These Silk-Suited Professionals Are Fooling Themselves : Language: When women at the top of the power ladder call themselves ‘outsiders,’ they deny the real outsiders.

Soon after the historic California primary put two women in Senate contention and 18 women among the finalists for the state’s 52 congressional seats, I found myself amid a celebratory sea of women at a Los Angeles fund-raiser for Kathleen Brown, our able state treasurer, feeling a little grumpy around the edges. But why? After all, it had been a long haul for women in politics. It was time to celebrate, as a quartet of female luncheon speakers clearly aimed to do and, no doubt, as numbers of women will again try to do at the Democratic Convention.

But what bothered me was some of the language they were using, a bit of pundit-speak, a standard sound-bite in this year’s election. Namely that this was the year of the outsider, and women were the ultimate outsiders. Hence, the Year of the Woman. I’ve heard that a lot and always accepted it gratefully. Yes, that’s right, we women are the ultimate outsiders. Yes, you’ve pushed us around long enough, ye of the backlash brigade, of the pin-stripe suit and the rep tie. Yes, it’s our turn now.

But sitting in that room full of nominees and other dressed-for-success women--the new relaxed “feminine” version (and believe me, I include myself in this)--I was struck by the inappropriateness of the word outsiders. By what stretch of the imagination were any of us in that room outsiders, many of us with high incomes and higher educations? To call us that made about as much sense as calling political veterans Barbara Boxer or Dianne Feinstein (whose wealthy third husband helped bankroll her) outsiders. Or Ross Perot. This is an outsider? Hardly.

But we in the media--and I implicate myself in this, too--repeat the word without examining it. We play along with the billionaire’s conceit and the conceit of the women candidates, a sleight of language and finally of conscience that renders true outsiders invisible.

After all, the real outsiders were not at that party for Kathleen Brown, nor are they in Madison Square Garden today.

The outsiders are out there, in the bleaker parts of our cities and towns. They’re in housing projects and rental apartments and heavily mortgaged homes, hanging on, hanging in, losing jobs, losing ground, scared. Single mothers trying to keep it all together (not the upscale Murphy Brown kind, but the kind who have been deserted by men; their children, too) older people on fixed incomes, our multicultural kids who aren’t being educated for the world in which they find themselves, people who have no sense of a stake in the system, unlike the women in Madison Square Garden.

I don’t want to sound churlish. I know that many of those women--nominees, delegates and, yes, reporters-- have fought hard personal battles to get where they are, often the first in their families to go to college or law school or run for political office--good women, hard-working pioneers.

I also know that many of those women, like successful, educated women the country over, increasingly move around in a world of other professionals. Just like men. It happens. The circles narrow. But then these women had better not appropriate for themselves the outsider label, because by doing so they reveal just how insulated they really are, sufficiently so as not to know who the real outsiders are anymore.

In my minor linguistic irritation, however, there is optimism, the hope that if we women try to keep ourselves honest, even about something so seemingly slight as our choice of words, we truly might be a transforming presence in politics, as corny or as impossible as that might sound.