Radcliffe Grad Talks Identity

As an undergraduate history concentrator at Radcliffe, Ellen Goodman ’63 never had a female professor and was denied access to Lamont Library because she was a woman.

When the now syndicated columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist returned to Harvard yesterday to speak at the Kennedy School of Government, she said she was surprised that Harvard has made more progress in gender equality than the rest of the country.

“I thought we’d have a woman in the White House before Harvard had a female president,” she said.

In her speech on women, news, and politics in the Taubman Center, Goodman probed the issue of what she called the “great divides in a historic campaign.”

Linking the “blue-pink divide” to the gender-specific issues of the 2008 election, Goodman said women are participating less in politics than law or medicine.

“Women are turned off by politics and news framed as food-fights by the media,” she said.

In this election cycle, Goodman added, voters often feel forced to choose between different facets of their identities when aligning with either of the “non-traditional” candidates for the Democratic nomination.

Goodman said, for example, that when polled, black women feel that they have to choose between being black and being female.

Goodman said that whereas African Americans have overwhelmingly supported Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama, older white women have formed the “tenacious core” of his rival Hillary Clinton’s supporters.

Goodman said this demographic divide can be explained by the sentiment of many older white women that “they don’t want another young man leapfrogging his way past a woman who has checked all the necessary boxes.”

Goodman also noted a generation divide that is “tenderly true of women who grew up with the women’s movement and their daughters.”

For older women, “it hits a muscle memory whenever Hillary gets trashed,” Goodman said.

But the daughters of these women, she added, “feel that in a post-feminist era,” they “don’t have to vote along gender lines.”

The media has played a significant role in shaping the public persona of both Democratic nominees, according to Goodman.

“While Hillary has been positioned as the tough guy, Obama has become the Oprah candidate,” she said. “It’s easy to talk in a woman’s voice if you are a man.”