She’s all about girl solidarity especially when it comes to the boys on the playground.  Come to think of it, so are all her girlfriends.  They all share that “us vs. them” mentality regardless of their skin colors, the neighborhoods they live in or who’s wearing the best color Chuck Taylor’s.

After last week, I started to wonder when we lose that collective “she” and define ourselves less by our gender and more by other factors in our lives like race, class, age or zip code.

For a good part of our lives gender is a unifying factor that we identify with more than other aspects of our lives. But that apparently changes at some point and, for some, becomes a wedge that divides us.

I had hoped for a constructive, positive and thought-provoking dialogue on the panel I moderated at Netroots Nation ’09 entitled “Building a Conversation Across Generations of Progressive Women.” I thought the focus would be how we can come together on issues after women were split about whether to vote for Hillary Clinton, the first viable woman presidential candidate ever.  Hillary somehow divided us, but I wondered how we could put that behind us and move forward.

Apparently, there are a lot bigger things that keep us from coming together.  And, apparently, I was pretty naive.

I was able to put together some fabulous women ranging from their 20s to their 60s who have thought a lot about getting women to talk about mending those rifts.  Gloria Feldt, a true leader in forging the way for women, agreed to be on the panel and I figured she would help us find some common ground.

But all of us on the panel were white.  I hadn’t planned it that way.  But when some in the audience took a look at us, they rebelled.

After I pulled myelf together, I looked at other panels and wondered,  did they get same question?  The same anger?  The same amount of  “I spit on your panel” attitude?  Was it a mistake that I hadn’t thought to make race as central an issue in the dialogue as gender?

Clearly there was a huge difference of opinion in the room on how we come together politically after Hillary’s 2008 attempt to become the first woman President of the United States.  And, of course, that’s OK if we can talk about it without the calling each other names.  But those things seeped into the conversation and it was clear about half way through the panel that there are so many unresolved identity issues — gender and age specifically for this crowd — that it was almost impossible to stay on track to talk about what I thought were the common issues that should bring us together.  Things like making sure that more women are elected who want to bring equal pay to the forefront.  Finding women politicians who want there to be healthy school meals for our kids and good medical care and safe child care.  And figuring out how do look for women who will help give us equal footing in the workplace.

I know that identity issues divide us even on common topics, but how can we begin to come together if identity always gets in the way?

Yes, I’m a white chick.  There’s nothing I can do about that.   But my skin color doesn’t completely define my cultural and racial identity or experience.  My husband is Jewish.  My daughter is Asian.  And while I am white and I can never understand what it is to be Black or Latina or even Asian like my daughter, I hope that doesn’t disqualify me from talking about the issues that should bring women together and not divide us.

At some point, is it possible to get past all the different identities we have and work toward policies that would help all women?  Or is that being naive, too?

It’s about me and my fellow MOMocrats and my sister. It’s about my mother and my aunts and my daughter. It’s about mothers and friends and women who haven’t even become the next generation of leaders, yet.

Of course, as the Women’s Media Center rightly points out in its new video called Sexism Sells, But We’re Not Buying It Anymore, we’ve been focusing on the wrong thing. The MSM doesn’t limit its use of terms like “soppy,” “bitchy,” “castrating,” “nagging,” or “Wicked Witch of the West” to Hillary.

The most famous and infamous TV pundits aren’t reserving their ‘looks are everything’ moments to talk of Hillary’s cleavage or wrinkles. There are no limits. We are all fair game.

I have no doubt that, as usual, in response to this sort of challenge to how women are treated in the news media, there will be many who rush to say that we aren’t the targets. That it really is about Hillary Clinton.

As my grandfather used to say, do I look like I just fell off the turnip truck?

But don’t take it from me. Take a few minutes and watch the video. Then tell me with a straight face that I’m doing the wrong thing by not letting my second-grader watch any television news “analysis.”

So many journalists and pundits have turned a laser focus on the issue of race, but, as Marie Cocco pointed out in her Washington Post piece last week, even the Democratic party isn’t doing a lot to help the first “viable woman candidate for President” put an end to the seemingly endless stream of sexist comments about Hillary Clinton.

Many loud voices continue to claim there IS no gender problem in America — look at all the women in law school and medical school! See, there are women in every profession — you’ve come a long way, baby, so we don’t have to worry anymore. Yup, check that one off the list. No one is trying to suggest that a woman can’t be President. That notion is just a confused one in your pretty little heads!

But as Hillary’s voice gets quieter in this campaign, I’m wondering where we, as political women, go from here? Three articles in New York Times in two days have raised the question. But what’s the solution?

I’m still working on that one, but one thing occurred to me this morning as I was reading these articles that might be important in getting to the answer:

Men are takers, women are askers.

If Hillary Clinton was, as Barack Obama is apparently going to do regardless of vote and delegate count this week, proclaim himself the winner of the Democratic presidential nomination, there would be an uproar of incredible proportions. We’d hear plenty of, “Who does she think she is? What gives her the right to just march up there and ignore the rules?”

Yet, few seem to have a problem with Obama doing that. And I’m sure we won’t hear much criticism of the fact that he has no problem taking something that isn’t his quite yet. Granted, it’s likely that will be the ultimate outcome, but few seem bothered by the fact that he’s not playing by the rules. When a women steps outside the rules of a game, she’s slapped down — men just get slapped on the wrist.

When I was still a naive junior associate in a large law firm, I learned that lesson the hard way more than I’d like to remember. The guys would march into senior lawyers’ offices, plop themselves down in a chair and start chatting, until they got assigned to the juiciest cases. Us gals? We generally knocked first, and got told to come back in things weren’t so busy.

We’re never going to convince men that they should be more polite in how they achieve their goals, so women are going to have to adjust their approach and take a lesson from the “takers.”

Clinton may be the imperfect example to illustrate how much further we all have to go in having more of a role in all aspects of politics and life in general, and how we can achieve that, but that doesn’t make what has happened to her less true. We still face accepted sexist attitudes and comments every day, like one reporter did recently did when Barack Obama referred dismissively to her as “sweetie.”

Let’s put our heads together and figure out how we start today to keep the next “viable woman candidate for President” going through the same treatment as Hillary Clinton.

It turns out that we are the ones brave enough to take on the political question many are afraid to talk about this political season:

Is this country really ready to elect a woman or a black man to be President?

We all like to think that in the 21st century we’re so much more enlightened and that we’ve moved past old prejudices and ways of thinking. Even I was hoping that we had.

But what evidence do we have that we’re ready? I don’t see a lot of examples in the real world.

We live in a country where less than 20 percent of law firm partners are women.

The numbers are close to that for women executives in accounting firms.

Women CEO’s? At least in Fortune 500 companies, you can count them on your fingers and toes.

So if our business and professional service firms across the country are still basically run by men, what makes us think that we as a nation are willing to see anything but that in the Oval Office?

Plus, if some random rudeness I’ve recently encountered from men in line at Starbucks or at traffic intersections is any evidence, there are a lot of guys out there who just don’t think they have to be considerate of a woman in any position, even if it’s just being ahead in line for a latte.

As for race, I don’t see a lot of diversity in large law firms and corporations. When pictures are included in articles, there’s still a sea of white men’s faces and very little color.

As I ponder questions about why one person gets treated differently in the media than another, it’s hard not to acknowledge that our biases, no matter how ugly, are there. And we have to factor them in when considering what can realistically happen in the presidential race this November.

We’re not as blind as Lady Justice — heck, we know that even she takes off that blindfold sometimes. So we may as well acknowledge those elephants in the room and talk about them like grown-ups.

Who knows, we might even start a trend.

Why? According to Hirshman and those she interviewed, women focus mainly on issues that impact the household, but pay little attention to political campaigns or world events.

Women, she has long contended, just aren’t as political as men.

I know so many women who are politically informed and active, it’s just hard for me to believe that the studies cited in the article are conclusive. I know they support Hirshman’s less formal survey that she wrote about for the Washington Post, in which she suggested that Washington, D.C.-area women don’t care about politics and rely on their husbands to tell them what’s worth knowing in the news.

Others wonder about that idea, as well. Catherine Price at Salon questions Hirshman’s premise that women pay less attention to the news, including political news, than men:

… [A]mong the people who do pay attention to news, women do so less intensely than men. Why is this? One reason suggested by Hirshman is that women are more likely to know about a candidate or politician if she’s female — and since there are far fewer female than male politicians, it makes sense that women might lose interest.

I don’t know if I buy this reasoning. (I would think it’d have more to do with the possibility that women’s tendency — on average — to be the primary caregivers in their families would make them more interested in local rather than national issues.) If it’s true, it immediately leads to a Catch-22: Having more female politicians requires having more women who are interested in politics to begin with (not just as voters but as candidates). But if people seem more interested in the political process when a person of their gender is involved, and if there are still far fewer women than men, then it’s difficult to get more women interested.

As with all surveys or studies or polls, the outcome depends on the slant of the questions asked.

One study Hirshman points to in her article from the University of Michigan asked men and women about their interest in “government and public affairs.” 42 percent of the men polled said they were “very interested,” while only 34 percent of women were. The topic of “government and public affairs” is pretty abstract. If the survey had asked things a bit differently — say with a specific question about the level of interest in the economy, the war in Iraq or specific political candidates — I’m guessing the outcome would have been different, too.

Apparently I’m not the only one who questions the stats. At the blog Igniting Real Change, the blog of the Ms. Foundation, their President and CEO Sarah Gould wrote:

This is surely not all we know and don’t know about gender and politics. Hirshman’s reliance on disembodied data and minimal-to-no context—as well as her odd interpretation of some of the data—paints a pretty disparaging picture of women.

I really like the idea of electing a president whose very presence in office is likely to help women feel empowered and engaged in politics. Even before reading this article, I’ve been wavering. I love that if Hillary gets elected, then my little monkeys will grow up associating the presidency with a female.

At the same time, I really like Obama’s style and compelling leadership, which I think is something that our country needs right now, to pull people together and get us moving in a good direction. While I think Hillary would do a great job, I’m not sure she’d be an inspiring leader in the moment. But the very fact that she’s a woman could mean that she can inspire a whole generation of women — and help a generation of young men see women differently.

While Sarah Ruth at Piu Vino! found some of the article’s generalizations about women more disturbing:

What irks me … is that [the article] claims obviously women aren’t voting because of political issues, ideas, and plans like men are. They are voting because they have crushes on Obama or because they wish they could be as successful as Hillary or, as the commentators have seemed to agree upon, women are blindly voting for any candidate based on her vagina.

One thing is for sure. For better or worse, you can always depend on Hirshman to get women talking.

I also know from experience that Hirshman doesn’t like to be criticized on any level. So I fully expect to hear from her on this post when her name comes up in her Google reader! So hang on to your hats!

Cross-posted from BlogHer.

Maybe I’m naive, but I really hadn’t anticipated the whole ratcheting up of the gender vs. race issue with the Democrats in the way that it seems to be playing out.

But how can one avoid moving into the waters of identity politics when we have two identity firsts?

At her New York Times blog Domestic Disturbances, Judith Warner wonders:

[I]s it realistic even to hope – as both candidates appear to – that voters will make their ultimate choices based on policy, philosophy and personality differences, and not by falling back on gut-level feelings of racial or gender allegiance?

It might not be.

One pollster says the race and gender of the presidential candidates may play out in a less expected way in the voting booths of South Carolina than on the debate stage.

According to Kathy Frankovic, CBS News director of surveys:

[In South Carolina], nearly nine in ten said a candidate’s race didn’t matter – much like the answers of voters nationally when asked if they would be willing to vote for a black candidate for president.

But the responses are different when it comes to women. One in four voters in South Carolina said they would rather vote for a man – and on that question it didn’t matter whether or not the respondents themselves were men or women. 27 percent of men would rather vote for another man, but so would 23 percent of women. Hardly any women – or men, for that matter – said they would prefer to vote for a woman.

And it’s not just women and African-Americans who are wrestling with identity issues.

Lest we forget that we’re a nation born from the melting pot, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen at Time’s blog Work in Progress wonders what those who fall into more than one identity category should do:

I feel I have a lot in common with Barack Obama. He’s half white and half other, like me. In fact, his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, … is my own racial mix: half white and half Asian. He’s the closest to me in age among all the candidates. He and I both spent a lot of time in Asia and Hawaii growing up. I identify with him in many ways.

I feel I have a lot in common with Hillary Clinton. She’s a working mom and always was; I’m a working mom and always will be. She’s raised a lovely, grounded young woman, and I am striving valiantly toward that goal. Her husband, like mine, plays a wind instrument, although mine with somewhat greater proficiency. She and I both tend toward elephant ankles, though I’m hoping mine will subside after the pregnancy. I identify with her in many ways.

Herein lies a problem the media tells me I’ve been grappling with: in a presidential race now fraught with racial and gender politics, with whom does a minority woman identify?

And that’s the dilemma for the demographic that pollsters say Clinton or Obama or John Edwards need to win in South Carolina — black women.

A Zogby/Lifetime poll conducted during the time of the New Hampshire primary showed something interesting to add to the identity mix– while it was based on a relatively small sample, it showed that minority women were more compelled to vote for Hillary Clinton because she is a woman than they were to vote for Barack Obama as a minority.

But there are some who are also clearly are outraged at the perceived suggestion that black women will cast their ballots based either on race or gender. In response to a recent CNN story on the topic, one reader responded sarcastically:

Duh, I’m a black woman and here I am at the voting booth. Duh, since I’m illiterate I’ll pull down the lever for someone. Hm… Well, he black so I may vote for him… oh wait she a woman I may vote for her… What Ise gon’ do? Oh lordy!

So what roles will gender and race ultimately play in the South Carolina primary?

If I could answer that now, I’d be decorating my variety of vacation homes in luxury spots around the world! But it’s clear that even thought we’d like to think we only vote based on a candidate’s positions and philosophies, other differences play a role, as well.

Cross-posted from BlogHer.