Charlie Chaplin wrote one of the most beautiful melodies I’ve ever heard. It was featured in his film, Modern Times (1937). [The lyrics were added in 1954 by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons.] It goes by the title “Smile.” There’s little or no humor in the song. It’s rather melancholy. Though Chaplin is quoted as saying “I have many problems in my life. But my lips don’t know tha
t. They always smile.”
There are many versions of the song available on-line. Here’s the great Nat King Cole (who recorded the first version of it that included lyrics) singing it: https://youtu.be/TAjx0d-fda4. If you listen to Pharrell Williams’ upbeat song Happy before or after you listen to Smile, you’ll immediately feel the difference. Somehow, I can’t see any male politicians or pundits telling Hillary Clinton to “Be Happy.” If they did, it probably wouldn’t feel as demeaning as being told to smile constantly.
Today, 80 years after the melody was heard in Modern Times — and 60 years after Nat King Cole sang the lyricized version, women still hear the admonition to SMILE <DAMMIT> more often than we’d like to remember. “If you’d only just smile you’d be ….. (fill in the blank): so much prettier; so much more likeable; less threatening; more ladylike).” I remember a time as a young professor when a senior university administrator told me, as he passed me in the dean’s office,”You’d better just keep up that smiling.” It struck me as somewhat odd, even though it wasn’t the first time a man said that to me.
So it’s not really surprising to me that so many pundits are telling Presidential Candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton she needs to smile more — and not shriek when she addresses the public. If you google “Hillary smile,” like I did a few minutes ago, you’ll get 3 million hits. Here are just two of the recent articles I found:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-smile_us_57d16d90e4b00642712bc259
Politics is — and has long been — a very sexist (and racist and xenophobic) endeavor. I remember when Geraldine Ferraro was on the Democratic ticket for VP, along with Walter Mondale. This was in 1984.
They were running against incumbents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. I watched the debate and paid attention to the comments that were made after it. Yep. Geraldine Ferraro was described as strident, emotional, etc. And apparently George H.W. Bush, himself, felt she was ignorant about international affairs (even though she had already served three terms in the House, representing the state of New York when she ran for VP) and “man-splained” the US foreign policy to her. She very politely, but firmly, called him on his paternalistic comments. GO GERALDINE. You can see 2 minutes of the debate here: https://youtu.be/3ktVMf4JHGA (The entire debate, which runs nearly 90 minutes, is available on-line, if you’re interested.)
One last observation. The field of Law, and the law schools which act as feeders for politics in many states, apparently still has some remnants of sexism, as an article in my local newspaper reported today. [See http://www.gainesville.com/news/20160909/uf-law-school-dean-defends-critique-of-gender-bias]. The article calls out Laura Rosenbury, the Dean of the University of Florida College of Law, for a 4000 word article she published in the New England Law Review this summer which, according to the newspaper, “ended by recounting a banquet last fall when the male president of UF’s Florida Law Review introduced (her)” as young and vivacious. Rosenbury speculated about whether a male dean would be described in the same way. According to her article, when she approached the faculty advisor of the Law Review (which is a student-run organization), he said, “But you look so much younger.” (She is 46.) He is, well, much older than she is. She is now getting a lot of “pushback” (the word used by the reporter of the newspaper article). Michael Balducci, an alumnus of UF’s Law School and a former executive of the Law Review) has publicly commented that she needs to apologize to the male law student and his advisor. ARE YOU KIDDING ME??????? Maybe she should just smile and say she’s sorry. I hope she doesn’t.
A Feminist of a Certain Age 