THE LAST WORD
POLSGROVE, CAROL
THE LAST WORD Carol Polsgrove Feminine and Tough Not long ago, I came across a New York Times story about Ann Dore McLaughlin, the new Secretary of Labor. McLaughlin, the headline told us,...
...We have the vote, and we can legally dispense birth-control information, but when it comes to holding positions of power we are still oddities...
...The result was a lengthy profile...
...The remark puzzled me...
...The Times quoted her husband's reassurances on that count: "She's almost a paradoxical combination of femininity and toughness in her professional life," he said...
...All the same, "when Miss Eastman argues," the reporter wrote, "the woman promptly gives place to the lawyer, clear-headed, clear-eyed, decisive, the adversary in every word and gesture...
...At her swearing-in ceremony, Ann Dore McLaughlin said she hoped she would do her job so responsibly that she would "perhaps make everyone understand that women running the Government's business is business as usual...
...When the appointment was announced, the New York Herald sent a woman reporter to interview her...
...She's every inch the executive, but she has not lost her femininity...
...Or bats her eyelashes...
...Having this baby, both childbirth and after, has been the toughest thing I've ever done, and I've had to be tougher doing it— emotionally, physically, and mentally— than I have in any other work I've undertaken...
...But it will take more than one woman Labor Secretary every fifty years to bring that about...
...In 1910, as a young lawyer, Eastman was the sole woman appointed, along with thirteen men, to serve on a New York state commission investigating industrial accidents...
...And then I had this baby...
...Finally, she refused to sit down in the car seat and, worn out by the struggle (she is a big, strong girl) I pushed her in her stroller four blocks to her grandmother's house, where I left her so I could come home and write this...
...So there you have it: Three-quarters of a century, and so little has changed...
...tipped fingers as she says, "No-no my dear, we can't do that, can we...
...Of course, I suppose John McLaughlin means something narrower by tough: the ability to look someone in the eye and say No without flinching...
...What does John McLaughlin mean by femininity...
...McLaughlin, the headline told us, Expects 'Scrutiny' at Labor, because, the article explained, she is the first woman to be named to the job in fifty years...
...As a fairly new mother, I'm engaged in what John McLaughlin (the Washington editor of National Review and host of the McLaughlin Group public-television show) would surely agree is a quintessentially feminine occupation: raising a child...
...So tell me, why do femininity and toughness make a paradoxical combination...
...It began with a portrait of the woman lawyer as she is usually pictured—"sacrificing beauty for brains"—but continued with "a gasp of pleasurable astonishment" when it turned out that Eastman had "brown eyes that laugh" and dimples...
...About the time I read his remark, I was drifting though a collection of essays by Crystal Eastman, a leading feminist, pacifist, and socialist earlier in this century...
...Before I got to the point of doing that, I spent twenty adult years as a professional woman—writer, teacher, editor...
...Or pats the hand of a male colleague with redCarol Polsgrove is a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board...
...Listen: My daughter is twenty-one months old and a wonderful person...
...But this morning she yelled when I took her out of the tub, and she yelled when I put her diapers on, and she yelled when I put her sweater on, and she solidly refused to let me put on her shoes or her coat...
...That his wife simpers when she smiles...
...And our character as women is still assumed to be at odds with our character as workers, or at least as professional workers...
...How many people that you say No to in the workplace kick and scream when you've said it...
...Well, that too, Mr...
...How many refuse to do everything—everything— that you ask them to, no matter with how much confidence, gentleness, or guile you phrase your request...
Vol. 52 • March 1988 • No. 3
