Lady Business: Midterm reality checks and gaffes; Crazy rich Asian male novelists
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the twenty-eighth issue, published May 17, 2018.
Are We There Yet?
I woke up last Sunday in my childhood home in Pennsylvania, a few days before the state’s primaries, to read a front-page New York Times feature about the women running for office in that corner of the country.
It was a somewhat unpleasant reality check, at least if you’re hoping for the midterms to funnel all of this post-Women’s March, post-#MeToo, post-Handmaid’s Tale fury into a surge of women taking over Congress. The Times story points out that there are too many women running in races they won’t win, and too many clustered in the same races:
“While we are encouraged by the energy and the enthusiasm and the engagement of women, I think we also at the same time have to be cognizant of the fact that many of these women, even when they win their primary, will be running very tough races in November,” said Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
“We are not going to see, in one cycle, an end to the underrepresentation of women in American politics that we’ve seen for 250 years,” she said. “The concern is, we need this energy and engagement to be here for the long haul. This is a marathon, not a sprint.”
That’s especially the case where my parents live, in Pennsylvania’s new, much-watched Fifth Congressional District. It was redrawn from one of the most ludicrously gerrymandered voting districts in the country, and its primary field was just as ludicrous: 10 Democrats, including six women, competed this week.
Fortunately, there was a happy ending! Mary Gay Scanlon, a Ballard Spahr lawyer (and the most depressing quote in that NYT piece) won the Democratic primary. On the Republican side, prosecutor Pearl Kim ran unopposed … meaning that come November, there will actually be a woman representing Pennsylvania in Congress. (Right now the state’s Congressional delegation is 20 dudes.)
Still, the part of the article that stuck most with me was this tidbit:
With days to go in the race, one of the women, Molly Sheehan, said last week that the state legislator, Greg Vitali, had asked her to drop out and endorse him. Ms. Sheehan, a bioengineer at the University of Pennsylvania who has outraised Mr. Vitali and has the support of several resistance groups, argued that he would not have made a similar request of a man. (He said he had.)
Vitali has represented my parents in the Pennsylvania state legislature for almost as long as they’ve lived in the state. He’s a Democrat who held onto his seat in a then-Republican-dominated (or gerrymandered!) district for decades, and one who I remember doing the door-knocking rounds in our neighborhood, to check in with his constituents and listen to their concerns.
So I’ve been generally predisposed to think well of him and his work ethic as an elected official. And I understand that his request is probably par for the course from experienced legislators to their more junior party members.
But, dude. Read the room. No, 2018 might not repeat the immediate effects of 1992’s “Year of the Woman,” which doubled the number of women in Congress. But we’ve already had a good 18 months of women being politically energized and publicly active post-Trump. Whatever the final outcomes of these midterm elections, it’s very much not the year -- or years! -- to tell women to sit down, shut up or drop out.
Lady Bits
--I’m finally reading, and really enjoying, Crazy Rich Asians, and looking forward to the movie adaptation this summer. But wow, it has some wince-worthy textbook examples of Male Authors Describing Women. Eg: “She was not a natural-born raving beauty, but she was one of those girls who really knew how to make the most out of what she had. And what she had was a voluptuous body and the confidence to pull off bold fashion choices.”
--Yay for Brooklyn Nine-Nine! The show’s 24-hour cancellation-then-resurrection gave the culture-news cycle just enough oxygen to publish lots of appreciations for the show and its quiet-but-not-subtle social commentary. (This weekend’s episode, in which Terry Crews and groom-to-be Andy Samberg pick wedding linens and assemble gift bags while Stephanie Beatriz and bride-to-be Melissa Fumero hunt down an elusive criminal, is a nice case in point.) This Twitter thread about Fumero’s character, Amy Santiago, might be my favorite of last week’s appreciations (and, um, a contrast in character descriptions to the above): “Amy, you see, is a lady who likes the rules. She wants validation from her mentors. She is fiercely ambitious. She loves paperwork and bureaucracy. She’s also NEVER PUNISHED for this. In other shows (The Lisa Simpson Effect) these women who are smarter and work harder are punished. They have to be miserable whilst (male) lesser characters get to grow. Or they have to change & realise they were at ‘fault’. Amy has never had to do this!”
Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com