Elsa Chaney
University of Iowa
The principal thesis of Supermadre is simple many women at the time the original research was conducted thought that voting was a civic duty, an appropriate, even obligatory, activity for women. Far fewer women and men were convinced that women should run for office. Thus, the majority of those who did so envisioned their role in electoral politics, and even their presence in the bureaucracy, as an extension of their motherhood role in the family to the larger family of the municipio and the nation.
My remarks today center around two questions What difference did it make that women defined their public roles in terms of stereotypical images of the feminine, and does the Supermadre image still prevail?
I believe that one consequence was the great number of women who found the macho rough and tumble of politics more than they had bargained for, and who withdrew after one term in office. In times of crisis or in special periods (as when women received the vote), women moved into public sphere. When the emergency was over, they and the men expected them to "go home." In the past, as each entry "wave" receded, only a few stalwarts were left on the beach. As a consequence, not enough women remained to create a critical mass of women officials.
Another consequence of the Supermadre bent of so many women such an approach was not necessarily positive. If women really believed or believe that running a country is like running a house, they're in trouble.
Defining a public career in terms of the Supermadre image also correlated with a strong tendency toward conservatism. Not many women in the survey talked about deep structural change in the economy and polity. Thirty-five percent of the sample who advocated no structural changes and only limited improvements in terms of their own mandates were classified as "housewives" in their approach to public service. Another fifty-eight percent who mentioned at least one structural change and had a broader vision of their mandate were classified as "reformists." Only seven percent of the total spoke in terms of deep political and economic change and saw their roles in those terms; these were classified as "revolutionaries."
What about the positives and negatives of the Supermadre vision in public service today? My own feeling now is that I was a bit too negative in judging the Supermadre approach, influenced as I was by the idealism and radicalism of the 1960's in the United States. In the last chapter of my study, however, I did attempt to show that it might be unwise to try to change women's approach, and that in the future politics itself might undergo changes that would bring so-called "feminine" issues, then considered quite marginal and unimportant, to the center of the political arena.
What I defined, in the terms of those times, as "feminine" were those issues "crucial to [women's] lives [and] ...related to the family, children and the old, food prices and inflation, peace, moral questions... Such issues are, however, usually defined by the male power structure either as `non-political' (men's issues revolve around questions of authority, power, war, arms, monopoly over resources, and economic policy) or `conservative.' What women needed to do, or so it seemed to me, was to hang onto "their" issues for dear life. The final question asked in my study, and with which I will end was this
Will women seek political power in increasing numbers as they become aware that their contribution is essential to the finding of solutions to the great problems perplexing humankind? Will women finally be admitted to the political arena as full-fledged power contenders, or will men simply co-opt women's issues and attempt to solve them on a masculine "power" basis (as they have largely done with population control, and as they appear to be doing in the quest for solutions to the problem of world hunger)?