Feminism, Femininity, and Power

Had you been standing in a supermarket checkout line in the first week of May 1984, leafing through the National Enquirer, you might have come across a story inviting you to Meet the Mama of Women's Lib. The person the Enquirer proposed to introduce was Nellie Tayloe Ross, who was elected governor of Wyoming in 1924, succeeding her husband, who had died in office. Some of today's feminists act as if they started the women's movement, the article began, but way back in 1924 the U.S. had its first elected woman governor.1 Unfortunately for the accuracy of the headline, Ross herself had declared some years earlier that I have no interest in women's lib.2 No one would mistake the Enquirer for a reliable source of historical information. Neither should we underestimate its power as a fountain of popular ideas, however silly its style. In this instance the grocery store tabloid made the common mistake of confusing a woman's participation in electoral politics with a politician's commitment to feminism. Instead, Nellie Tayloe Ross provides the classic example of the kind of woman politician who has sometimes made feminists gnash their teeth. But Ross also stood as an early example of a person facing a continuing dilemma for women in public life, who must prove at once that they will govern as well as any man without losing their femininity in the process. Nancy Cott, in The Grounding of Modem Feminism, noted that women's rights activists of the 1920s bemoaned the fact that after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, male-dominated political parties seemed only to support women candidates who distanced Copyright @ 1995 by Frontiers Editorial Collective

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• The grounding of modern feminism

  Nancy F Cott•The grounding of modern feminism•1987

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• Beyond Suffrage

  Lois W Banner, Susan Ware•The American Historical Review•1982

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• Over His Dead Body

  Open Access•Diane D Kincaid•The Western Political Quarterly•1978

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