Hanna Rosin is the author of The End of Men: And the Rise of Women and a national correspondent at The Atlantic.
Harvard Political Review: In your book The End of Men, you discuss the idea that the modern world and economy is better suited towards women. Do you, and if you do, how do you see the recent increases in women elected to Congress fit into this idea?
Hanna Rosin: That I would say is less of an economic question… There’s a different section of the book where I talk about women and leadership, and I think that that’s more relevant here in the idea that the country is ready for women in leadership, that so many women were elected to the Senate, that we slowly become accustomed to the idea of women in positions of power, which I think this election showed pretty well. So I think the election was really positive on that front.
HPR: What does women becoming a more targeted and important voting bloc, in the eyes of both 2012 presidential campaigns, mean for the country and how politics will move forward?
HR: There were a few things. One was just the mere fact that women were an important voting bloc, and that the candidates took a lot of time trying to reach out to women voters. One important fact is that women voters were actually the majority and in some sense they helped determine the election and swung the election one way or the other. One interesting thing that emerged was that married women voted for Romney while single women voted for Obama. It seems that an interesting demographic to watch in the future will be single women voters, rather than all women voters, and to watch how they will swing. And that means both young women and single mothers will be a demographic in play for future elections. It’s very interesting to see that candidates would have to think about the interests of women and what would bring women to the party. Additionally, if you do retrospective analysis of the election, you’d see that the rape question and the extremists of the Republican Party really seemed to do a lot of damage. All of them lost, basically, and turning off women in that way turned out to be mistake, in retrospect. At the time, you wouldn’t necessarily know which way it would go, but in retrospect it turned out to be quite a critical mistake.
HPR: Do you think that this renewed conversation and greater focus on women’s issues was a temporary thing seized on during the election to get votes, or will this turn into real political change, for example in equal pay and similar measures?
HR: I think that the issues that came up during the election were fairly reactionary, like the contraception issue. There were more cultural war-type issues that came up during the election, so they weren’t the kind of nuts-and-bolts equality issues like equal pay or childcare. Those kinds of issues didn’t really come up. I actually think that’s a different process, a longer process, which requires getting more women in power to pay attention to women’s issues. That’s longer, slower, and more complicated. You now have a hundred women Representatives—that’s quite a lot. We’re nearing the one-third mark in Congress, which is quite important, and I think we see that the presence of women is sort of normalized, that women can bring up a lot of issues like childcare and equal pay. But it doesn’t automatically follow from what happened during the election.
HPR: How do you see the GOP moving towards talking about women’s issues more and making greater strides in getting more female members?
HR: The Republicans—not in this election but in the last election—made a big push to reach out to women voters. They were actually pretty good at recruiting a lot of candidates. The Tea Party was really good at it too; the Tea Party had a lot of female leaders. They didn’t so much do that this time around. But again, those are completely different issues. Republican women don’t tend to bring up women’s issues. They tend to think of them completely differently. For example, they would never bring up subsidized childcare; that’s not one of their priorities. They might bring up equal pay, but they also have a complicated relationship with women working. So their presence doesn’t necessarily translate into the kinds of policies that we think of as women’s issues. Same thing with abortion rights: their existence does not translate into the set of issues that you’re probably thinking about. To me it’s more a kind of intangible comfort that people get with women in power that I think is really important. I think, even more than when I started researching the book, that the idea of a woman president—for example, if Hillary decided to run again—wouldn’t be that foreign or unusual. We wouldn’t be thinking about the same questions we were thinking about the last time she ran, like “Is she too soft? Is she going to cry? Is she tough enough to wage war?” We’ve been through those questions. It’s more about normalizing the idea of women in power and women making decisions, which I think politics is doing much more smoothly than say, finance or corporate America is doing.
HPR: You mentioned Hillary Clinton and her portrayals in the media. As women make more gains in politics and near the one-third mark in Congress, do you think that that will affect the way women will be portrayed in the media?
HR: I think it definitely affects something like women’s portrayal in the media and optics, if only because it becomes normalized. When you have lots and lots of women, it’s not so unusual. It’s not an aberration or an anomaly. You don’t celebrate every milestone. It becomes a kind of normal occurrence and so you write and talk about women in terms of what they’re doing or as individual entities with individual policies, not so much as “the first” this or that woman. You see them not so much as symbols, and instead they become a normal part of the landscape, which I think is really good. They’ll probably break up into factions and have different agendas, and all that is really good.