Women everywhere...except the Oval Office
Commentary by Pat Murphy
By PAT MURPHY
Pat Murphy
|
|
It?s no accident the 2004 presidential and vice presidential candidates shared platforms with wives: Fitting reminders whence the source of their stability.
Women were ubiquitous--as election analysts and reporters, brainy campaign advisers (the iron lady Karen Hughes for President Bush; Mary Beth Cahill for Sen. Kerry), partisan drumbeaters (Arizona Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, to name two).
Only 80-some years after fighting for the right to vote, women are in commanding and demanding positions in every calling--media, business, government, military high commands, religion, science, medicine, academia, space flight, engineering, finance and on and on.
So, why haven?t women been nominated for president by the major parties (fringe parties nominate a few now and then)?
The time surely is overdue.
Cynics have observed, correctly, that (a) women couldn?t do worse than men who?ve made a mess of things in Washington, and (b) probably would lift the stature of politics and improve government efficiency.
Women in senior roles characteristically are more honest (except for a few wayward souls such as homemaking diva Martha Stewart and Pentagon official Darleen Druyun, who got nine months for conspiracy in the Boeing tanker lease deal), more tenacious, more driven by principle and less by expediency and vices.
Mothers are idolized as pillars of judgment, comportment, emotional strength, integrity, moral suasion, the glue that holds families together in crises?
Some researchers insist women have special genetic qualities that make them superior to men. Males have good ol? boy systems that give them an edge in politics. But that?s changing.
My bias may be understandable.
In my childhood, when few women worked in business, I watched my mother toil as a clerk to keep our family afloat in the Depression and while my father was in and out of veterans hospitals with World War I Navy injuries. When she died in her 80s, she was still at it, but vice president of the company with two sons and a husband who never lacked. Such stamina.
My first flying lesson in a Florida cow pasture was with a female instructor, Verna Burke, when few women were in aviation. I got my commercial license and took my FAA flight exams with Mary Gaffaney, once the world aerobatic flying champ. Now space flights and airline jets are routinely piloted by women.
Computer giant Hewlett Packard is captained by a woman, Carly Fiorina. I?ve worked for two women publishers. As an editor and publisher, I?ve hired women as key executives.
Could most men who run for president match the credentials of women who?ve had to be better than men to get where they are?
