The Infantilization of Adult Professional Women
Elise Stefanik, a 33-year-old congresswoman from New York, is a “little girl” who “can always run home to Mommy and Daddy,” according to her opponent, Democrat Steve Krieg (he also called her “sweetie” and, after he was criticized for his remarks, said she is “a child”). Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, who is 51, is a “young lady” who “doesn’t know a damn thing what she’s talking about,” says Alaska Rep. Don Young. According to President Donald Trump, his 35-year-old daughter Ivanka begged, “Daddy, can I go with you?” on a trip to push his tax overhaul plan in North Dakota (Ivanka also asked “daddy” if he could do something about parental leave policies). On The View, host Joy Behar asked former Gov. Mike Huckabee, “How can you let your daughter defend [Trump]?” That daughter, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is 35 years old – and was sitting at The View’s table herself, forced to politely nod along as her dad explained why he allowed his adult daughter to maintain her employment.
When we want to take women down a peg, or undersell their influence, we treat them like little girls.
I’ve seen this firsthand. When men on social media or website comment sections object to something I’ve written, they routinely refuse to engage with the subject matter itself, opting instead to call me “Jilly” to put me in my place at the kids’ table. Other female writers have written about the nickname condescension as well, most notably Jessica Valenti, who becomes “Jessie” (anyone whose name can’t be easily girlified becomes “missy”). Inevitably, if you push back against these insulting diminutives, the rage comes out – now you’re a bitch or a slut. It was never about just writing you off; the condescension was a cover for the anger that comes from feeling threatened.
This happens to prominent female officials as well. Elizabeth Warren is alternately “Lizzie,” “Betsy Wetsy,” or “Pocahontas” (that last insult a winning combination of disdain based on race, gender, and age – Pocahontas barely lived beyond her teenage years). Nancy Pelosi isn’t Speaker Pelosi; she’s “Princess Nancy.” When men are trying to assert their dominance, they occasionally infantilize their male opponents, too – remember “Little Marco” Rubio? – but being treated like a child is not a regular cost of male political ambition.
Women are already less likely than men to be perceived as competent and hireable, even when they have the same education and skill sets. Ambitious women are treated with particular suspicion, as if there’s something dubious and undesirable about women who pursue greatness, power, prominence, or even just success in their field. Men who compete with other men are unremarkable; male competition is the natural course of things, and given that men have long dominated electoral politics and many workplaces, competitions for power in politics or the workplace have long been male-only fights. That’s no longer the case. Now, women who pursue power, whether that’s elected office or a managerial role at work, are often competing with men, too. This co-ed competition touches on some of our deepest assumptions and biases about what women are supposed to be. It touches on some of men’s deepest fears about what they stand to lose.
And so women who challenge the status quo must be put in their place. Sometimes, those women come across as so powerful and commanding that it’s tough to cast them as hapless children, and so detractors attack them for being too ambitious, suggesting that they must have gotten where they are through the stereotypical evil-female traits of deception and manipulation. These women are ball-busting bitches, cunning liars, and power-hungry harpies (see, for example, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Michelle Obama). Other times, women’s power itself is undercut, and this is where treating you like a child comes in. Often, detractors use both tactics against the same women – infantilizing them as princesses or crybabies, and also smearing them as craven or crazy (just ask Elizabeth Warren and Nancy Pelosi).
There’s a particularly insidious tone to the “you’re just a little girl” attacks on female politicians that make these insults feel different from those leveled at men. “Girl” is in and of itself a slight, from “throwing like a girl” to being a “girly-man.” A “boyish” politician is youthful and charming; a “girlish” one is unserious and coquettish. Girls are silly and frothy; they don’t intimidate anyone because they have no real power. When Trump says his daughter begged “daddy” to come along on a work trip, he subverts any claim of authority she has – she may have an office in the West Wing, but he’s the all-powerful one to whom she must appeal. Trump, being president, is of course more powerful than his daughter. But as a presidential adviser, she holds some sway nonetheless (at least in theory); his repeated quoting of her asking “daddy” for help is a reminder that she is nothing without his patriarchal authority.
The subtle insinuation that lives just below the surface when men girlify a powerful woman is this: You don’t belong here. Lecturing an adult woman as “young lady” or calling someone a “princess” suggests not actual clout, but a spoiled, silly, and overindulged girl – a girl who has been showered in unearned privileges by someone more influential than her, and has gotten a bit too arrogant. These comments remind women that any power they do have is not really theirs, but is a gift from a man – the dad you can run home and cry to, the real men who do know what they’re talking about, the father who “lets” you work for the president, the daddy who listens to your cries for paid parental leave.
There is no perfect age to be a woman. Younger women are cast aside as unserious girls, their views, ideas, expertise, and skills insufficient because they supposedly lack competence and gravitas. These stereotypes are so pervasive that other women – even liberal ones – sometimes unthinkingly latch onto them, too. But it doesn’t necessarily get better with age. Men can be as old, fat, liver-spotted, and bald as they want to be and still have their own prime-time TV shows, pull top billing in movies, hold public office, and sit in the Oval Office (sometimes accompanied by a spouse a fraction of their age and many magnitudes more attractive). But women who have crossed some ever-changing threshold of what’s young enough to be considered attractive are supposed to drag their sagging carcasses off into the bushes and die with dignity (or at least disappear from public view). Few things make misogynists angrier, and a lot of the public more uncomfortable, than the ones who keep talking in public anyway.
And if you happen to wake up one day in the body of a woman of a certain age – or if you see these women in Congress and find that you relate – you may observe that older women are sometimes still mocked them in girlish terms; this remains a swift way to demote even a more seasoned woman from a respected professional to little more than a whiny child or a demanding princess. Minutes later, you may find that sexists have forgone the “young lady” condescension, and in breakneck speed the spoiled princess has morphed, in their estimation, into a wrinkled but still wicked witch.
The lifespan of the prominent powerful woman seems to careen from bobble-headed little girl straight to crazy, scheming old shrew – and then right back to pouty little princess, because the infantilization never ends. It’s enough to give you whiplash – or make you wish you were a middle-aged man.
Jill Filipovic is the author of The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. Follow her on Twitter.
You Might Also Like