Caroline Kennedy is a woman. Some of the most oppressed people on earth are women named Kennedy. Ergo, appointing Caroline Kennedy to the US Senate is striking a blow for women and humankind. Caroline is not going to make this argument on her own behalf, so let me try.
In the hundred year history of the Kennedy-Fitzgerald family in public life, it’s been all about the guys. There isn’t a more vivid depiction of women dismissed and marginalized by men, and put in service to them, than the story of the Kennedy men and the Kennedy women. One Kennedy woman (Caroline’s Aunt Rosemary) was even lobotomized to make her behave. You can see it in the pictures: The Kennedy boys are expansive and dazzling, the Kennedy girls are introverted and frumpy.
And, if the Kennedy boys treated women in their own family badly, they treated women outside their family—the women they worked with, or the random women they encountered—even worse. They used them, they harassed them, they abused them, they raped them, they killed them (Mary Jo Kopechne), and possibly murdered them (Marilyn Monroe).
Caroline Kennedy has undoubtedly been traumatized by many things in her life—her family’s extreme disregard for the intelligence and well-being of women must be one of those things. Kennedy men—her grandfather, her father, her uncles, her cousins—shit on women.
Shitting on women has rather defined being a Kennedy man.
Caroline Kennedy appears to be a person emerging from trauma—the halting speech, trying to focus her eyes in the lights, the way she shies from people's touch. Perhaps this is not so much a sign of her failure, but of her courage. She’s doing what no woman named Kennedy was ever encouraged to do (Kathleen Townsend, Bobby Kennedy’s eldest daughter, who became the lieutenant governor of Maryland, reportedly fell out of favor with her brothers over her presumption).
That she’s been asked to do this by her failing uncle adds a sort of poignancy and poetic justice—he being, even among Kennedys, a flagrant abuser of women—to the passing of the torch.
(AP Image)
This is, I’m not sure she realizes, her ticket. While we say our interest is in the idealism of the Kennedys, our real interest is in their dysfunction. All Tombstone Burris has had to do to get seated as the senator from Illinois was wave a little race flag. If Caroline sat on Oprah’s couch and talked a little about the difficulties of growing up female in a certain Irish Catholic family, she’d be in.
The Kennedys have been for too long an unsettled thing in American history, a powerful myth warring with a virulent reality—glamour boys who got us in a lot of trouble. Caroline Kennedy could at
least help write an ironic coda to this story: A woman is the last Kennedy standing.
