I'm the Ice Box. Ice Box doesn't like boys!

Becky "The Ice Box" O'Shea

What can be said about the overwhelming disproportion that exists between women in positions of governmental power and the failure to live to up to the American standard of being pretty?  Dignitaries like Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Rodham Clinton have single-handendly created a style of their own; meshing the physical attributes of being a woman with the manliness of being a man.  Using their gender to their advantage, both woman have shown the world that females can (and will continue to) climb the rope of success faster than the criminals did in Home Alone 2 when Kevin McCallister lit the rope on fire.


In the current political climate we see this new breed of go-getter woman appearing more and more.  Women who can't quite be compared to a Cosmopolitan cover girl are plundering the political villages to acquire every prominent role they can get their hands on.  Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Representative Nancy Pelosi have become household names over the past ten years.  Swooping in on the wings of the feminist movement, these women were elected and appointed to positions that a less qualified man would have received as little as four decades ago.  They stand as a monument to women everywhere.  Beacons of hope cutting through the London fog of testosterone that shuts down the harbors of our political system.


However, leaving the pop culture anomaly Sarah Palin aside to wrestle a moose on her reality show, what about the woman who wants it all?  Is it possible to command the power of Secretary of State, House Representative, or Supreme Court Justice, and still turn heads in a cocktail dress?  Becky O'Shea has shown us that this is entirely possible.  


Daughter to a small town gas station owner played by Rick Moranis in Warner Brothers' 1994 classic, The Little Giants, Becky "The Ice Box" O'Shea was too exemplary a football player to be taken seriously by her peers as a "little girl" but to much of a girl to be taken seriously as a football player.  Throughout the movie, we see Becky battle with maintaining the tough appearance she had honed so well with liking boys, being girly, and still doing all the things that are traditionally reserved for men.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Because I feel like nobody should be denied the experience of witnessing this cinematic masterpiece I won't give the plot away.  In the end, though, Becky struts out onto the field to face her team's rival squad, after much soul searching, combining the yin and yang in her life that she tried so hard to compartmentalize.  Donning a helmet, shoulder pads, and a cheerleading skirt, Becky won both the battle within and, eventually, the game.  It is true that The Little Giants was made in the mid-90s and crashed right in the midst of a media feminist overhaul, but this movie speaks on such higher levels than cross-cutting the gender gap to sell more tickets.  The Ice Box can show us that women of power can have it all.  Of course there will be naysayers who say that a woman should remain in the kitchen.  Thankfully, those relics are dying along with the floppy disk, car phone, and VCR.  The female political juggernauts today may not ever receive an endorsement deal from Maybelline, but they are flirting with the line of shoulder pads and cheer skirts.  The media does care about what Secretary of State Clinton wore to her daughter's wedding and what Justice Kagan showed up to her questioning in.


These are, sadly, issues that do nothing for these women's political stature, but they do so much more for the generations ahead of them.  In the past, these issues were reserved for first ladies.  But today, we can see that there is a desire amongst the American population to know not only what decision the Supreme Court will take on a hot-button issue, but what heels Justice Sotomayor wore to court that day.  Instead of looking at this as a losing battle, take a page from Becky "The Ice Box".  If the public yearns to know what label you're wearing to a peace summit, it isn't because you're setting women back 300 years, it's because you've finally blurred the lines between facemasks and pom-poms.