As the election campaign gather pace, I am feeling increasingly disturbed by the role party leaders’ wives seem expected to play and find the “Campaigning? Me? I’ve got my own job to do!” approach of Miriam Gonzalez Durantez extremely refreshing.
One reason why the emphasis placed on Sarah Brown and Samantha Cameron in Labour’s and Conservative’s campaigns respectively worries me is that it strikes me as undermining the hard-fought idea of married women as autonomous individuals with financial independence and an agenda of their own. Sometimes I feel we’ve all entered a time warp back to the 1950s, when it was normal for married women to be expected to act as unpaid employees of their husbands’ firm, the standard of corporate entertaining which they supplied, free of charge, reflecting on their husband. And don’t get me started on the swathes of column inches given over to dissecting Michelle Obama’s and Carla Bruni’s fashion choices, as if the First Lady opting for a cardigan instead of a jacket is somehow going to have a major impact on an entire nation’s fortunes.
Another reason why the politicians’ WAGs phenomenon does my head in, though, is that I feel the move we have witnessed in the past couple of decades away from the grey-suited, impersonal, eminence grises who seemed to take the top political jobs in yesteryear towards “family man” party leaders is a manifestation of a faux feminism, which seems to make the concerns of women central to politics, while actually marginalising female politicians still further. All the major parties at the moment seem desperate to have at their helm a youngish married man with a feisty (but not too feisty!) wife and young family, the thinking seeming to be that this will appeal to the female voter – a man with an outspoken wife and hands-on experience of bringing up young children will understand women’s needs and concerns. “No need to have women politicians, then”, though, seems to me to be the unspoken, sinister subtext to all this. We’re supposed to think that by voting for Gordon or David, we’re actually voting for the Gordon/Sarah or David/Samantha team, so we don’t need to worry about having female representatives in Parliament – our man at the top, so in touch with his feminine side, so adept at changing nappies, can speak for us girls, as well as for the blokes. It seems to me that, if parties continue to focus on the Young Family Man as the only credible model of leader, women will soon stand even less chance of being chosen for the top job than they did in the 1970s.
And it’s not just female politicians who could be discriminated against if the Young Family Man becomes the de rigueur model party leader. While I, obviously, applaud the fact that the impact on families seems to have become more of a concern when politicians address economic and social policies and recognise that getting and keeping the needs of mothers and children on the political agenda is a vital part of the feminist struggle, the fact still remains that not everybody in society is a parent of school-age children. Older people, gay people, single people, childless people all potentially face exclusion from senior political posts if the 40-Something Family Guy becomes the default position. We only have to look at the political fate of Sir Menzies Campbell to see how older politicians already face discrimination. And, while it’s clearly much easier for openly gay men and women to be selected as parliamentary candidates and for ministerial positions than it was thirty years ago, I do wonder if we’ve in some respects regressed from the position we were in back in the 1970s, when Edward Heath, a middle-aged, unmarried, childless man, was elected party leader and Prime Minister.
