Victoria Woodhull, the First Woman to Run for U.S. President (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Victoria Woodhull, the First Woman to Run for U.S. President (2015)

politico.com

40 pointswellokthen29 comments

A trivium: the first electoral vote ever cast for a female candidate went to Tonie Nathan, the Libertarian Party's VP nominee in 1972.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonie_Nathan

... "in the United State of America".

In Germany, we've had a female head of government for over a decade now and, if my memory is correct, Angela Merkel's gender has never been a big issue. With this background, I find it really strange to hear Clinton making such a big deal out of the fact that she's a woman. It's pretty obvious that she's a woman and we all understand the significance of that. But the fact that she's stressing it so much could unnecessarily antagonize people, for example women who may feel that she is implying that any female who's not voting for her is a traitor, or men who may feel that Clinton is not representing their interests. Overall, I find Clinton's way to deal with this issue quite heavy-handed. Why isn't she taking Obama's approach and letting the fact that she's a women speak for itself?

Obama didn't emphasize his race because less than 15% of the US population is black, and there's a long history of other black candidates and activists who are almost viscerally repellent to the mainstream (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Malcolm X etc).

In particular Obama didn't want to fall into the "angry black man" stereotype.

I don't think it's a good idea for Clinton to play up the woman angle, but at least she's targeting a much larger demographic encompassing half the population.

Also, identity politics has a long history in the Democratic party. And for what it's worth Trump has used identity politics to his advantage on the Republican side.

Identity politics has a long history in both parties. Reagan was all about it, not that he started it either.

As well as Nixon's "God, guns and gays"

Clinton has proven herself to be a bit of a holdover of second-wave feminism in her rhetoric and actions. From erasure of the struggles of minority groups, exploiting identity politics, and even going as far as trotting at notorious TERF Gloria Steinem at a campaign event, Clinton has demonstrated a view of gender that is not very consistent with more modern perspectives. After all, she held off on supporting LGBTQ rights until it was extremely politically dangerous for her not to do so.

She's kind of the poster child, the realization, of "neoliberal multiculturalism": as long as have some representatives of disadvantaged subgroups in some positions of power, then that validates "the model". Once we establish that the model "works" (because, hey, there can't be inequality if we have a woman president, right?) then you can change the narrative about the people that fall through the cracks of society: it's their fault, because clearly the people that work hard get to live the American dream.

>After all, she held off on supporting LGBTQ rights until it >was extremely politically dangerous for her not to do so.

She was supportive of most LGBTQ rights except same sex marriage. Same as Obama. Same sex marriage is here because the courts pushed it through. It lost time after time at the ballot box. While most of HN is probably in favor of it most Americans are not on HN and not directly involved in tech. HN tends to be liberal/libertarian types.

Gallup polls have shown a majority in favour of same-sex marriage for the past few years: http://www.gallup.com/poll/117328/marriage.aspx

The number of people I know celebrating the fact that she might be the first female president is disturbing (I mean the hashtag #ImWithHer even plays up that fact, not #ForThePeople etc.). She's played that card hard and certain individuals have lapped it up.

From what I've seen, this appears to drive a significant cognitive dissonance around all her flaws as a candidate: war hawk, horrible record on policy, attack dog on her husband's accusers etc.

FWIW, it's always been the issues and policies being the primary qualifiers for me, not what someone's gender is. I don't doubt there will eventually be a woman president, just like we had a black president but I'm not sure she's that torchbearer.

History will tell... but I sure hate us normal folk having to deal with the consequences

Are you saying that Hillary should avoid the female pronouns?

I have to say, ImWithHer seems pretty innocuous to me. Gerald Ford had, "He's making us proud again." Goldwater: "In Your Heart, You Know He's Right." Would you say they were unnecessarily emphasizing their maleness, their role in upholding the patriarchy... or is it just that most of us use "he" and "she"?

War hawk, sure. Using "her" to refer to herself, ...

No.

She's a woman, naturally she would use female pronouns. However, that does not equate to using/playing up the fact that she is a woman (as a differentiator etc.).

That said, #ImWithHim is equally silly.

Once again, policies and issues are what matter.

Not an issue - sure. But in the middle of a heated political campaign, any distinction, any being "the first" becomes a weapon, and a quite effective one, in its impact on the masses of semi-educated, semi- (or mis-) informed people.

How do you feel Clinton has been heavy-handed?

I grew up in Argentina, which has had female presidents for decades, and lived in two other countries which had female power figures at some point or another (England and Brazil.) I've lived at least two of the elections leading to a female presidents. I've never seen gender thrown into the discourse as much as in this election.

I can't even count the times I've heard "it's time for the first woman president" coming directly from her or her campaign people. Or the comparisons to "mi abuelita" (a maternal figure, of course.) Also, the whole notion that anyone who might oppose her is doing so from a purely misogynistic standpoint ("Bernie Bros", etc.) She definitely played identity politics a lot.

Exhibit A: #ImWithHer

Exhibit B: Articles that ask if it's sexist for Bernie to stay in the race [1]. I mean, seriously, WTF.

[1] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jun/7/new-york-time...

Her campaign tried to specifically pitch "Bernie Bro" stories to journalists. Shameless.

In 2008 her campaign didn't play up gender, but definitely forced the race issue - the Muslim claims, the Reverend Wright allegations, etc.

Ok, we added U.S. to the title, though this is not a very substantive response to a historically rich article.

Lost me at

>face it, progressives, Elizabeth Warren is a pipedream, not a possibility

That extra knee in the back after Politico's absurd torrent of Bernie Sanders hatecoverage is just plain unnecessary.

It was a dumb bit of trolling, but I think it's time for us to learn as a community how not to react to these bits, since doing so invariably makes the discussion worse.

Indeed. At a more meta level, it makes you wonder what are they thinking, still antagonizing Sanders supporters that way. You'd think they would try to move to a more conciliatory discourse at this point, in order to get those voters in November.

Objectively speaking, it's not just dumb but could possibly affect the election.

The article is from April 2015. And they were quite correct – Warren did not declare her candidacy (or even come close to doing so).

Thanks, added the year!

I look forward to someone discovering a line of discourse that'll de-antagonize the legions of Sanders supporters writing hateful comments across the internet. It is truly sick.

It goes both ways, really. I have a suspicion there's a lot of trolling against both coming from third parties though (read: the Trump troll brigade.)

Agreed. But I also think that as one of the admins you should refrain from explicit judgement on comments and leave that to the community.

HN is not community-driven in the same way that Reddit or 4chan are. I come here for that reason. I want HN moderators to tell people when they're straying from what they want HN to be. I wish more discussion-oriented sites were like that. It makes it feel a little more like a moderated mailing list. I usually agree with the moderation, but if I didn't I'd just go elsewhere, and I wouldn't hold it against the moderators here. There's nothing wrong with people preferring more democratic moderation (or none at all), and there's nothing wrong with other people preferring more opinionated and direct moderation.

I appreciate sites like Reddit that are way more hands-off, and that try to give the community tools to be more or less self-moderating. But I also appreciate sites like HN which are driven by a (relatively) small number of people who just want to run a particular type of site with a particular type of community and enforce a particular level of discourse. There probably wouldn't even be an HN if this wasn't the case. There's no reason both approaches can't coexist on the Internet, and users can choose the sites with moderation philosophies that best suit them.

To add to mwfunk's fine comment, one of the lessons I draw from HN is that interesting things emerge when you have more complex feedback loops between community and moderation. Entirely unregulated discourse seems to trend to extreme states that turn out to be boring and ultimately turn into a desert, at least for a site whose guiding value is intellectual curiosity. We knew about some of this when pg started HN—that's why its original prospectus talked about trying to avoid the typical fate of online communities—and we've learned a lot more over the years.

The key, of course, is to stay within an optimal range of moderation. One wants enough to avoid the perils of unsupervised discourse, and then stop. Do we get the balance right? Hard (and not) for me to say, but one thing I'm sure of is that we're not interested in controlling this place, only helping it be as interesting as it can.

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