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I never thought I’d see the day when a U.S. Congresswoman’s breast milk was the star of a nationally televised segment, but there we go. On CNN, Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin fed her five month old from a Medela bottle. I’ve never seen a mother in real life actually using those bottles to feed (the flow), so she must have been making a statement: “Hey, this is breast milk, not formula!” This signal is to nursing mothers what Conservative code words about crosses and the like are to right wing Republicans: something you only pick up if you've lived it.
Recently CNN featured a piece on the “baby boom among female lawmakers.” Seven, now eight (with Linda Sanchez) women have given birth while in Congress, recently Kirsten Gillibrand and Herseth Sandlin. Even post-Palin, to say new mommies in elected office are a novelty is an understatement. So I’m glad that the media is re-introducing the concept now, while we’re in love with Democrats and Mommy-party governance is not a pejorative. But let’s take a feminist perspective on the CNN piece, just for fun.
Margaret Thatcher famously staged a scene during which she ended a Cabinet level meeting at 5pm to hurry to the shops to get “her Denis” his bacon before the shops shut. Done for the benefit of the press, Thatcher wanted and needed to tone down her Iron Maiden image.
In a way, Herseth promoting her breastmilk on CNN is as much of a canned statement as Thatcher’s. Women politicians are often still a novelty, and as the Politico points out this week, the old boys club is alive and well on Capitol Hill. Erika Falk writes of how media treatment of elected women differs from the way men are covered. Coverage perpetuates female novelty and cultural biases. Women are described differently than men. This maintains the perceptions that women in leadership roles are tokens and focuses people’s attention on more personal aspects rather than on more relevant information.
Most political associations and legislative bodies are skewed groups, with percentages at about 85% men to 15% women. Both houses of the US Congress are at about 17% female-- keeping women in token roles. As Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Kanter wrote, tokens are not judged on their individual merits, but are expected to act as one expects their larger group to act, as mommies, for example. They are highly visible, and they typically perform their jobs under public and symbolic conditions different from those of the dominant group.
Let’s talk about the comfort factor. One of the most common threads in the leadership literature is the impact of the “double bind,” in which people like a woman if they see her exhibiting communal traits, but do not respect her as a leader with the necessary agentic qualities. The reverse is also true, that a woman can be seen as possessing agentic qualities, but will not be liked and therefore not seen as a successful leader. I actually see this changing in the coverage of women officials, and I think we can thank Hillary Clinton for it. The thing I liked about coverage of Gillibrand was that her work as a tough lawyer for Phillip Morris showed her as pretty cutthroat and a true corporate force to be reckoned with.
But does any of the media coverage matter if women accomplish important tasks while in office? There is the “New Hampshire” effect and this is what gives me hope. New Hampshire with its female majority has introduced a trifecta of paid leave and work family bills. This message is being carried to the federal level: "Our approach to policies that were important to us before become even more important, whether it's early childhood development and how you fund it, child-care, quality child-care, child nutrition, prenatal care," said Herseth Sandlin.
So, the time is right for breastfeeding Congresswomen; hopefully the novelty will wear off. I’ll close with the words of Michelle Obama at a recent Corporate Voices for Working Families meeting:
“We need to discuss flexible work hours that give employees greater ability to attend to important family responsibilities like child pick-up, something as simple as that; doctors appointments for those not just with kids, but for people with elderly parents. We're finding more and more that families are in that crunch, as well.
We need to discuss
