final blog and personal study

As my last post I would like to talk about a quick study I have wanted to do for this blog all semester. This study was done by asking 6 different female college students at Washington State University. All of these women were asked the same question of “how do you feel about the role women play in politics today, and do you feel that women receive the same rights that males do? I recorded all of the replies that were given to me and came up with these theories.
Of the replies I received in this study there was one response that I received from all 6 interviews. This response was that they felt like women share all of the same freedoms that men do and more. What they were saying by this is that they don’t feel like sexism plays a role in society anymore and furthermore women receive privileges and are accepted in more ways than men. This was further insinuated in an example that one women gave me which was there are more options and alternatives for women in life than men. Of these opportunities and privileges are women are sometimes hired for jobs over men only because they are female and many large companies need to have female representation to avoid accusations of sexism, the same thing applies with the racial issue. Many companies are hiring people of other ethnicities over white applicants to instill diversity in their companies. Another example that I thought of was the amount of college scholarships offered to women and other ethnicities. If anything this makes it look like the white male is now at a disadvantage. However statistics still show this is not the case. This small and short study I completed didn’t make any major uncovering but it did tell me that most women feel that they are not discriminated against and feel that sexism is no longer an issue as it was years ago.

Facts About Female Elections Past and Present.

A website that has been a major contributor to my blog is www.cawp.rutgers.edu
I spoke about it in my last blog as well; however I continue to find really good sources and articles that pertain to my blog topic of Women in Politics. I was searching through this website trying to find something to write about and under the facts tab are tons of facts about not only this year’s elections but elections that date back to 1996. Along with election results were fact sheets and historical summaries of women candidates that were running for office this year as well as many previous elections. I found one sheet that listed all of the women candidates running for Congressional and Statewide offices in 2007. The sheet showed what office they were running for, the state in which they were running, whether the seat was open, incumbent, or there was a challenger as well as the result of the election. I was actually very surprised to see that in over 100 elections that women were running in, they won over 90 percent of them. As well as fact sheets on elections there are also facts and reports that are made available by the CAWP that show voter turnout, gender gap, women’s vote watch in this year’s election as well as past years, as well as facts about Resources for and About Women of Color. I also noticed that the web site included links to other websites that offered campaign training for women. This site was called “Ready to Run” and is a bi-partisan national effort to recruit and train women to run for all levels of office. The amount of information on this web site that covered female politics is amazing, I only wish that I could have found this site earlier in the semester when I first started my blog project.

Website connected to Women's Politics.

A major source to most of the information found on my blog came from http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/
This web site is dedicated to awareness of not only female politics but women’s rights all over the nation. This is the official web site for the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), and is a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. CAWP has been analyzing and interpreting women’s participation in American politics for almost four decades and is nationally recognized as the leading source of scholarly research and current data about American women’s political participation. The Center for American Women and Politics mission is to promote greater knowledge and understanding about women’s participation in politics and government and to enhance women’s influence and leadership in public life.
I found the web site to be most helpful in keeping me up to date on all of the elections where a woman was running for state legislature, governor, congress, and even democratic nominee when Hillary Clinton was still a possibility. CAWP had links to all of these women’s home web sites where I found a lot of up to date info on their campaigns and main headlines as well as few stories. Also there are links at CAWP that allow you to watch the polls in races that women were running.
One article I found interesting was a story about president-elect Barack Obama who has a standard to meet or beat the record proportion of women appointed under President Bill Clinton which at one point had 9 of the 19 cabinet members that were women. Currently there have only been 33 women to ever serve in the Presidential Cabinet. “This is just one way that the Obama administration will reflect the nation’s diversity, including many strong women like those who have helped to shape his life and career.”

Palin speaks out..

Obviously the primary central figure to my topic is Sara Palin.  If you have read any of my other posts or even read any newspaper you will have seen that Sara Palin is all over the news.  At one point her face was pictured in every newspaper on WSU campus, as well as other types of media.  However as we all know Palin was both positively and negatively displayed by the media.  At the beginning of the campaign Palin was displayed as a ploy by the Republican Party to gain the majority women’s vote.  However as the campaign progressed the biases in the media started to become visible.  This was mainly seen in the television news stations, which obviously chose their sides as to which campaign they supported.  The stations that were on the democratic side targeted Palin by slandering her name and questioning her stance on the abortion issue.  Some stations wrote story’s that exposed her family and mainly her daughters child and possible second child.  However the most public slandering of palin came after the vice presidential debate, where Palin was ridiculed by most types of news for her speech edicate when she used names to describe types of people as “Joe Six-Pack” and “Dave the plumber.”  Last week I saw two skits on the popular television show Saturday Night Live   where she was made fun of in a fake debate with Biden.

            Although most people only remember the negative press that Palin received during the election there was also a lot of positives that came with the negatives. Last week at the Republican Governors Association conference Palin addressed the media for the first time after losing the election.  According to many pollsters Palin made very smart moves during her first speech addressing the media about many of the accusation’s of her clashing with McCain among other issues.    

Palin's post campaign speech.

The article I chose was in USA Today and it was an article about Sara Palin and her actions with the media post election.   This article however did not mention anything about her book that she is supposedly going to write, or any of the other rumors about her commentary abut the past election.  Mainly the article speaks about her comments made in her first speech since losing the election.  Palin praised Sen. John McCain and wished Obama well in her few opening statements.  She also stated about president elect Obama “if he governs with the skill and the grace and the greatness of which he is capable, we’re going to be just fine, and as he prepares to fill the office of Washington and Lincoln, know that this is a shining moment in American history.”  She later spoke about her opinion on what direction her party should take.  In the article Palin states that her defeated party must return to core GOP values, such as limited government and personal freedom.  Which is a sign of her returning to her very conservative views that she had once maintained before she began running for the white house with John McCain.   She later emphasized this again by saying “the Washington values displayed by our national leaders simply don’t reflect the values of the Republican Party.”   I feel that these first speeches by Palin show what is to come in the future of her political career.  It seemed to me that she is trying to show how much she intends to move back to her pre campaign views of conservatism.   

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/2008-11-13-palin_n.htm?loc=interstitialskip

The video I chose was sent to me by my sister that is twelve years old and is still living in Alaska.  She is a hard-core democrat and was pretty excited to see this.  The video was filmed in Alaska, however the video was primarily of women that live in Anchorage Showing support for Obama by making the Obama logo outside of the state building.  The video also showed pictures women as well as men showing their support all over the state.  Some pictures were of people camping in cabins, on top of mountains, on beaches.  There was even one picture of some women holding Obama signs after the Alaska Day parade in my hometown of Sitka.  This seemed awkward to me because I assumed that Alaska would be in full support of Sara Palin.  However after talking to my mom she said that there has been a lot of support shown for Obama all over the state and it was all over the news.  I thought it was interesting that there almost seemed to be an uprising of democrats this year in a state that has a republican senator running for vice president next to John McCain.  Republicans have primarily dominated Alaska for the last half-century as well.    the video clip can be found at  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lffB7B8jKE

The Internet site that I chose to relate to my blog is pbs.org.  However although the site doesn’t relate solely to my topic of women in politics, it does provide thousands of stories and reports on women in politics and other issues of the sort. This media site is made to inform the public about news from all over the world, and not just news that is covered on the PBS television station, but from other television and radio stations as well as stories from all over the world in news papers, journals, magazines, and other scholarly sources.  This site has become very helpful in providing me with topics to blog about as well as my own personal interest reading.  Two of the stories I used from this website were both related to Sara Palin and her influence in the recent presidential election.  Another article I used was about Palin’s negative support that she was receiving from the female population in not only Alaska her home state, but in other high women’s rights states as well, such as Connecticut and Michigan.   These aren’t the only articles that I pulled from this site.  I have used two other blogs that have been influenced by information that I found on this site.  I would recommend this site to anyone that needs to research information that is covered by any type of media.        

Do women want to elect a female president?

Do women base their support for a candidate on the type of gender?  Will the female vote swing towards senator Clinton over Obama?  Obviously not since the democratic election is over and Senator Obama won.  However my question is that do you think the majority of the women vote would sway towards the women candidate?  I’m pretty sure there are a lot of men in the United States that would sway there vote away from a female candidate because they are female.  I have personally heard people say things during this years election about how America isn’t ready to have a women be president.  There are many old fashioned people in this country that are firm believers that women have no place in office and they should leave the “real work” for the men to take care of.  Coincidently these old fashioned minds happen to make up one of the larger age group of voters in our country.  Do you think the women in this age group would then support a female candidate because she is female or side on her husband’s side of the issue?  According to various Pollsters mentioned in Aida F. Akl’s article Women Influence U.S. Politics, women do not show any difference in there vote based on whether the candidate is male or female.  Victoria Budson, Executive director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard University claims that women voters are more tuned into the issues that are meaningful to their lives rather than which candidate will push for women’s rights more or which gender each candidate is.  I personally feel that a person should vote for whom will best benefit there lives, however wouldn’t supporting a woman candidate help every other woman in America’s cause.  It would defiantly make sense if the majority of women votes when to senator Clinton in her push for the presidency.  I would feel that during the women’s rights movement in the 70’s a firm majority of registered female voters would have voted for senator Clinton just because she was a female and would have brought more power and voice to women across the country.  Does this mean women are happy with the rights, privilege, and equality standards they have now?  Are they still out to gain complete equality in all acts of life?    

Women Influence U.S. Politics

By: Aida F. Akl’s

http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2008-01/2008-01-15-voa6.cfm

Beyond the Double Blind

According to a top scholar on politics in the United States there has been a “seismic change” in the cultural assumptions of women and leadership.   I feel that this is obvious sense there are an increasing amount of stories being published about women winning positions as mayor of their towns or cities.  Also with the bigger name women leading the way are obviously Hillary Clinton and Sara Palin.  In Article  “Making a Difference in the U.S.A. Women In Politics” Kathleen Hall Jamieson author of Beyond The Double Blind Women And Leadership  she Speaks about women who have of lately made a push to gain leadership positions not only in the united states but around the world.  Women have increasingly been winning positions of governors, seats in congress, in presidential cabinets, as heads of major philanthropies, and as university professors, all of which have demonstrated there ability to be leaders to the public (Jamison).

 It seems to me that the days of women being forced into stay at home jobs and child caring are coming to an end and with every it seems that more women are pushing the envelope to gain higher positions politically and professionally.  This is undoubtedly paving the way for a louder and more influential female voice in the United States.  Jamison also said in her interview that women should look to the other countries that have been lead completely by women as an example that shows that eventually the day will come that the U.S. elects its first women president. 

My understanding to this is that with more and more women over coming the sexual biases of our culture and political system eventually something will give way to the age of women having an equal say in our political endeavors.  Take for example our presidential race right now.  Twenty years ago no one thought there would ever be a black president even running for the office, however 20 years later we have a black candidate about to win.  It’s only a matter of time that the women’s movement becomes so strong that they too will push a leader into the oval office.   

 

http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/womenpolitics/jamieson.htm

Why not fight for your rights?

Sara Palin is a national icon right now and you would think would be fighting for further women’s rights; however she is extremely conservative, and I feel that this might be a prime example of gender socialization in Alaska where Palin is from.

Gender socialization plays a big role in our society, it tells a person what identity to create by influencing how people act, think and look.  It also shows you how the other gender is different and also how they are the same. Gender Identity and ideologies about gender are shaped by society’s influence in someone’s social life.  When children are young their gender identity is shaped largely by parents and school.  Later in their lives it might change from school to their places of work, friends and other forms of their social lives.  For example I was taught at a young age that as a boy I was to do different chores than those of my sisters.  I had to take out the trash, feed the dogs, and help out with repairing sain nets when my  nets would get holes torn in them after fishing trips in Alaska.  To most people these jobs are described as more masculine jobs that are usually more suitable for a male to do.  Where more feminine jobs consist of more indoor jobs that are less physically demanding.  In Alaska this is the case but at a higher extreme.  Living in Alaska for my entire life I sometimes feel that Alaska is behind the rest of the country at least a decade when it comes to women’s rights.  The views in Alaska are extremely old fashioned and I feel that these views have shaped some of the ideas that Sara Palin has fought for, some of whom have not necessarily been in favor of women’s rights.  I feel that this Is a prime example of how socialization through a persons life can affect there views on life even if those views are somewhat non beneficial to themselves.  

Main target... Palin

I would think that since we have a women running for vice president of our country it would prove that the problems women have faced with sexism over the years would be close to eliminated.  However that is simply not the case.  With a new face to lead the women’s rights surge, there is also a new name to slander.  It seems that even though she is running for one of the most prestigious jobs in the history of our country, she is gaining no credit from both males and females.  After the latest debate between Palin and Joe Biden all I have heard from friends, news papers, and television is that Palin is a joke and should probably quit.  It seems the most recent attack on Palin is about her eye batting in the vice presidential debate and how unprofessional it was.  Time magazine quoted a women speaking about Palin’s wink “I think it’s hysterical.. I think women can relate with being in a situation where its very serous, you kind of have to sep back and add that humor, whether it’s a wink or it’s a shrug.”  Why has this tiny gesture taken such electoral importance, after all it was only four years ago that our current president for the last two terms was cracking jokes about his own mistakes he made in many of his speeches and debates, however no one took the time to blow up his jokes and acts of humor into acts of unprofessionalism..

Intro

Im sure you all recognize that there are very few women in the U.S. that hold high ranking position in U.S. politics.  Since 1789 only 2% of the members of congress have been women, from 1922-2006 only 33 women have served in the senate: 20 Democrats and 13 Republicans.  Women have only been allowed to vote for the last 88 years.  I felt that this would be a good issue to examine seeing how Sarah Palin, whom is from my home state is running for vice president with John McCain, and because this is a more relevant issue being discussed today.