9-23-90 Sunday. During the Senate hearings on the nomination of David Souter to the Supreme Court, a panel of feminists (all female) argued against his confirmation. Among them were Molly Yard, the president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), and Eleanor Smeal, the immediate past president of NOW. In a videotape that I saw last night on The Capital Gang, Strom Thurmond [1902-2003], the aged (“senile” is a better word) senator from South Carolina, addressed the feminists as follows: “Welcome, ladies; you all look very beautiful today; thank you for coming.” Then, turning to the committee chair, Joe Biden [now the vice president], Thurmond drawled “I have no questions”. The feminists were naturally outraged by this patronizing, objectifying behavior. Yard didn’t wait until after the hearing to vent her anger; she immediately lit into Thurmond. A tearful Kate Michaelman [sic; should be “Michelman”] of the National Abortion Rights Action League told reporters that she couldn’t believe how Thurmond humiliated and belittled her colleagues in a public forum, on the record. Conservatives such as Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak [1931-2009] have rallied to Thurmond’s side, calling him a “Southern gentleman” and claiming that he meant no harm by the remarks. To them, it’s much ado about nothing. Ed Rollins, a Republican political consultant who appeared on the program, got in a jab of his own: Yard, he said, should be grateful to Thurmond; nobody else ever said she’s beautiful.
This is hardly much ado about nothing. What Thurmond did, by calling the women “ladies” and characterizing them as “beautiful”, was turn them into objects—aesthetic objects perhaps, but objects nonetheless. You can see his little mind at work: These are women; women are valuable primarily, if not exclusively, as aesthetic and sexual objects; so I’ll compliment them on their appearance. Even if he was not being sarcastic and inflammatory, his choice of words is inexcusable. His mindset is precisely what feminists have been railing against for all these years. To Thurmond, women cannot possibly have anything important to say. They are not even worth listening to or taking seriously. Like children, they should be seen and not heard. As for the defense that Thurmond is a “Southern gentleman” and was just being genteel, that’s poppycock. Imagine that Thurmond addressed a panel of black male civil-rights attorneys in analogous terms: “Welcome, boys; you all look dapper today; thank you for coming.” The uproar over his comment would have been deafening. To refer to a black male as a “boy” is to reduce him, to fail to take him seriously as a person. Similarly, to refer to a woman as a “lady” and to comment on her appearance is to reduce her to an object. Thurmond’s remarks are inexcusable. As I have long maintained, sexism is pervasive. The only difference between now and, say, thirty years ago is that people are more discreet. They keep their sexist attitudes and beliefs to themselves.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 