women to lead or the willingness of the people to trust them to do so.
Viewed from inside the United States, the election of a woman to the presidency would mark a change. Because the women’s liberation movement has some of its roots there – in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir often referred to the achievements of the American women – we sometimes imagine society across the Atlantic to be more sexually egalitarian than it is in reality. Any discrimination on the basis of gender is prohibited by law and punishable by the courts, but the resistance of men to sharing power is no less strong.
In politics as in the economy, women who have exercised power or who have held high level positions are rare. Only one entered the presidential competition this year, where there were initially 15 men. Nancy Pelosi is the first woman in history to have risen to the post of Speaker of the House of Representatives – of 535 Representatives, 86 are women – after the victory of the Democrats in the 2006 legislative elections. Of 100 senators, only sixteen are women, including Mrs. Clinton. Of 50 states, eight have female governors.
All of this means that the United States is far achieving equality. The election of Mrs. Clinton on November 4 would be a qualitative leap forward rather than the culmination of a gradual process. The extent the Americans are ready for this, or conversely, adverse, is difficult to guess. But what’s certain is that the senator from New York is divisive.
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