URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT

1111 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 3, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

To Pull a Thorn From the Side of the Planet
BYLINE: By MIREYA NAVARRO
SECTION: Section ST; Column 0; Style Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1431 words
DATELINE: SANTA CRUZ, Calif.
THE Bonny Doon Garden Company, a downtown flower kiosk here, had signs posted all around it last week for Valentine's Day, but the sales pitch wasn't just about romance.

A bucket held red and fuchsia anemones that were ''organic.'' Ecuadorean roses the size of baseballs were ''certified.'' Roses from a nearby farm were ''locally grown.''

Was the kiosk selling flowers, or lettuce?

Pesticide contamination doesn't usually come to mind when ordering long-stemmed roses for Valentine's Day. But that is precisely what florists like Bonny Doon are asking their customers to think about. Teresa Sabankaya, the shop's owner, said that when she opened in 2003, ''some people would look at me like, 'Are you nuts?' ''

Now, at least, ''people become engaged,'' she said. ''Forty percent of people will say: 'That's nice. Why would it matter? We're not eating them.' ''

True, flowers are rarely eaten. They aren't worn against the skin like organic cotton, or rubbed on the body like soap. Perhaps that's why organic flowers have not been a big business, especially compared with organic fruits and vegetables. The Organic Trade Association says organic food and beverages had $17 billion in sales in 2006. Flowers -- a $21-billion-a-year industry -- brought in $19 million in organic sales.

That may be changing. The environmentally correct flower is now sold on Web sites like organicbouquet.com, by small florists like Ms. Sabankaya and by big retailers like Sam's Club and FTD, the floral delivery network, which last year introduced a line of sustainably grown irises and lilies from California and roses from Ecuador.

And as in other industries with increasing demand for green products, the floral industry is debating what is environmentally correct. Should flowers be organic -- that is, grown without synthetic or toxic pesticides? Or should the emphasis be on fair trade, meaning that the workers who grow and cut them are safe and well paid? Or should consumers favor flowers grown locally, not flown or trucked over long distances? In other words, what, exactly, is a green flower?

A vast majority of cut flowers sold in the United States, 79 percent, are imported, mostly from countries with mild climates, like Colombia and Ecuador. But only a small minority of flower farms have adopted environmentally friendly methods, like banning toxic chemicals for pest control, said Nora Ferm of the International Labor Rights Forum, an advocacy organization where she is the program director of a ''fairness in flowers'' public education campaign that began a few years ago.

And few of those farms, Ms. Ferm said, bother with occupational health and safety measures for workers, who can suffer pesticide-related illnesses like headaches, rashes and birth abnormalities among their children.

Ms. Ferm said that ''just using less-toxic pesticides would be much better for the environment and the workers.''

Whether consumers can be roused to passion about these issues is a challenge that distinguishes the fledgling green-flower movement from other campaigns for environmental awareness. But big environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council have added flowers to their agenda and are encouraging the public to look for floral eco-labels that can now be found in flower shops, grocery stores and other flower retailers.

The labels emphasize different aspects of sustainability. Fair Trade and VeriFlora, two big organizations whose labels appear on flowers sold in the United States, impose strict environmental and labor standards on farms they audit, though they do not require them to be fully organic. Use of pesticides is limited, and workers must be paid fairly; Fair Trade also requires investments in community programs like child care. (Full criteria are at veriflora.org and transfairusa.org.)

Flowers labeled ''USDA Organic'' -- government certification that no toxic or synthetic pesticides or fertilizers were used -- are hard to find beyond farmers' markets or online distributors like Organicstyle.com. While organic flowers do exist, mass production would be difficult for most farms because of the investment and technical assistance required, Ms. Ferm said. And more research is needed into ways to control pests and diseases, other experts said.

MICHAEL SKAFF, FTD's director of design and product development, said he decided to stock flowers certified by VeriFlora, which also vouches for quality, rather than organic ones, because some organic flowers have blemishes and smaller, imperfectly shaped petals.

''We want the consumers to be happy at the end of the day,'' he said. ''People buy sustainable flowers because they know they're grown in environments that are good for everybody.''

But for the most part, florists say, organic and sustainably grown flowers are indistinguishable from those conventionally grown. (As with conventional flowers, durability and fragrance depend more on the variety and breeding than how the flowers were grown.) And unlike organic fruit and vegetables, they usually cost about the same as pesticide-laden versions, or slightly more.

Still, the most environmentally conscious flower buyers are bothered by buying flowers flown and trucked over long distances, no matter how sustainable. Amy Stewart, author of ''Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers'' (Algonquin Books, 2007), said buying local flowers should be the first choice.

But she said workers should also be supported. Visiting South America, she said, she found that ''life on any certified farm is better -- it doesn't matter which certification it is.'' Besides, she noted, it is difficult to assess what is greener: large loads of flowers transported over long distances efficiently or a smaller number grown locally, but requiring a heated greenhouse and a trip to a farmers' market in a pickup truck. ''How do I compare the energy efficiency per flower?'' she asked.

Peter J. Moran, chief executive of the Society of American Florists, which includes retailers and growers, said even growers not certified by any program are already moving toward more earth-friendly practices.

In California, where most American flower production is based, California Pajarosa Floral in Watsonville invested about $100,000 to comply with all regulations necessary to be certified by VeriFlora, said Paul Furman, the manager. He said his company, which grows roses hydroponically in 17 acres of greenhouses and is one of the nation's largest flower growers, would have had to spend more if it hadn't already been using some green practices, like using predatory mites to kill thrips and spider mites that discolor petals and damage foliage.

But Mr. Furman sees a payoff. ''We want to be part of pioneering something that's good for the industry,'' he said. ''We're in the infancy stage of this, so we don't know what to expect, but we do know that the whole world is going green.''

Other entrepreneurs have taken up the cause. Hannah Ling opened a shop, Gardenia Organic, selling organic and sustainable flowers, in December in the West Village in New York. Ms. Ling, a former management consultant from Great Britain, said she spent her life savings on her shop.

''I'm kind of on a mission to show that you don't have to sacrifice quality if you're green,'' she said.

At Ms. Sabankaya's kiosk in Santa Cruz, some walk-in customers admitted not caring much about where their flowers came from as long as they smelled good and had pretty colors. ''The carsand the coal and the petro, that's where we have to make a change,'' said Arlene La Borde, 64, who retired as buyer for Lockheed Martin.

But Ms. Sabankaya, an organic gardener who grows some of the flowers she sells and dresses them up with organic myrtle, rose-scented geranium and other fragrant herbs, said she does a brisk Valentine's Day business -- she sold 2,000 roses last year -- and receives e-mail messages all the time from curious customers.

One, Karen Wolowicz, 28, a policy analyst at a local conservation agency, wanted to know which organic flowers would be available in early May for her wedding in Carmel, Calif., next year. Ms. Wolowicz, who lives in the San Francisco area, said she can't afford a hybrid car, but she shops for organic food in farmers' markets and wants to do her part in minimizing harm to the planet.

''It's the little things that you do that make a difference,'' she said. ''And as Californians, we have great flowers and great food, so we might as well enjoy it and share it.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: ORGANIC FOODS (90%); PESTICIDES (89%); FLORISTS (89%); ENVIRONMENTALISM (89%); RETAILERS (78%); ORGANIC FOODS INDUSTRY (78%); SALES FIGURES (78%); FLORICULTURE PRODUCTION (78%); GREEN MARKET (77%); SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE (77%); TOXIC & HAZARDOUS SUBSTANCES (76%); ENVIRONMENT & NATURAL RESOURCES (76%); IMPORT TRADE (72%); OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH & SAFETY AGENCIES (71%); PESTICIDE POLLUTION (71%); ENVIRONMENTAL ILLNESS (71%); FOOD & BEVERAGE TRADE (70%); WORKPLACE HEALTH & SAFETY (60%)
COMPANY: SAM'S CLUB (65%); GARDEN CO LTD (91%)
PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (55%)
GEOGRAPHIC: SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CA, USA (73%) CALIFORNIA, USA (93%) UNITED STATES (93%); SOUTH AMERICA (92%)
LOAD-DATE: February 3, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: PRETTY IN GREEN?: A move is on to make flowers more eco-friendly.(PHOTOGRAPH BY RANDI LYNN BEACH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. ST1)

FOR THE EARTH: At California Pajarosa Floral, left, the owners invested about $100,000 to gain a ''sustainability'' label. Hannah Ling, far left, sells organic and sustainable flowers in her West Village shop.(PHOTOGRAPH BY HIROKO MASUIKE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

(PHOTOGRAPH BY RANDI LYNN BEACH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. ST10)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1112 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 3, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

16 Ways of Looking at a Female Voter
BYLINE: By LINDA HIRSHMAN.

Linda Hirshman is the author of ''Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World.'' This is her first article for the magazine.

SECTION: Section 6; Column 0; Magazine Desk; Pg. 38
LENGTH: 4511 words
1. The Female Thing

FOR MONTHS before the presidential primaries began, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was widely held to lead among women voters. That she would naturally appeal to her own sex accounted in no small part for her front-runner status. By the end of last year, national polls showed not only that Clinton was ahead but also that women supported her by 8 points more than men did.

But in the Iowa caucus her lead turned out, to use a Clinton phrase, to be more talk than action: 35 percent of female Iowa Democrats went for Senator Barack Obama while only 30 percent stood up for Hillary -- and Obama won. Was Iowa an isolated case? Or had women voters turned their backs on Hillary?

Various explanations surfaced. A WNBC television reporter suggested that ''somewhere along the line she lost the narrative of the first female president as a huge change.'' A blogger on The Huffington Post decided that what women needed wasn't change; it was the whole truth and nothing but the truth: ''Women are too smart, informed and astute at reading between the lines to back a presidential candidate who isn't being straight with them -- especially when she is a woman.'' The snarky Washington-based blog Wonkette proposed that maybe Hillary lacked a certain something and that Barack Obama, well, had it. ''I think Chris Matthews said,'' the post read, ''that we're all voting for Obama because we want to date him, but they were showing a picture of Obama at the time, and I heard birds singing and bells ringing and missed it.''

Then in New Hampshire, things suddenly changed: 46 percent of women in the Democratic primary voted for Hillary compared with 34 percent for Obama, giving Clinton the victory. Was it the welling up? Was it the specter, three days earlier, of those male candidates piling up on her during a debate? Was it because the debate's moderator questioned how likable she was? The Times columnist Gail Collins briefly summed up the theories for Hillary's victory -- ''Do women Obama's age look at him and see the popular boy who never talked to them in high school? Did they relate to Clinton's strategy of constantly reminding her audiences that she's been working for reform for 35 years?'' -- and then added her own. Hillary, she wrote, ''was a stand-in for every woman who has overdosed on multitasking.'' As Collins saw it, women simply wanted to get their own back: ''They grabbed at the opportunity to have kids/go back to school/start a business/become a lawyer. But there are days when they can't meet everybody's needs, and the men in their lives -- loved ones and otherwise -- make them feel like failures or towers of self-involvement. And the deal is that they can either suck it up or look like a baby.''

There was one thing the commentators seemed to agree on. Women in Iowa and New Hampshire -- whether they voted for or against Hillary -- were doing so for the same reason: because she was a woman.

2. Mind the Gender Gap

IN 1920, just as American women got the vote, the New York League of Women Voters tried to defeat a sitting senator, James Wadsworth Jr. The league didn't beat Wadsworth that year, but his ally Gov. Nathan Miller nonetheless later denounced the league as a ''menace'' to ''our free institutions.'' There is no more need for a League of Women Voters, he declared, than for a League of Men Voters. He need not have worried -- women didn't begin to vote as often as men or differently from men for decades.

It wasn't until Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980 that observers first noticed the ''gender gap'': men supported Reagan by 8 percentage points more than women did. Of course, more women supported the incumbent, President Jimmy Carter, than did men. And ever since, women have been more likely than men to favor Democrats. Both parties have tried a variety of strategies to open or close the gender gap: nominating a woman for vice president (Geraldine Ferraro), pretending there was no difference, collecting women into smaller subgroups (soccer moms, security moms), emphasizing feminist issues (equal opportunity, reproductive rights), emphasizing economics (health, welfare, child care). A host of feminist institutions -- the Democratic pro-choice political action committee Emily's List; the nonpartisan White House Project, which promotes political activity among women -- have arisen to try to drive up the numbers and harness the power of the women's vote.

Despite these efforts, the gender gap has neither widened nor narrowed much. It spiked in 1996, when women supported Bill Clinton by 11 percentage points more than men did, and again in 2000, when women favored Al Gore by 12 points. But because the gap describes the difference between how many men and women vote for a single party's candidate, it doesn't necessarily tell us whether women themselves are split. In the election 28 years ago that first pointed to the existence of a so-called gender gap, women still preferred Reagan by 46 percent to Carter's 45 percent. More women may have voted for Carter than men did, but even more voted for Reagan.

3. Race Matters--and Class, Too

RACE FACTORS into the gender gap in two important ways. In 2004, for example, the nonwhite female vote was 12 percent of the electorate; the nonwhite male vote was 10 percent. So when polled, women as a group were less ''white'' than men were -- and nonwhite women are more likely to vote Democratic than white women are. Second, nonwhite women are more likely to vote Democratic than nonwhite men (75 percent to 67 percent in 2004). In other words, nonwhite women make ''women'' more Democratic than the nonwhite men make ''men'' Democratic. In 2004, 55 percent of white women actually favored George Bush.

And as it does for men, economic status can affect how women vote. In a recent national poll of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters by the Pew Research Center, Hillary Clinton led Barack Obama among women in every category but two: self-described liberals and college graduates. Among college graduates, he is 3 points ahead. And whereas among women with incomes of more than $50,000, Clinton leads Obama by a mere 5 percentage points, among those who earn less, she leads by 36 points.

4. Winning Women Isn't the Same as Winning

WITH THE possible exception of 1996, women have never voted a candidate into the White House when men thought the other guy should win. (Bill Clinton's so-called gender-based victory depended on splitting the male vote with Bob Dole. In other words, women did not have to overcome fierce resistance in order to prevail.) In the 2004 election, there was a gender gap in virtually every demographic -- among old folks, married people, single people, squirrel hunters -- but the gender gap still did not offset the robust men's vote. If men are Republican enough, the Republicans need not care whether the women are less enthusiastic about them than men are.

5. Besides, Women Keep an Open Mind

STILL, THERE are ways in which women, as a group, behave differently than men. According to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, women in 2004 made up a higher percentage of undecided and swing voters than men. In an independent survey conducted in October 2004, women accounted for 60 percent of undecided likely voters.

Just before the primary season began last month, the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California and Zogby International released their ''National Survey on Politics and Entertainment,'' which juxtaposes Americans' cultural lives and their political views. They found that 62 percent of the ''moderates'' -- those with middling and flexible positions on the issues -- were women. Pollsters grouped respondents according to how they indicated their degree of agreement with certain statements. The Lear subjects clustered into three clear groups: blue, or liberal; red, or conservative; and purple, or moderate, who were 24 percent of those surveyed. Although no one was very surprised when the liberal group turned out to be 57 percent female, Johanna Blakley, deputy director of the Lear Center and a lead researcher on the project, said she found it ''absolutely unbelievable'' that 62 percent of the moderates were female. She had always thought of moderates as male independents, alienated from politics.

When asked to identify their party, the female moderates, it turned out, were actually more Democratic than Republican, but like most women, they voted only somewhat more for John Kerry than for George Bush in the 2004 presidential election. ''They don't see the political world as legible, especially in the media,'' Blakley suggested. ''That's why they misidentify themselves, these words don't make sense to them, they don't have a value and a weight that makes sense to them, a narrative for politics.''

6. What About the Middle Ground?

WHEN IT comes to politics, it's not just that women are ambivalent; it's that, as a group, they are less interested than men are -- not all women, naturally, but on average. In a 2006 University of Michigan survey, 42 percent of men responded that they were ''very interested'' in government and public affairs, compared with 34 percent of women. At the uninterested end, women were more likely to say that they were only ''somewhat interested'' -- 60 percent of female respondents compared with 54 percent of male respondents.

These differences -- give or take a few percentage points -- have persisted for at least 20 years. Studies have turned up many explanations for the difference -- education, partisanship, sex-role socialization -- but the interest-gap remains. The only area where the gap narrows is in local politics, where women score close to men. Not surprisingly, less interest translates into less knowledge.

In their 1996 study of Americans' political knowledge, ''What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters,'' Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew organization, and his co-author, Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communication, reported that on average, men outscored women by more than 9 percentage points on all political questions; by 15 points when asked to name their governor; by 10 on the identity of either of their senators. (It is true that women sometimes say that don't know when they do, but this accounts for only about a quarter of the knowledge gap.)

In a separate survey done before the current election cycle, Pew asked men and women which of the Democratic candidates is Hispanic, what Mitt Romney's religion is, the name of the current speaker of the House, what position Robert Gates holds, which party has the House majority and how many U.S. troops have died in Iraq. The men outscored the women on every question, with the widest gap being the name of the secretary of defense (there was an 18 point difference between the number of men who answered correctly and the number of women who did) and the smallest that Mitt Romney is a Mormon (2 points). Many more men (13 points) knew the rough number of U.S. troop casualties in Iraq and that Nancy Pelosi is speaker of the House (6 points).

7. The Gap That Matters

THE PEW Research Center for the People and the Press has been following the gender divide in news consumption in great detail for years. This is what that gap looks like:

POLITICAL INTERESTS MEN WOMEN

International affairs 63% 37%

News about Washington 59 41

Local government 55 45

While men are more likely to follow international, national and local politics, women are more likely to attend to religion, health and entertainment, community, culture and the arts, crime and the weather. Men are significantly more likely than women to be regular consumers of ''hard news'' (32 percent of men versus 22 percent of women), and to turn to the Internet, radio news, talk radio, newspapers, political comedy shows and political talk shows. Women, by contrast, are more likely to get their news from the morning news broadcasts and network news programs. Although morning shows do offer news, they tend toward true crime, entertainment and lifestyle, and they regularly put a human-interest spin on government and foreign affairs.

Even if you factor in all the ways in which people gather news -- women supposedly also get political information from the groups they join and from the people they know -- and control for political affiliations, race and class, men still know more about politics than women do. The audiences for programs like ''The Daily Show'' and ''The Rush Limbaugh Show,'' those on National Public Radio and the Web sites of national newspapers all scored significantly higher on political knowledge -- defined as familiarity with public figures and political policies -- than those surveyed who were not part of those audiences. Of all of these outlets, only NPR has an audience that's roughly half female.

Of course, a quick glance at the numbers confirms that a lot of people, of both sexes, are hardly following the news at all. Most voters aren't policy wonks. It may well be that there's a base line of information that is ''good enough'' for citizenship, and knowing more makes little practical difference. But there is a strong correlation between knowledge and political participation. In most aspects of political action -- candidacy, fund-raising, proselytizing, propagandizing -- men predominate.

8. What Makes Women Tune Out

A RECENT report assembled by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government suggests that the absence of women in journalism and on television news programs reduces the likelihood that women will form a significant part of the audience. Most hard-core news programs have hardly any women participants at all: a 2001 White House Project study reported that on the Sunday-morning talk shows, only 11 percent of the guests were women. A follow-up study in 2005 showed the percentage had increased by only 3 points. Similarly, a 2005 Project for Excellence in Journalism study found that only one-third of news accounts cited any female sources at all.

9. Pride and Prejudice

NOT ONLY do fewer women turn to outlets with predominantly male sources for information, but studies also tie women to what scholars call the negative-media effect. Women will sometimes back a candidate because the media they distrust are backing his or her rival.

There was a lot of speculation after the turnaround in New Hampshire that MSNBC's ''Hardball'' host, Chris Matthews, was at least partly responsible for Clinton's surge when he gleefully declared Hillary all but dead and buried after her Iowa loss. Although there is no way to know how many women decided to vote for Clinton in response to the news media's attacks on her, Rebecca Traister, a columnist for the online magazine Salon and a self-declared anti-Hillaryite, was not alone in giving voice to the impulse. ''The torrent of ill-disguised hatred and resentment unleashed toward a briefly weakened Clinton,'' she wrote, ''made me feel something that all the hectoring from feminist elders could not: guilt for not having stood up for Hillary. I can't believe I'm saying this, but had I been a New Hampshire voter on Tuesday, I would have pulled a lever for the former first lady.''

10. XX Marks the Spot

HISTORICALLY, THERE is no reason to believe that women, even Democratic women, will automatically support a female candidate. As Nancy Burns, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, demonstrated in a recent article in the journal Politics and Gender, women, like men, have multiple commitments and connections, which pull their electoral loyalties in many directions. And because women's lives are intimately connected with those of men, women are a little harder to organize than, say, a segregated racial minority. Burns also maintained that ''gender consciousness,'' far from helping women to organize themselves politically, has little power to generate political action, and that its influence has ''waned over the last 30 years.''

On the other hand, the presence of a female candidate is consistently bracing to women voters -- even if they don't end up voting for her. In their book, ''The Private Roots of Public Action,'' the political scientists Nancy Burns, Kay Lehman Schlozman and Sidney Verba found that for women, ''living in a state with a statewide female politician has a significant impact on each of the components of psychological engagement with politics: political information, interest and efficacy.'' Women are more likely, for instance, to know the name of their state's U.S. senator or Senate candidate if a woman held or was competing for the office. Seeing themselves as part of the political arena encourages women to get involved.

Page Gardner, who founded Women's Voices Women Vote, an organization dedicated to increasing voter turnout among single women, reports that female candidates are traditionally ''very motivational'' to her constituency. (Single women vote less frequently than married women, by 13 percent.)

The degree to which women participated in recent primary elections suggests that a female candidate does increase turnout among women. In both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, 57 percent of those who voted were women, up 3 points from 2004. In Nevada, women made up nearly 60 percent of the record 116,000 Democratic caucusgoers.

11. When Sisterhood Is Power

MOST OF the data on the gender gap are gathered from research collected in the general elections. In the primaries, that gap cannot be explained simply by the fact that women tend to favor Democratic over Republican policies. To a degree, the recent primaries are taking place in virgin territory. Not only is there a female candidate in the Democratic presidential race, but a robust, viable female candidate, someone with a powerful organization, a large checkbook and a legendary campaigner at her side.

From the beginning, Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's chief strategist, bet that women would propel Clinton to victory. Though Penn has taken a lot of flak for this statement, it would seem a solid prediction. In the New Hampshire Democratic primary, Clinton scored 17 points higher with women than she did with men. And exit polls in Nevada showed that Clinton won the backing of 51 percent of women voters, while Obama took about 38 percent. More important, in Nevada, Hillary's support among women was large enough to offset Obama's support among men, which gave her the popular vote.

Were women just waiting for a viable female candidate to form a bloc?

12. More Sense Than Sensibility

SAMUEL L. POPKIN, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who has worked as a consultant to political campaigns, maintains that unless voters know how government works, they can't read the cues about their legislators' intentions and priorities and rely on ''estimates of personal character instead of their attitudes about parties and issues.''

Of course, recent work, like that of Drew Westen, a psychologist and the author of ''The Political Brain,'' suggests that voters are more driven by their emotions than by any informed summing-up of their interests. (Westen's brain studies, incidentally, were done on men.) But even if voters act, as Westen says, on their feelings toward their party and its candidate more than on their understanding of the issues, they can't begin to form those feelings if they don't know something about the parties, candidates and issues. As Popkin has noted, a party is really just shorthand for a series of issue positions -- you love your party because it stands for what you stand for.

So, if women as a group know less, does that mean they are more or less emotional when it comes to voting? Perhaps there's another way to pose the question. Maybe, as Ann Lewis, the director of women's outreach for the Clinton campaign, told me recently, it's that men are the emotional ones, ''more likely to get swept away in abstract ideas and symbolism, '' and that women are simply more practical. ''They may not frame their decisions in terms of policy or party positions -- not use legislative jargon -- but they know what's in their family's interest,'' she said.

Marion Just, a political science professor at Wellesley who worked on the Kennedy School's Shorenstein report, agrees. She characterizes the female agenda as focusing mainly on ''family, education, things that affect the household budget, health care.'' Which today, she adds, also means war and peace. Similarly, Page Gardner told me that for her single-women constituents, it's ''all about economic opportunity -- health, education for their children, wages, energy costs.''

13. It Does Take a Village

''I UNDERSTOOD the networks for women's issues -- Emily's List, breast cancer,'' Ann Lewis also told me, explaining her outreach work. ''Women naturally think of working with other women in network form, talking to each other about what's important.'' The women's outreach for Hillary started with the legendary Clinton Rolodex -- Friends of Hillary -- in Washington, in New York, in Arkansas, in Chicago. Once Clinton received endorsements from female elected state officials, the network spread to the endorsers' networks. ''In my experience, all elected women at the state level have a network,'' Lewis observed, ''and they are still in touch. Our campaign talks to the women who are already engaged, and then we encourage them to reach out to the ones who are less engaged.''

''My goal, on Day 1,'' Lewis went on to say, ''was to have 100 women e-mailing 100 e-mails'' to their social networks, soliciting support for the candidate. The campaign has also focused on the issues they thought would attract women's support, starting with events around Equal Pay Day last spring. ''The polling confirms what common sense will tell you,'' Lewis said. ''Economics, health care, education, their own retirement.''

14. Or a Cybervillage

THE OBAMA campaign has also identified a woman-to-woman strategy. In addition to recruiting women through field offices, the Obama campaign signed up women on its Web site, creating ''a 20,000-woman network.'' Becky Carroll, the 36-year-old national director of Women for Obama, says that that's the most important part of how they reach out to women, but that Women for Obama is not confined to traditional networking. They have ''girls' nights out'' where ''young, professional women host cocktail parties'' and book clubs around Obama's book ''The Audacity of Hope.'' Carroll also speaks proudly of using ''new media in a very important way -- a really aggressive outreach through our own blog, crossposts on hundreds of other blogs, a campaign newsletter.'' As a result, Carroll says, women have formed a ''grass-roots movement,'' doing things on their own initiative.

Carroll's strategy has been to use the Internet to have voters hear directly from the Obama campaign. Certainly Obama's oratorical skill is a vivid reminder of the role of rhetoric to inspire political commitment, and he has done extremely well with young women voters, those most likely to be wired.

15. The Political Is Personal

IN HIS essay ''Federalist No. 10,'' James Madison worried that small republics, where politics are conducted face to face, were necessarily unstable. The constitution solved this problem by expanding the scope of representative government so that interests would be diluted. The framework turned out to be quite functional for an expanding land-based empire with a diverse population. But the system always rested on the assumption that people would work to represent their interests. The aversion of many women to big-sphere politics would seem to weaken the system and ensure that their interests will be muffled.

Yet what Samuel Popkin, the political scientist at U.C., San Diego, describes as an emphasis on personality versus issues, Page Gardner frames as marginalized citizens anxiously trying to figure out how to play the political game to get what they need -- a very conventional political behavior. No less a figure than Carol Gilligan, the feminist scholar who first posited that women express themselves in a different voice, reminded me that she never said a woman's tendency to value relational connections excluded the self. ''Coming forward with their own voices is key to citizenship in a democratic republic,'' Gilligan told me. ''Women are using their emotional intelligence and relational intelligence to read the biographies to figure out if this is a trustworthy person.''

And when women do come forward, they alter the political landscape. Scott Keeter, of the Pew organization, and Michael Delli Carpini, of the University of Pennsylvania, found that as knowledge increases, ''both single and married men become slightly more conservative, while married women move slightly in the liberal direction and single women become quite a bit more liberal.'' These changes lead to a clear gender and marriage gap on domestic-welfare issues. As Keeter and Carpini concluded in their study: ''A fully informed citizenry would have collective consequences, resulting in a public-opinion environment that is more ideologically diverse and slightly more liberal.'' It may happen sooner than we think. According to Women's Voices Women Vote, the single-female-voter demographic shifted 32 points in the five days between Iowa and New Hampshire. As their advocate Page Gardner says: ''You'd better be paying attention. Because they're up for grabs.''

16. By the Numbers

SINCE 1964, more women have voted than men have, and since 1980, they have voted at higher percentages: 54 percent of voters in the 2004 presidential election were female. If women care less about politics than men do, why do they bother? In one recent study, women said that they vote to protect their interest. Whereas men said they vote because they enjoy politics. To a campaign strategist, the female vote -- if you can get it -- must look like the Chinese market does to an entrepreneur. Only a modest percentage has to want your product, and you'll succeed beyond your wildest dreams.

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