oa Het politieke wordt persoonlijk

The political becomes personal. Gender representations of cabinet members in Dutch newspapers and weeklies, 1973-1982

‘The office of cabinet minister is not for women’, wrote Volkskrant journalist Martin de Ruyter in 1974. This article examines interviews with female and male politicians from the cabinets Den Uyl (1973-1977), Van Agt I (1977-1981), and Van Agt II (1981-1982). First, it describes how cabinet members used self-fashioning to forge their public personas. Second, it shows what journalists tried to accomplish with these interviews. Finally, it explores the effect of this divergence between the goals of politicians and of journalists. Despite more open communication by politicians, more women in politics, and against the background of the second wave of feminism, the result was gender-stereotyping and sexist descriptions of female cabinet members by journalists both left- and right-wing, male and female.