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Ironically, there is a glaring flaw in Maureen Dowd’s current column, A Flawed Feminist Test:

But Hillary is not the best test case for women. We’ll never know how much of the backlash is because she’s a woman or because she’s this woman or because of the ick factor of returning to the old Clinton dysfunction.

What she misses is that there will never be a perfect test case. There will never be any way to prove with absolute certainty the degree to which a specific female politician is disliked because of her gender as opposed to her specific traits. Indeed, the two types of reasons are often intertwined. Moreover, there will always be something in any individual’s background– a flaw– that could be pointed to as the (primary) determining factor in this dislike.

The most important reason that there can’t be an ideal test case for women in highest office, however, is that no woman can ever stand for all women. By writing as if there is validity to searching for an ideal gender representative, Dowd obscures this.

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