Women and Politics
Against my better judgement (or not), I am taking a Women and Politics class this semester.
(Admittedly, it's with one of my favorite professors in the department, so I mainly did it for her. That and my "Speaking Intensive" requirement.)
There are many ideas that I disagree with in the course. Perhaps I will touch on those later. However, I thought that I'd post my reaction to an article I read. It was the first one that hit a chord in me, the conservative woman who didn't necessarily long to put herself under the "woman" category.
The article discussed the lack of women running as candidates forpolitical office. One thing that fascinated me was the theory behind the reluctance of women to run for political office. The study claimed that women constantly underestimated their capabilities and even women with the most credentials "didn't feel experienced enough."
And that completely struck a chord in me. If there's anything, in college I have felt that anything I had previously done was shoddy work. I read my past entries, newspaper articles, and I wince. I read more and more and lament over not having time to research more in a certain subject. I have basic knowledge of 3 languages containing different alphabets (Ukrainian, Farsi, Arabic) and I can read them with a decent accuracy. Everyone tells me "I don't know how you do this!" I know a lot about this, about that.
But every morning I wake up and I feel that there is so much more I could be doing. Why is my language study not progressing fast enough? Why can't I measure up? Why is my Middle Eastern knowledge so shallow? How dare I call myself a "specialist" in anything? I feel like the stupidest student in the department.
I am not doing this to show off or garner compliments. This is a feeling that I sincerely am faced with all the time. I would NEVER run for political office if I didn't feel that I was perfect. And I wonder, is the article correct? Do women feel that they are under extra scrutiny, and that they need to be perfect? That besides running a political campaign and being knowledgeable of all the issues, they need to be a great mother or the ideal model of a single woman, and look good doing it?
Is it a concern that is solely gender based? That might be ambiguous, however, the study did have a lot of hilarious quotes of men saying "I can run the government better than _____!" while women hardly ever made those sort of statements. Even as a non-feminist, in my experience, that's been true a majority of the time.
Do we hold ourselves to impossible expectations?
And does it even matter in the long run? Does it really affect a woman's perception of her own ability to become involved in politics?
Thinking...
