Women as leaders. A comparison between Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth and Claire Underwood from House of Cards

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Introduction

2. Feminism
2.1 Feminism in the renaissance
2.2 Feminism today - the women as a leader

3. Lady Macbeth

4. Claire Underwood

5. Comparison between the two characters

Bibliography

1. Introduction

In recent years a strong resurgence of feminist activism has developed. Young women are having an increased interest in feminist ideas to give meaning to their lives. This revival of feminism is reflected in the formation of countless feminist groups around the world and the introduction of various feminist projects and campaigns, which are regularly reported on in the media, for example such as the Women's Global Empowerment Fund or the National Organization for Women. This term paper examines the development of feminism set in comparison between the renaissance and today, using two works as examples:

The representation of Claire Underwood in the BBC series House of Cards in comparison with the representation of Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare's Macbeth.

Macbeth is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare in the early 17th century. The work is about the rise of the army commander Macbeth to become king of Scotland, his transformation to a murderer and the preservation of his power. Wrecked by guilt and paranoia and spurred to action by his wife, he is forced to commit more murders to protect himself from hostility and suspicion. He soon becomes a tyrannical ruler. During the storyline Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are taken into the realms of madness and death.

House of Cards is an americanized version of the BBC series of the same name which is an adaptation of Michael Dobbs' novels (1989 - 1994)¹ about the British politics and which magnifies modern day brutality and corruption. The series focuses on the American Congressman Francis (Frank) Underwood and his wife Claire. Underwood is Majority Whip of the Democratic Party and has been promised the post of Secretary of State after a successful election campaign. In fact, the Democratic candidate becomes President of the United States, but Underwood does not get the promised position. From now on, he secretly plans his way into the presidency closely supported by his wife Claire. Underwood resorts all forms of tactic, to lies and intrigues of every kind, acts without any moral and not even shies away from murder,just like Macbeth.

2. Feminism

What exactly is the meaning of feminism? Feminism means different things to everybody, such as believing that women and men should be able to have the same rights rather than men having more rights than women. So feminism can be seen as a political movement which developed through the participation in patriarchal gender relations and the effort to liberate women and to help them to achieve self-realization. But feminism has changed from the 15th century until today. In addition to this, the question of what a woman is and the critique that feminism would ignore the racial issue and overlooks the conditions of global inequality. Feminism is not a problem, where we can start from a set of common premises and then develop it with a logical method, but rather a movement that focuses on its premises through critical attention. This movement tries to further clarify its self-image and to convey the contradictory interpretations.²

The next two chapters will explain the differences between the Renaissance period feminism in contrast to todays' feminism.

2.1 Feminism in the renaissance

The Renaissance period started in the 14th century in Italy and was a time of change in culture. It was very different to the periods before. Both, women and men were able to excel in arts, science or literature and however, most women did not have political rights. Women were mainly married young and “owned" by their husbands. The situation of women in the early modern period was based on two main foundations: for them the natural law applied, in this case above all divine law. On the other hand, the positive law, which regulated their position by social norms.³ Women were expected to be wives and mothers, they were not well educated and did not engage much in life outside their home. Single women were often associated with being witches and marriage was a desire especially for lower class women.

During the Renaissance, a new social class developed in between the nobility and the lower class - called the middle class, which earned money through banking or practicing a trade. The humanism, which stressed the ability of humans to do great things, was developed. Nevertheless, women were not seen as a part of this.⁴

Since society in the Renaissance was patriarchal all power was held to men. People believed that women were not able to be in charge because they were interior to men. They believed, that the smaller bone structure and skulls of women meant they were weaker and less intelligent than men.⁵ Also education was considered to be wasted on women, except in the upper class were just a few young girls attended elementary school. Girls did not advance far in the education system and were not allowed to attend university. They were encouraged to learn spinning, sewing and how to manage a household in order to please their husbands instead of reading and writing.⁶

Feminists were women trying to step out of their shell and standing up for women. Lucrezia Marinella was one of these women. She was born in Venice in 1571 and lived there her whole life. Her father was a physician and wrote medical treatises and encouraged his daughter to do whatever she liked. Lucrezia Marinella wrote different books on genres like poetry, lyric and literature which lead to writings about philosophical polemicists, the writing about opinions and the truth about things. She "questioned the arguments against female self­determination common at the time, opposed the Aristotelian image of women and critically examined the history of creation."⁷ For this period, it was rare for women to write about these kinds of topics. Her main book "The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men" is about women rights and standing up to what Lucrezia believed about women. Lucrezia Marinella was also one of the first female writers, who confronted a common problem regarding women and introduced "'equality' and 'rights' into the lexicon of the debate on women."⁸

The typical woman is shown as having to respond in one of two possible ways: "either to reaffirm the value of her duties as her husband's subordinate [,..]"⁹ or to reject "the grounds upon which she has been assigned her role and discover others that provide her with greater scope"¹⁰. The loss of the opportunity to make decisions for herself or her family.¹¹ The first instance is to agree taking her households seriously and never to refuse to perform her husband's orders except in the most extraordinary of moral circumstances. The virtue of women may be real and deserves respect but is always ancillary to that of men.¹² However, the second instance is to reject the principal features of patriarchy. Women are ought to be allowed to do more than they did in the past. Educated women are considered to be capable of exercising both kinds of virtue assigned to men: justice, fortitude, prudence, whereby men profit from a feminized society.¹³

Anyone who defended the rights of women encountered two principal challenge: Firstly, the fact that "creation is organized form its beginning as a hierarchy of creatures, with man superior to woman"¹⁴ and secondly that "such a hierarchy is justified by virtue of the nature of the creatures it ranks"¹⁵, since woman are naturally weakerthan man. Feminists responded to these challenges by arguing that the hierarchy and its reflection in society is not natural. They claimed that this is just the result of the deployment of political or economic power.¹⁶ Feminists in this age already seeked to establish a socially and politically heterogenous society.

2.2 Feminism today- the women as a leader or not?

Nowadays, gender should not be a factor whether or not a person can be a great leader. The ability to be a leader should depend on the individual strengths and personal traits a person brings with them. However, women often are not encouraged to take on leadership roles as often as men.¹⁷ It may be easier for women to access ruling positions, but there are still a lot of boundaries to pass like the stigma of masculinity. Men and women tend to have different styles in terms of leadership. Women tend to be more democratic and encourage in participation, share power and information whereby men are more likely to use forces as controlling and commanding.¹⁸

If women access the business world, they are also constantly monitored by society and the media. To define feminism, it is important to define "gender" and "sex". Judith Butler, an American feminist, defines the terms in her work "Gender Trouble" by distinguishing them from each other, whereby "sex" is attributed to biological sex and "gender" is a construct created by the outside world like the gender identity of a person.¹⁹ Thus Judith Butler assumes that the connection between "sex" and "gender" is anti-naturalistic. Therefore, gender identity is a binary matrix is which contains a coercive framework that ensures the patriarchal and binary structure of power in a social society. There power is constituted and visible.²⁰

Butler thus describes the gender categories as the result of an economy of sexuality, which moreover forces an artificial and binary relationship between the sexes. Therefore, the interpretation would not be limited to "man or woman". There are two fixed sexes, but that does not imply an existence of only two gender identities. Nevertheless, if sex and gender are separated from each other, this opens up many more possibilities for interpreting a biological gender.²¹ As an example one could mention the gender identities such as transgender. So to conclude one can say a person is not considered a man or is called a woman because of having a male or female body, but exactly the other way around. The anatomical gender is derived from the cultural gender.²² Gender may not be the favorite word to describe feminism, but the question of the relationship between social change and feminism should be obvious.²³ Cultural gender can explain women's aversion for example to study fields with mathematical skills. These often represent the gateway to leading positions. There is a little evidence of actual gender differences in mathematics, which are even attributed to cultural factors such as social status. Nevertheless, there is still the widespread belief that men are much better than women at mathematics.²⁴

Today women are emerging in leader positions in growing range of fields like education, business, law, politics and so on. However, they often have to behave like men. If one wants to define feminism one instantly encounters differences of opinions about whether “equality means that mean and women are treated interchangeably".²⁵ While norms are needed to know in which direction one want to change the social world, sometimes these norms have to be reasons of social justice.²⁶ But why are men still the running gender when it comes to leading positions? Effective leadership has always been associated with “masculine traits", which characterizes leadership within male-dominated contexts. This goes back, as already mentioned in this abstract, to the 1400 century, where women were seen as weaker as men. Women are less likely than men to be in a leading position since they “prefer different kinds of jobs than men and accumulate less of the required work experience than men.²⁷ Nonetheless, the concepts of masculinity and femininity are not necessarily precise correlates of biological sex which means a man or a woman may possess either masculine or feminine characteristics or both. So it is possible that women today possess more masculine characteristics than they had in the renaissance.²⁸

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¹ Wood, Jennifer M. "22 Streaming Facts About House of Cards". Mental floss. March 3, 2016. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/61882/22-streaming-facts-about-house-cards. Accessed: 24 Feb.2020

² Butler, Judith. “Die Macht der Geschlechternormen und die Grenzen des Menschlichen.“ Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main. Erste Auflage 2009. P. 285

³ “Woman and Natural Law."Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models, by Constance Jordan, Cornell University Press, ITHACA; LONDON, 1990, pp. 65-133. JSTOR, https://books.google.de/books?hl=de&lr=&id=LDzF0h_YY8oC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=Renaissance+Feminism:+Li terary+Texts+and+Political+Models&ots=wZTJGyqPZp&sig=Cf_Nx3Zqlaw3md2A7artN9MYJBE#v=onepage&q=R enaissance%20Feminism%3A%20Literary%20Texts%20and%20Political%20Models&f=false. Accessed 26 Feb. 2020.

⁴ Huntley, Theresa. "Women in the Renaissance". Crabtree Publishing Co. Canada. 15 Oct 2009. P. 4 https://books.google.de/books?hl=de&lr=&id=PrR9NUITN3YC&oi=fnd&pg=PA4&dq=Huntley,+Teresa.+Women +in+the+Renaissance&ots=X63DuKtzJC&sig=ciOSZzCRYQywtlgZ- NdA8S0CO_4#v=onepage&q=Huntley%2C%20Teresa.%20Women%20in%20the%20Renaissance&f=false. Accessed: 24 Feb. 2020

⁵ Ebd. P.5

⁶ Ebd. P. 8

⁷ Integralis gem.e.V. SOPHIE - Lexikon der Philosophinnen. http://www.sophie- lexikonderphilosophinnen.de/html/marinella.html. Accessed 24 Feb. 2020.

⁸ Ross, Sarah Gwyneth. "The Birth of Feminism: woman as intellect in Renaissance Italy and England". Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press. 2009. P.15

⁹ Jordan, Constance. P.13

¹⁰ Ebd.

¹¹ Ebd.

¹² Ebd.

¹³ Jordan, Constance. P.13 ff

¹⁴ Ebd. P.66

¹⁵ Ebd.

¹⁶ Ebd. P.67

¹⁷ Gausepohl, Shannon. "3 Steps Women Can Take to Blaze a Leadership Trial". Business News Daily. August 23, 2017. https://www.replicon.com/blog/17-reasons-women-make-great-leaders/ Accessed: 06 March 2020

¹⁸ Ebd.

¹⁹ Butler, Judith. "Das Unbehagen der Geschlechter - Gender Studies". Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main. Erste Auflage 1991. P. 22 ff

²⁰ Ebd.

²¹ Ebd. P.181ff

²² Ebd. P.167

²³ Butler,Judith. 2009. P.325

²⁴ Haveman, Heather A. Beresford, Lauren S. “If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You the Boss? Explaining the Persistent Vertical Gender Gap in Management."Gender and Race Inequality in Management: Critical Issues, NewEvidence, edited by Matt L. Huffmann, SAGE Publications, Inc, First Edition, 2012. P. 121 ff

²⁵ Butler, Judith. “Die Macht der Geschlechternormen und die Grenzen des Menschlichen.“ Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main. Erste Auflage 2009. P. 281

²⁶ Ebd. P. 327

²⁷ Haveman, Heather. Beresford, Lauren.

²⁸ Ebd.