Sheryl Sandberg, Nancy Pelosi, and the Suburbanization of the Democratic Party

By now as all the post-2018 midterm elections have made clear, the Democratic Party’s blue wave was driven in larger part by female voters in middle class to affluent suburbs.  The question now to be answered is what will be the policy consequences of this?    Of course starting in January one will find out, with the question being will women do politics differently than men or will they conform to the rules of power that confront them?  The answer may be a little bit of both, but it is important to understand the perspective that the female suburbanization of the Democratic Party offers, and perhaps how the experiences of Sheryl Sandberg and Nancy Pelosi tell us something about what difference women do or do not make in the world of work and politics.
The question of whether women offer a unique perspective started with Carol Gilligan’s 1982 In a Different Voice.  It argued that men and women morally perceive the world in different ways, with the former depicting it in a hierarchical, right/wrong, black/white way versus a more nuanced  relational way.  Gilligan’s work was a landmark in psychology, paralleled by Mary Field Belenky’s, et al, 1986 Women’s Ways of Knowing and  Deborah Tannen’s 1990 You Just Don’t Understand,  which described the unique ways women come to learn, know, and communicate.  The core arguments for all three, and subsequent feminist writers, was that the unique experiences of women compared to men provide a female perspective in critical activities in life.  Men and women performing similar functions do things differently, might be one way to capture this idea.
Politically the argument would be that female legislatures would do politics differently, both in terms of style and policy agenda.  Margaret Conway’s 1995 Women and Public Policy noted important differences along these fronts, and since then other scholars have found contrasting ways men and women politically engage or act as public officials.  However, as other scholars, such as Robin West, have noted, lumping all women together in one group is stereotyping–there are important differences in perspectives among women based on race and class, for example. This is the concept of intersectionality recognizing the interplay of gender along with race, class, and sexual orientation,  for example. Much, but certainly not all of the  political research has focused on middle class white women, ignoring important perspective and policy differences that may divide women across a range of variables that also divide men.  Enter Sandberg and Pelosi.
Sandberg is a feminist icon to some for her book Lean In and claims that women should take charge.  Yet as many critics point out, she spoke with the voice of white affluent privilege, largely  ignoring the circumstances that women of color and less modest means face.  Her book was a claim that women would do business differently, but as the recent NY Times expose on Facebook and she revealed, it is hard to see how Sandberg brought a different way of doing business to the corporate world.  She adopted the same techniques and perhaps dirty tricks that men used when Facebook was challenged.
Nancy Pelosi ranks among the richest members of Congress, with net wealth estimated at nearly $30 million.  She is the former Speaker of the House, skilled legislatively, as a fundraiser, and as a leader.  It is hard to argue that her career has demonstrated a real difference compared to men in terms of the work she has done.  However both she and Sandberg are accomplished and represent one important perspective of women, but it is far from clear that they represent transformative figures that embody a unique female perspective.  They changed their worlds and conformed at the same time.
Why is all this significant?  The suburban blue wave that occurred on election day was one driven by affluent white women.  When it comes to partisan politics and policy,  the Democratic Party is largely being remade in the image of this powerful group of women.  If these women are the drivers of the Democratic Party now, their views should inevitably come to dominate as they take ownership of the party. Almost anyone, except former governor Chris Christie, gets this.  Sunday on ABC’s This Week when asked if it was a problem that women were not joining the Republican Party, he said they were welcome so long as they “believe in Republican philosophies and Republican approaches to government.”  Christie apparently thinks he and his other white male friends own the Republican  Party, define its orthodoxy, and that its principles are immutable.  Such an attitude is a recipe for political extinction.
The new Democratic Party will evolve;  it  is a party of women who share affinities with Sandberg and Pelosi.  It will be a perspective representing one set of middle to upper income values, but it is not clear that the interests served will necessarily be as progressive or as representative of the interests of the poor and people of color as some might think.  The challenge for the new Democratic Party will be how to hold together a constituency that contains suburban white women, people of color, urban liberals, and perhaps the poor.  These three sets of values are not necessarily compatible, and the challenge facing this new suburbanization of the Democratic Party is to ask whose preferences are not only included by excluded, and whether the female vote will really be transformative.