Women for President: Media Bias in Nine Campaigns

3. Baking Muffins and Bombing Countries

3 Baking Muffins and Bombing Countries I n 1984 when Geraldine Ferraro was running for vice president on the Democratic Party ticket, she was asked byAgriculture and Commerce Commissioner Jim Buck Ross, “Can you bake a blueberry muffin?” (Braden 1996, 109). On Meet the Press, she was asked, “Do you think that in any way the Soviets might be tempted to take advantage of you simply because you are a woman?” (Jamieson 1995, 107), and “Are you strong enough to push the button?” (Cohn 2002, 18). Over twenty years earlier, when Margaret Chase Smith was first elected to the Senate, the Saturday Evening Post published a photo essay showing her wearing an apron and baking in the kitchen (Schmidt 1996). Not only does the press ask women candidates different types of questions than it poses to men, but it often uses words to describe women that are not used to describe men. Each of these can be a subtle way of conveying stereotypes. Maria Braden (1996), a journalism professor, argued that when Representative Susan Molinari (R–NY) was described as “perky” by the VillageVoice, Senator Nancy Kassebaum (R–KA) as “demure ” by the W ashington Post, and Governor Madeleine Kunin ofVermont as “hysterical,” they all were being described in ways that no man candidate would be. Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg School for Communication made the same argument with regard to a W ashingtonPost description of Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell as “haughty” and Golda Meir, former prime minister of Israel, as a “grandmother.” In fact, Senator Kassebaum reportedly became so tired of being called “diminu- baking muffins and bombing countries 53 tive” and “soft-spoken” that she said if she heard it again she would “hit someone over the head” (Jamieson 1995, 129). Reporters ask these types of questions or choose these types of words because they are following stereotypes that associate women with domestic spheres and nurturing instead of public life and leading.These stereotypes inform their writing and interviewing of the candidates, which in turn may influence readers, often subtly conveying that the women candidates are unsuited to politics . According to Dianne Feinstein’s campaign staff in her 1990 run for governor of California, “The hardest task they faced during the campaign was the need to establish Feinstein’s credibility as a leader over and over and over again, despite her credentials as mayor of San Francisco and her charisma. Yet the public had no trouble seeing her mild-mannered Republican opponent, Pete Wilson, as a leader, for as a white male he fit the public’s most comfortable leader image” (qtd. in Jamieson 1995, 123). This chapter examines some stereotypes about men and women to learn to what degree the press coverage reinforced or challenged these traditional conceptions and how coverage changed over time. Specifically , I examine the treatment of emotion, family, profession, naming, and character descriptions. Such patterns are important to scholars of media bias, elections, and discrimination because they help describe the systematic forces at play in society. Stereotypes One reason for the difficulties women face in the press is that Western culture associates leadership with stereotypically masculine characteristics . Evidence for such an argument is found throughout the social sciences . For example, Sandra Bem (1987), a research psychologist, found that when subjects were asked to choose traits that were more desirable in men, those mentioned included: leader, aggressive, ambitious, analytical, makesdecisionseasily,willingtotakeastand,dominant,andforceful.This same list could have been derived from descriptions of good leadership. The list of attributes that were more desirable in women were decidedly not associated with leadership: compassionate, childlike, yielding, softspoken , gullible, and shy. Kathleen Hall Jamieson (1995) noted that this dichotomyintraitsgrewoutoftheseparate-spherephilosophy.Masculine traits tend to be associated with work and rationality (the public sphere). Feminine traits are associated with mothering, reproduction, and emotion (the private sphere). Given this, it is noteworthy that when two researchers, Shirley Miller 54 women for president Rosenwasser and Norma Dean (1989), asked college students to describe the qualities of a good president, they found 61 percent of the descriptions for a good president were categorized as masculine; none of the students described a good president as feminine.They found that masculine traits were considered more important for all offices from local to national.The political scientist Leonie Huddy (1994) concluded from this and similar research that “a female candidate stereotyped as a typical feminine woman would most certainly lose...