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The Year of the Woman is long overdue, the optimists would argue, pointing to the curious fact that America, with the largest and most entrenched women's movement on the planet, has also had proportionately fewer female legislators than almost any other Western nation. No one knows exactly why, though many plausible reasons have been advanced. There is the understandable reluctance on the part of many women to venture into a building already occupied by Jesse Helms or Bob Dornan, a building that was designed, for all we know, without a single ladies' room in the floor plan. Plus there has been the chilling effect of male politicos like former Republican Party chairman Clayton Yeutter, who reportedly addressed a high-powered donor as "little lady" and inquired as to whom she "belonged to" -- thus sending a generation of Republican women out to join militantly separatist rural communes.
But the real reason women may finally be let into the political process is that the men are moving on to better things. Politics has become too loathsome, degrading and of course devoid of any discernible impact on the world. As William Greider explains in his new book, Who Will Tell the People, & the actual function of our elected representatives is to serve as lunch companions for the hordes of corporate lobbyists who would otherwise be lonesome and pitiably hungry. Leadership has long since passed out of the political sphere, which is why, in times of crisis and civil disorder, we turn not to our President but to the notoriously lite-minded Arsenio Hall.
Hence the mass exodus of male politicians just as the women come tearing in. Male incumbents in Congress -- 51 at last count -- are fleeing as fast as they can, searching for meaningful work. Sorry, Ross Perot is only further evidence of the ongoing political decline: our first generic candidacy -- no party, no platform, no issues -- just the first guy to come along with the incontrovertible means to buy his own lunch.
There is always the possibility that women will get in and somehow transform politics, making it meaningful again, restoring antique notions like "democracy" and "representation." A study from Rutgers University claims that female officeholders have already shown a radical tendency to recall who their constituents are and even bear them in mind during the framing of legislation. Plus there is reason to hope that no elected woman will ever feel obliged to prove her "manhood" by calling out the troops.
So a woman is well worth a vote. And if the Year of the Woman is a flop, if politics continues to decline, finally reaching the point where even women, as a class, don't want it, then we will have only one place to turn: to the people who already perform all those tasks -- like busing tables and sewing garments in sweatshops -- that native-born Americans disdain. It will be the Year, sooner or later, of the Undocumented Immigrant from south of the border.