Perhaps Nancy Pelosi, the first Speaker of the House to wear Armani suits with real pearls in public, just doesn't really think highly of women.  Framed by her grandchildren to really, really emphasize her grandmother/mother feminine family credentials, she boasted that now women had really crashed through the marble ceiling.  Well perhaps she injured her brain tucked so neatly under that flawless brown hair in that nasty crash. Carol Platt Liebau writes

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Really? Prior to Pelosi's election, were women being deliberately and systematically excluded from leadership in the corridors of political power, thereby requiring the shattering of obstacles maliciously put in place by men? Given the prominence of a number of women in Washington - ranging from Hillary Rodham Clinton to Elizabeth Dole to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to political consultants like Donna Brazile and Mary Matalin - such an assertion seems like something of a stretch. What's more, it's difficult to see how the fact that a woman has been elected Speaker of the House marks the lifting of a heavy yoke of oppression for all American women - especially when it's impossible to point to any meaningful repression being visited upon them in the first place (unless, of course, one counts Jane Harman, who -- in a significant breach of feminist sisterhood -- has been passed over by Pelosi for chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee)...

it's hard to identify any significant, systemic barriers that a San Francisco multimillionaire, raised as the daughter of Baltimore's mayor, has overcome in order to rise to power - as women might have, say, a century or more ago.

She won because of her hard work, her fundraising, her long tenure in the House and her political skills -- plus her ability to garner more support than the well-qualified man who had run against her. In other words, she won her post in the same way and for the same reasons any man would have. Her sex was simply incidental -- as it should have been....

It demonstrates that even Democrats are occasionally willing to do what other Americans do on a regular basis: Support the person they believe is best for a particular job - regardless of gender.