Why Do Qualified Women Spur Suspicion?
By: Faith O. Potts
Tags: Sexism, Patriarchy, Feminism, Politics, Misogyny

Women are frequently told that, if they work twice as hard as men, then they will be just as respected and admired. This notion — that individual women can and must assume the burden of combating sexism by doubling the amount of work they perform — is problematic for a number of reasons, but I think the most glaring issue is that, in practice, it simply doesn’t appear to work. Its ineffectiveness is exemplified by the faltering campaigns of two of the most qualified, competent, lively, and inventive presidential candidates ever — Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton — both of whom were ultimately yielded to old white men.

Were they too competent? Was that it? And on what planet is being exceedingly competent a problem?

For men — I don’t think this is even a question — there isn’t such a thing as being too competent. A man with knowledge is brilliant. He is genius, and in American culture the male genius is often elevated to a godlike status, allowing him to easily elude all forms of discipline — even at the expense of the women he may silence or abuse. But when the knower is a woman, she’s often treated like a criminal; how dare she acquire the knowledge that has so long been withheld from her?

Women are forced to walk a very thin line: the line between being, in the eyes of men, too weak or sensitive or timid for the job and being so qualified and equipped to succeed that they garner — or steal — the attention and admiration that is supposed to belong to men.

Think about it. In 2016, American voters on both the left and the right were disproportionately suspicious of Hillary Clinton, who — whether or not you agree or disagree with her political positions — was indisputably one of the most qualified presidential candidates in American history (President Obama himself said she was THE most qualified, period). I doubt any of us forget Donald Trump and his followers referring to her only as “Crooked Hillary,” or the infamous debate moment when a resentful Trump turned to Clinton, who had spoken eloquently and thoughtfully all night, and called her a “nasty woman.” And then there are the Sanders supporters. Although they were insistent that they were not biased against Clinton, many of them never hesitated to deem her — albeit without solid proof — corrupt, greedy, entitled, callous, shrill, selfish, and even bloodthirsty, or to launch misogynistic attacks against her, often in the form of the #BernTheWitch hashtag.

Similarly, throughout her 2020 presidential campaign, Elizabeth Warren endured misogynistic attacks from certain groups of Sanders supporters, who frequently called her a snake, which really means that they viewed her as a deceitful backstabber because she dared to tell the truth about her perception of her interactions with Sanders. Other Democrats leveled similar criticisms against Warren, deeming her unlikable, condescending, and a know-it-all. MSNBC commentator Donny Deutsch said her “kind of high-school principal demeanor” made her too unlikable to defeat Trump. A New York Times article features a variety of readers’ perspectives on why Elizabeth Warren’s campaign faltered, one of whom says, “She suffered from the same flaws as Hillary Clinton — most fundamentally, the belief that if only a woman works harder than anyone else, she will get rewarded with the presidency. The belief that the election is a contest over who has prepared the most elaborately detailed plans.” Elizabeth Warren had a plan for everything, even when her competitors didn’t — and, with the help of misogyny, male candidates were framed as the vulnerable victims of an over-prepared Warren’s malicious narcissism and egomania.

“Misogyny primarily targets women because they are women in a man’s world.”

Many have claimed that misogyny was not the cause — or even a cause — of the Warren campaign’s decline. I would argue that this standpoint arises from the seemingly perpetual misunderstanding of what misogyny entails. In her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, feminist philosopher Kate Manne theorizes that misogyny is not merely hatred for all women, explaining that defining it as such is often unproductive in that it allows virtually anyone to deny being a misogynist (i.e. to make claims like I can’t be a misogynist if I love my mother/wife/daughter etc). Instead, Manne suggests that misogyny functions to police women’s behavior and enforce patriarchal gender roles; in other words, “misogyny primarily targets women because they are women in a man’s world.” Manne argues that misogyny often consists of a system of punishment and reward in which women who fulfill their patriarchal role as “human givers” — such as “loving mothers, attentive wives, loyal secretaries, ‘cool’ girlfriends, or good waitresses” — are rewarded for their conformity, while women who disobey the patriarchal order are punished or put in their place.

A significant amount of the attacks on Warren certainly seemed to have the goal of policing her behavior, or putting her in her place. For example, Obama administration officials referred to her as “sanctimonious” and “a condescending narcissist” because she wanted to be put in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which she proposed in 2007. Asking to be in charge of one’s own proposition seems perfectly reasonable to me, but, for a woman, this was apparently asking for too much — she had to be put in her place, and that place was not as the head of the CFPB.. Perhaps the disproportionate criticism Warren faced for miniscule actions, such as whether or not she lied when referring to her father as a janitor instead of a maintenance man, were also efforts to put her in her place. What leads me to think so is the fact that, while Warren was receiving constant media criticism for such trivial matters, more significant issues pervading the history of her male competitors, such as Bernie Sanders’ alarming record on gun control — which remained more or less unchanged until 2016 — were largely ignored.

When Super Tuesday arrived and Warren did not perform as well as expected in her home state of Massachusetts, I found myself reminiscing about the night Donald Trump was elected president. Then I found myself vaguely recalling the numerous liberals who made use of the infamous I would vote for a woman, just not that woman claim, citing Elizabeth Warren as an example of a woman they would vote for (as opposed to Clinton). The fact that so many liberals resorted to this claim to justify their not voting for Clinton, and then, come 2020, used a variation of the same claim to justify not voting for Warren, is further proof that a woman’s immense qualification and competence simply isn’t enough to counteract America’s misogyny. In a 2016 Houston Press article on liberals’ repeated claims that they would vote for Warren but not Clinton, Jef Rouner articulates my own thoughts perfectly when he says, “[Warren is] the perfect female candidate for president in 2016 in that she isn’t actually running, and thus her danger to the patriarchal power system is just a thought exercise rather than the reality embodied in Clinton.” In 2020, his claim rings painfully true; when voting for Warren was a mere hypothetical, it was strikingly easy for liberals to use her in their justificatory claims, but when she ran for president in 2020, not even close to enough voters materialized to match the previous rhetoric. When the abstract idea of a Warren presidency became the reality, suddenly all that really mattered was that she was a threat to the patriarchal order.

Elizabeth Warren had a plan for everything. She was passionate, prepared, and tremendously qualified. She was also fiercely and disproportionately scrutinized, and ultimately written off on behalf of two elderly white men. The election of a woman for president of the U.S. is long overdue — 59 other countries have already done so — but it would mean severely disrupting the patriarchal power system. This type of big, structural change — having the first woman president — appears to be something most Americans still aren’t ready to embrace, regardless of how qualified, innovative, and prepared she may be.