man wins presidential election; world is shocked May 10, 2007
Posted by sindhub in 2007 french presidential election, careerwomen, class, female politicos, Female Power, female voters, feminism, france, gender, Girl Power, Hillary Clinton, in the news, International, jacques chirac, motherhood, new york times, news stories, nicolas sarkozy, politics, Power, segolene royal.add a comment
As you may know, France’s presidential election took place recently. In a runoff between rightist Nicolas Sarkozy and socialist Segolene Royal, Sarkozy was chosen to replace Jacques Chirac, 53 to 47 percent. What’s relevant to ‘girl power’ is that Royal is a woman. I found this article, “France’s female voters shun Segolene Royal,” which makes the situation sound pretty bad. But the female vote for Royal wasn’t much different from the overall vote, with a 52 to 48 margin in favor of Sarkozy. Although Royal focused part of her campaign on appealing specfically to female voters ‘as a mother’ and promising greater equality (only 12% of French lawmakers are female), apparently female voters thought she focused on it too much. Some of the women interviewed say that they didn’t vote for Royal just because she’s a woman, because they didn’t think she was going to do anything for them or because she didn’t share the same vision for the country that they did.
There are two conflicting ways to look at the situation. On one hand, isn’t this what we want, for women to be seen as individuals (as ‘human’) and not just as women? But, do we really want that when it doesn’t work in their favor? Especially when it might not be working in their favor because the political system is still biased against them? And it seems that while Royal was criticized for showing too much identification with one demographic, that being women, she’s also criticized for (more…)
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