My colleague Engin Isin wrote an interesting blog in January about the episode of Hillary Clinton’s tears. He argued there that there are many signs that indicate that the image of being political now includes being emotional and many signs that men as well as women are caught in the production of this image. He pointed out that one of the main arguments against including women in politics until the twentieth century was that ‘women ostensibly represented the irrational and passionate aspects of being human and such qualities did not belong in public space’.

However, I think there is enough evidence to show that women still contend with double standards in public. In presenting themselves as public persons, they must make finely tuned decisions about the nuances of gendered meanings. In public office they may struggle to find a rhetorical style – a persona – that the press and the public will accept as ‘authentic’. Hillary Clinton has continually been cursed with the perception that she is calculated, contrived and overly macho. We will never know if her famous tears may or may not have been equally calculated, which presents us with a modern conundrum. For we demand these days that politicians must act in such a way that is ‘true’ to themselves: so here we have tears that signify spontaneity and personal expressiveness, even if those same tears risk being regarded as contrived, fake, tactical. Clinton was at the time saying ‘It’s very personal for me, it’s not just political, it’s not just public’, which underlines her use of authenticity here.

 [Photograph taken by Joe Crimmings. Accessed from FlickR and used under Creative Commons license.] 

is the double bind: if Clinton conducts herself in a male style, she risks disappointing those for whom having a woman candidate and president makes a difference. It seems to be the case that Clinton has lost the support of many professional women; and she may have suffered also for not having publicly shared her pain about the Lewinsky episode (by, for example, going on the Oprah Show!). Of course she may also not project the right kind of womanliness to attract Republican voters to the Democrat cause, having declared when Bill Clinton became president that she wouldn’t be the type of First Woman to bake. Would a man married to a female president even feel compelled to make a public statement about their role? If a woman is a strong leader she is at fault for not being a homemaker, but if she is a homemaker she is at fault for not having the qualities of the leader. The quality she needs to be a president – to hack it with the big boys – is the same quality that goes against her. If women talk loudly they are shrill; if they talk softly they are overly feminine and weak. And Clinton as a woman is described in ways that could not now be publicly used to describe Obama as a non-white; when a member of the audience at a John McCain event asked the Senator ‘How do we beat the bitch?’ McCain’s smiling reply was ‘Excellent question’.

Some commentators think that the Democratic race for nomination is inevitably reduced to that between a black man and a woman and that because the U.S population are more sexist than they are racist, Clinton will never win the candidacy and less even the Presidency. That is, to use semiotic terminology for a moment, a female signifier of difference from an unmarked (white, male) norm is more troubling than a black signifier of difference. This is not about whether people think Hillary Clinton is capable, knowledgeable, or rational; she is widely thought to be all these things, and these would be valued in a man. But these capacities are undermined by what is clearly a different wish that she show some kind of deeper, truer self, which is ‘feminine’. So far the consensus seems to be that while Obama looks unforced and his speeches are born of deep conviction, here we have a woman whose political ambitions and ambitiousness are seen to question her very humanity.

These problems appear whenever women enter the public sphere, and not just in the domain of politics. Kate McCann (whose daughter Madeleine was abducted in Portugal last summer) was probably right to complain that if she looked and acted in a more ‘maternal’ way, she would have had more sympathetic media coverage. Judged endlessly by her demeanour, which was considered too much the ice queen, there was deemed to be a necessary link between outward appearance and conduct and inner life. Her inner turmoil, then, should have been visible, her feelings closer to the surface – via dishevelled clothes, lack of care for the self, tearful inarticulacy. Because it wasn’t, and she exerted some control over her public self, she was regarded as quite possibly an irresponsible mother as well as a realistic suspect in her daughter’s abduction. I noticed that there was no similar questioning of the integrity of her husband, for Gerry McCann has been equally able to remain relatively emotionless and poker faced in public appearances.

There seems, then, to continue be a very strong wish to question the motives and even ethical capacity of women once they relenquish the maternal, the instinctive, the emotional – typically regarded as qualities belonging to private life but which they must leave behind once they step into a public, for which read masculine, role. Women often lose either way, damned if they do and damned if they don’t use an emotional register in public, either approache being judged to convey rich symbolic meanings that question their authenticity and ultimately their authority.

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Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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It is difficult to know whether she became 'emotional' because she was now trailing Obama or the campaign pressure caught up with her. Either way, barely 24 hours after this display of emotion, against predictions, she emerged as the unlikely victor in New Hampshire. It is impossible to know the effect of the tears in her eyes on this outcome. But I wouldn't underestimate it.

Are we witnessing a moment in history when the place of emotion in politics (and public life) is taking the centre stage? More broadly, are we witnessing the emergence of a new image of 'being political' (used to be called ‘man’) who is not only 'rational' but also 'emotional'? The signs of these shifts are everywhere. It is almost as if we are back in the seventeenth century and the battle between what was then called 'reason' versus 'passion' is being waged again though the outcome is by no means certain. Throughout that century a new image of being political emerged where 'his' reasons triumphed over 'his' passions. This image dominated public life since then and what it means to appear in public always carried with it a strong element of being reasonable (as opposed to passionate) and rational (as opposed to emotional). In fact, this was one of the main arguments against including women in politics until the twentieth century: women ostensibly represented the irrational and passionate aspects of being human and such qualities did not belong in public space. Reading arguments by mostly male thinkers against the suffragette movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I am struck by how much emphasis was placed on women as e‘motional beings and how they were incapable of sound judgement in political affairs.

TImes have changed. First, of course, as the suffragettes had claimed, women proved themselves perfectly capable of sound judgement in political affairs, if not, in fact, more so than men. Throughout the twentieth century women have occupied significant political and public positions. As studies repeatedly show, the male world still dominates but it is no longer the same. Yet, it can be, and as many have said, women have occupied these positions by mostly acting in the image of man: rational, reasonable, calculative and instrumental. It was a survival strategy in a man'’s world. ’ Then, in the second part of the twentieth century, women began conducting themselves in public as ‘women’. (In the social sciences this was interpreted as a change from a politics of identity to a politics of difference.) With this interpretation, however, we risk fixing definitions of ‘'man' and 'w‘oman' and associating them with specific qualities: men with rationality and women with emotion. That’ is precisely why in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries many have approached such identities with flexible and fluid meaning rather than thinking that masculinity was lodged in the male body and femininity was lodged in the female body. (In the social sciences this was seen as the birth of cultural politics as opposed to politics of identity or of difference.)

The tears in Hillary Clinton’ eyes may well be one of those moments where such changes are crystallized. I have not encountered a comment by Obama on her tears but John Edwards, the third running candidate, did imply that it showed she is not capable of leadership: "I think what we need in a commander-in-chief is strength and resolve, and presidential campaigns are tough business, but being president of the United States is also tough business." I guess that's why Edwards is not in serious contention since he is clearly not reading the politics of affect that surrounds him. The remarkable aspect of the success of Clinton against Obama in New Hampshire is that that rare display of emotion may well have finally countered what many are attracted to Obama for: passion and emotion. I suggest that only when Hillary Clinton departed from the script that often constituted her as the reasonable and experienced leader and displayed that she was involved in politics emotionally that she was able to mount a challenge to Obama's passionate politics. Now was this strategic? If one means by strategy intentional action, I would wager that it certainly was not strategic. But if one means by strategy an intuitive orientation toward that which works, I would think that Hillary's tears in her eyes were strategic.  

I don't mean to suggest that emotion has now become legitimate strategy (in both senses) in politics under all circumstances or that women's’ entry into politics has brought about this change. There are many signs that indicate the image of being political now includes being emotional and many signs that men as well as women are caught in the production of this image. How this image affects the politics of our times is a broad issue that requires investigation.

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Engin F Isin is professor in politics and international studies and director of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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