Stop calling women in politics 'emotional'

I really wasn't sure whether I should write this column. 

On the one hand, you could call it thin: Talking about a decision made by Michigan's governor to halt work on a controversial pipeline on Wednesday's "Frank Beckmann Show" on Detroit's WJR-AM 760 (Hi, Frank!) Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield, R-Levering, said that decisions about the Great Lakes should be based in "in sound science ... we can’t be driven purely by emotion."

On the other hand: There's a long and tiresome history of men calling women "emotional" in order to undermine our decisions and discredit our leadership, and when it happens, it's important to call it out, not least because publicly framing a woman's choices as emotional rather than rational or reasoned works. Women, particularly female politicians, successfully cast as "emotional" often find it difficult to shed the label, researchers say. 

Read more:

Michigan lawmaker says Whitmer, Nessel 'driven by emotion' on Line 5

So that's a problem. 

Here's what happened: Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Attorney General Dana Nessel, both Democrats and both, you know, women, made no bones about their opposition to Line 5 during last year's campaigns. The aging pipeline runs through the Straits of Mackinac, and has become the target of environmental concerns because it's not in great shape, its location means that any spill or leak could imperil large swathes of the Great Lakes, and because it's owned by Canadian energy company Enbridge, a company with a terrible track record of transparency and environmental safety. 

During last year's lame-duck session, Gov. Rick Snyder (whose former chief of staff is married to an Enbridge lobbyist) rushed bills through the GOP-led state Legislature that allowed the energy giant to build a utility tunnel under the straits that would, upon completion, house the pipeline. Environmentalists do not like this plan because it means leaving Line 5 in place and thus courting environmental disaster for another seven to 10 years (and that's if construction proceeds on schedule). 

A poll conducted by EPIC-MRA last April found that 87 percent of Michiganders are concerned about the safety of Line 5; more than half of those polled said it should be shut down, and just 22 percent said the pipeline status quo was fine. 

One of Whitmer's first acts as governor was to request an opinion about the legislation that enabled the Line 5 tunnel deal from Nessel, whose constitutional charge includes reviewing legislation and providing advisory opinions about the constitutionality of same. 

Nessel found that the tunnel legislation didn't pass constitutional muster: Because lawmakers shoehorned a new authority to oversee the tunnel into the legislation after it passed, Nessel found that the scope of the legislation exceeded its intent as expressed in the bill's title. 

To recap: a newly elected governor and attorney general did exactly what they said they would on the campaign trail, within their respective constitutional purviews, with the apparent end goal of getting Enbridge back to the bargaining table. 

None of which strikes me as particularly emotional. 

But when discussing these relatively unremarkable political machinations, that’s the word Chatfield chose. 

It's disingenuous to suggest that an experienced politician like Chatfield doesn't understand that "emotional" is a loaded word, when you're talking about women's workplace decisions, despite his spokesman's assertion that criticism of the speaker's comments is political. 

That's a way to deflect criticism, just like calling a woman "emotional" is a way dismiss her decisions, without engaging on the merits. 

"It’s a way of saying they’re making the wrong choice, but not making a reasoned argument. He's not saying 'I disagree with the attorney general or governor,' it’s that they’re emotional," said Jean Sindzak, associate director of the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University. 

The idea that women are too emotional to participate meaningfully in civic life has been used for centuries to dismiss women's leadership, Sindzak said.

"This is really a tried and true tactic for undercutting women in politics. Men have been calling women in politics emotional really since the suffrage movement. The argument against women voting was because we're too emotional," said Amanda Hunter, communications and research director for the Barbara Lee Family Foundation. "We also know that emotional is a gendered term. It’s used to undercut a woman’s seriousness of purpose."

In this case, Chatfield doubled down on the stereotype, contrasting the “sound science” he believes he and other tunnel proponents’ decisions are based on with others’ “emotional” responses. 

He really ought to know better. 

Chatfield said a lot of other stuff on the Beckmann show, noting that his constituents rely on the propane passed through Line 5 to heat their homes. This is a reasonable thing for a lawmaker like Chatfield to worry about. He defended the rushed lame-duck legislation as a fair process, describing it as a deal between the State of Michigan and Enbridge (I kind of thought that the Legislature should pursue the best deal for Michiganders and for our lakes, but whatever I would end this at our lakes) and to his credit, largely rebuffed Beckmann's efforts to claim Nessel and Whitmer somehow overstepped. 

Then, I guess, the speaker got carried away. You might even say, emotional.

Nancy Kaffer is a Free Press columnist. Her every decision is made through the flinty lens of cold reason. Contact: nkaffer@freepress.com.