IN THE SPRING of 2013, I met Stephanie Schriock, the president of EMILY’s List, the powerful political action committee that elects pro-choice Democratic women, the week before EMILY’s List launched its first salvo in the 2016 campaign. Schriock is tall, with an athletic physique, a blond bob, a wide smile, and the easygoing manner of a native of the Mountain West. Like many of the youngish women at the forefront of the new push for women’s political leadership, Schriock did not come up through the feminist movement. Rather, she attributes her passion for politics to her family’s progressive values and the community where she grew up, the labor union, copper-mining town of Butte, Montana, where Democrats were strong and visible in the community. By junior high she was a political junkie. After running for student body president and losing several times, she figured out how to organize an untapped pool of voters. “I realized that I could just focus my entire campaign on the freshman and sophomores, because the entire school voted. Then I got the younger sister of one of my opponents to endorse me—she was a freshman, she was great! And I won.”
Over the years, Schriock has finely honed that youthful intuition into strategic brilliance about how to win elections for other people. Before turning thirty-five, Schriock had managed and won two long-shot Senate campaigns, one for a comedian and one for a guy who described himself as a dirt farmer. (Respectively, Minnesota senator Al Franken and Montana senator Jon Tester.) A senior Clinton campaign veteran once described her as “spectacular, one of the best campaign managers I’ve ever worked with”—a view several Washington insiders expressed to me unprompted. Coming off huge success in the 2012 election, at forty years old Schriock had already appeared on many lists of America’s most influential women in politics. As 2016 heated up, she was rumored to be on the short list to lead Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Before Schriock took over at EMILY’s List in 2010, she had been cycling back and forth between campaign management and her job as Senator Tester’s chief of staff. A senator’s chief of staff is one of the most powerful positions in American government, just short of serving in high office itself. Leaving that influential perch to run a women’s organization is not on its face a power move.
When I asked Schriock why she gave it up to come to EMILY’s List, she recalled a few experiences at the top level of campaigns where she had been struck by the absence of women. “I really felt, and still do, that as a woman I can do anything I want to do. My folks made it clear that I could, and they gave me a set of values to use as a compass—which is why I’m a strong Democrat, I can thank my parents for that,” she said. “I felt like I was growing up in an era, not so different from how the millennial generation feels now, where everything was going to be equalized. It wasn’t until I got a little bit older that I realized that there are still fights to be won and a lot of glass ceilings that need to be crashed through.”
Undoubtedly Schriock was chagrined to observe how few women were seated at the table of power. But a full answer to why she came to EMILY’s List would likely include the fact that the group, from its founding in a basement by twenty-five second-wave feminists, had grown into one of the powerhouses of the Democratic Party.
THE YEAR WAS 1982. Ronald Reagan was president. In June, the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the single most important goal of political feminists, went down to defeat. That same month, when Argentina invaded the British-controlled Falkland Islands—a sparsely populated, desolate, oil-rich island chain 300 miles off Argentina’s coast—Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first woman prime minister, ordered British warships to the scene. After more than 1,000 casualties on both sides, Argentina retreated. Since a hostile Soviet journalist had called Thatcher the “Iron Lady,” the prime minister had relished the moniker; the Falklands War proved to the world it was no mere talking point.
At the time, nine out of ten members of Congress were white men. One woman, Nancy Kassebaum, was a United States senator—her father had been the GOP’s 1936 presidential nominee against Franklin D. Roosevelt. In late fall, on the eve of the midterm elections, polls in the Missouri U.S. Senate race showed Democratic state senator Harriett Woods in striking distance of defeating the incumbent Republican. But Woods had nearly run out of campaign funds.
“So Harriet Woods came to Washington, DC, looking for $50,000 for a week of television in Missouri,” Schriock said. “She went to the typical places you would go in the early ‘80s—the labor unions, the party caucuses, the party leaders. And they all said no. They basically said, ‘Women can’t win.’ And they let her run out of money.” Woods narrowly lost. “There was a group of women here led by Ellen Malcolm who were just livid at what happened. But they realized that they didn’t have a network to help fill that hole either.”
In 1983, Malcolm gathered some of her friends together to strategize about how to bust through the Senate’s glass ceiling. They faced a Catch-22: Money was the measure of a candidate’s viability, but campaign donations flowed only to those who looked like winners. Malcolm had been press secretary for the National Women’s Political Caucus, and she had a lot of contacts in the feminist movement. There were plenty of women who were giving money to feminist causes, but they were not contributing to women candidates. The group agreed that women needed funds early in their campaigns to, in Malcolm’s words, “convince these old boys that they could win.” They experimented informally for the 1984 cycle, and then in 1985, Malcolm realized that if they wanted to elect more women, they needed to get serious about building a fund-raising machine.
Every good tale includes an origin story, and the story of EMILY’s List begins one night in 1985 in Malcolm’s basement. Malcolm invited twenty-five friends from the women’s movement to her house in Washington and told them to bring their Rolodexes. That night they sent 450 women a letter with two requests: join EMILY’s List and donate $100 directly to two women candidates of their choice. In effect, they were bundling money to candidates. Campaign donations did not pass through their hands, but their handiwork was there for all—the candidates, the party, the operatives—to see. Barbara Mikulski’s 1986 election to the Senate was their first big win—EMILY’s List gave her critical support in the Democratic primary. They got themselves on the national map a few years later with Ann Richards’s successful 1990 bid for Texas governor. In 1991, when Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas was accused of sexual harassment by law professor Anita Hill, and televised hearings showed the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Joe Biden, impugning Hill in a way all too familiar to many women, EMILY’s List was there to harvest the groundswell of political will.
From the beginning, EMILY’s List set out to change these well-worn habits and decided that the fear tactics typical of movement organizing wasn’t the best way to do that. “It wasn’t one of these ‘The world is coming to an end so you should give.’ It was ‘Here’s what happens in a campaign. Here’s what candidates do with the money,’” Malcolm recalled. “We went through years of building a trust relationship with women donors. The early money strategy worked. It gave women tremendous credibility in the political world. Over the years, all those Democratic Party people—all those know-it-all employees of PACs who would decide who should get the contributions—came to believe more and more that women were credible contenders.”
Money is key, but there are many other components to a successful electoral campaign, and in the mid-1990s, EMILY’s List expanded their portfolio. They started campaign-training programs and kept people on their own staff to advise women candidates on everything from communications to strategy. Malcolm continued, “We then decided that women voters were key, not only for women but also for Democrats. We spent tens of millions of dollars on understanding what is important to women, what groups need extra motivation to get to the polls, what groups we can persuade to vote for our candidates. It has really put us at the table with the party in a very different way.”
Three decades after Harriett Woods could not raise $50,000 to run television ads, EMILY’s List is a huge operation that provokes envy in Republican women and not a small amount of pique among some progressive women’s groups. When I asked Malcolm how she felt about accusations that EMILY’s List threw its weight around by choosing winners and losers, she shot back, “I hope so!” She continued, “I think you need to be smart and strategic in where you put your resources. You can’t look at what EMILY’s List was doing in 1986 and where we are now and not realize that we’ve changed dramatically in our ability to find and help women become credible candidates. In the old days, we used to look for credible candidates. Now we make them credible.”
In 2010, after twenty-five years as EMILY’s List president, Malcolm passed the torch to Schriock. The organization was ready for a generational change, to keep up with the new nature of campaigns in an age of social media and data mining, as well as to expand its membership beyond the second-wave feminists who had remained the group’s stalwart supporters. In the 2012 election, under Schriock’s leadership, EMILY’s List elected a record number of women to the Senate and was rated one of the top five most effective political action committees by the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation. As EMILY’s List marked its 30th anniversary in 2015, it could take credit for electing 600 Democratic women, including ten governors, nineteen senators, and more than 100 U.S. representatives. In her five years at its head Schriock had tripled the membership once, and then again, to more than 3 million.
Clearly, electing a woman president was the next frontier. And given the news cycle and the voraciousness of the political press, that challenge began the day Barack Obama began his second and last term in office. “Everyone in the press decided they should start talking about the 2016 presidential election immediately after the 2012 election,” Schriock recalled, in an amused yet exasperated tone. “We were seeing all of these stories being written—of course about Secretary Clinton—but then a long list of Democratic men. We at EMILY’s List said, ‘Wait a second, if you’re going to give us a list of folks that includes Governor Martin O’Malley and Governor Andrew Cuomo, we’re going to give you a list that includes Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Secretary Janet Napolitano and Senator Amy Klobuchar.’” (Elizabeth Warren, whom Schriock had encouraged to run for the Senate, had only just taken office and was not much on anyone’s radar yet.)
There was really no real news to feed the outsized demand. Clinton had zero incentive to announce her candidacy so early. Any woman who might have considered a presidential run was waiting on Clinton’s decision. (And in case anyone was loath to wait, Senator Barbara Boxer organized a private letter to Clinton from all the Democratic women senators expressing their heartfelt support for her to be the first woman president and their party’s 2016 standard-bearer. Unsurprisingly, the letter quickly leaked to the press.
But if you’re not on top of the message, the message gets on top of you. So EMILY’s List conducted polling about women’s leadership, signed up respected spokeswomen like Senator Claire McCaskill and Governor Jennifer Granholm, made a cute video of young girls talking about their hopes for a woman president, and invited the media to cover their new “Madam President” campaign. Eighteen months later, Schriock was justifiably pleased with how they had changed the conversation. “We succeeded in awakening the press, and thus the country, to the great pipeline of women who should be considered.” She added, “When we think about potential Democratic women candidates for the presidency, Hillary Clinton stands above everyone. Period. Forget gender. She stands alone. But when we think about this, we don’t just think about the first woman president. We see a pipeline for the second, third, and fourth.”
“IN MY MIND, EMILY’S List is, if you will, the shadow campaign for the Democrat Party,” Maria Cino, deputy chairwoman of the Republican National Committee (RNC) during the 2004 presidential election, told me. In 2011, Cino had been a top contender for chair of the RNC; after seven rounds of balloting, she came in third to Reince Priebus, the current RNC chairman.
“EMILY’s List has done a terrific job. It will be the gold standard for many, many decades to come,” Cino continued. “They have put their money where their mouth is and they have built almost a separate party organization. If you look, they do all the things that a party does—recruiting candidates, helping them staff up, fund-raising. They’ve established a very, very strong financial network to be able to be very competitive. It’s as strong, I think, as the Democratic Party.”
And the cornerstone of that infrastructure is money. To state the obvious, political campaigns in America are astronomically expensive, especially after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.
Candace Straight, a pioneering woman in investment banking and a self-described mainstream Republican, is something of an evangelist for women to step up on the money side of politics. “I don’t mind asking for money. I never had a problem with it,” she told me. “Because if you care about politics, that’s what you’ve gotta do. You’ve gotta raise money for candidates if you believe in them. It comes easy if you do.”
Straight comes to political activism naturally. “I believe in public service. That was my grandmother—she believed in public service. To her, running for town council was serving the public. I believe women want to serve the public. I think men see it as a career move and an opportunity for power. My investments in politics have always been in candidates I’ve believed in.” She has been a big champion of several New Jersey Republicans, such as former governor Christine Todd Whitman and current governor Chris Christie, and in 2008 she was a bundler for John McCain. (Federal election law limits the amount an individual can contribute to a candidate. A bundler is someone who solicits donations from others and yet is typically given credit by the candidate for bringing in that total haul. The Center for Responsive Politics’ database, OpenSecrets.org, lists bundlers for all federal candidates.)
As EMILY’s List started to rise on the Democratic side, Straight and others decided Republicans needed their own vehicle to raise money from women for women. “I am pro-choice. I would never ever make that decision for another woman—that’s the reason I’m pro-choice. But it’s not a litmus test for me per se on whether I will vote or support a candidate,” Straight explained, as she recalled how they went about creating their own PAC. “I asked some people in Washington if we should be a group that had no litmus test on anything but being a Republican. I remember Linda DiVall [a leading Republican pollster] said to me, ‘Well, how can you raise more money?’ And I said, ‘In New York, I’m confident I can raise more money with a litmus test than without a litmus test.’ So she said, ‘Go for raising more money.’”
In 1992, Straight and others founded the WISH List, a PAC that supported Republican women candidates who met their pro-choice litmus test. (Straight emphasized that, personally, she also supports pro-life Republicans.) Among their early successes were New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman (1993), Maine senator Olympia Snowe (1994), and Maine senator Susan Collins (1996).
Straight, like many women candidates and donors I talked to, observed that women are less acculturated to donating money and, when they do give, have different motives than men. “Primarily as a fund-raiser in the Republican Party, you’re asking men more than women. I think women are more cause-oriented. They’ll give because somebody is really good on the environment. Or they’ll give to them because they’re pro-choice or pro-life—I mean, depending on their position. I think men are still more power-oriented. They give more because they’re in the business of political giving and they see it as part of their business life. Women, I don’t think, see it quite that way. Now, I’m not saying that about women CEOs—if I was a CEO of a high-tech company in Silicon Valley and I want change as it relates to immigration and things like that, I’m sure I’m going to be seeing it that way. But your average American woman I don’t think sees politics as something that they want to give money to.”
This is not a Republican problem. It is a woman problem. Women simply do not donate to political candidates at anywhere near the level men do. Bettina Duval, a Democrat, a major donor, and the founder of the CaliforniaLIST (modeled on EMILY’s List), characterized women’s relationship to money and politics in almost exactly the same terms as Straight. “Men understand the relationship. They just get it: ‘You give money, I give money. You give to my candidate and I’ll support yours, within reason.’ Most of my social friends don’t even contemplate giving political money, at all,” she said. “In my world, early money is always small donors. One hundred to two hundred dollars, up to one thousand. But what happens now more than ever is that independent expenditure groups come in. That’s where the money is. Progressives do have an argument that this is really ugly. But at the same time, this is the way the game is now played. It is what it is. If you want to win, you’ve got to play the game. Period. You just have to raise money.”
AND YET THE Republican Party does have a woman problem. A minority of American women identify as Republicans; a minority of women nationally vote for Republican candidates in federal elections; a minority of women-elected officials at the local, state, and federal level are Republicans. By every measure, as those who follow American politics closely know, the Republican Party is behind with women.
One of the Republicans who has been most committed to changing that is Wilma Goldstein, retired now from a five-decade-long career as a Republican operative, pollster, and RNC official. Goldstein got her start in Republican politics in the 1960s in Flint, Michigan, fighting to protect black civil rights against the right-wing John Birchers—many of them women—who were vying for control over the state party. (The “Birchettes” wouldn’t talk to her even years later. “I thought it was wonderfully amusing and I don’t like the Tea Party wackos any better today,” Goldstein told me.) Goldstein was one of the women, with veteran Republican pollster Linda DiVall, who tried to impress on Reagan-era Republicans that they should pay attention to the gender gap. Snowe told me that when she first came to DC looking for party support for her first national run in the late 1970s, Goldstein helped introduce her to party leaders. “Everybody told me she was a person I had to know,” Snowe said. “Wilma was a great guide and mentor. She knew everybody in the Republican Party establishment.”
Like many of the women behind the scenes inside the Beltway, Goldstein’s social circle is bipartisan. That has given her an opportunity to observe the different ways Democrats and Republicans have brought women into the inner circles of party leadership. One evening many years ago, when a group of Democratic and Republican operatives were hanging out at her house, Goldstein recalled, “One Democrat observed that they had these titles like, ‘woman’s consultant on political issues to Senator Kennedy or Senator Harkin,’ or something similar. There was always some qualifying ‘woman’ thing in their title. We didn’t have those. I was director of survey research. My friend was director of the field office. Any guy could have filled those positions. The Democrats noticed that and said, ‘We give the information, but then we don’t sit in the room when the decisions are made. So we don’t really know what’s going on. Are you telling us that you do?’ One of my friends jokingly said, ‘Well, you might be interested in knowing that Wilma and Nancy and I are going to leave here, and we’re going to my house where three of the field office guys are cooking our dinner!’” In other words, Goldstein concluded, “They pointed out that they had titles but we had power.”
Cino, like every Republican woman I spoke to about the subject, hoped to see more Republican women in elected office. And like many other political operatives and academics alike, she believed the main reason for women’s underrepresentation was that not enough women ran. She thought that an entity where you could target more money for women, like EMILY’s List did for Democrats, would be good for her party. But her caveats about women running for office were both sensible and revealing. “Where I might be different—maybe because I’m a party person—is that we shouldn’t push every woman. I don’t care whether it’s a Democrat or Republican, just like we shouldn’t push every man,” she said, laughing. “There has to be viability. The person has to be a good fit.”
And when considering potential women candidates, she preferred people who had prior experience working behind the scenes in politics. “They come a little bit more qualified. They’re not all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. It’s great to get the job. But what happens when the dog catches the car?”
Goldstein’s story illustrates a broader paradox. In some ways, individual women rose faster and higher in the GOP. The first woman elected to the Senate, the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court, the first woman to make a serious presidential bid, and the first woman to lead the White House speech-writing office were all Republicans. In today’s GOP, many women hold powerful positions, and there are many Republican women in elected office.
And yet Republican women have not formed a cohesive and influential pressure group—either inside the party or outside the government. Among GOP women, as we’ll see in chapter 6, there is significant ambivalence about women acting collectively to achieve the goal of gender parity in politics. The key to understanding why that might be the case, I am convinced, is to acknowledge that many of them would view Albright’s dictum—”There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other”—as utter nonsense.
“POLITICAL POWER IN DC has a formula. There are groups that can elect people, that can cause political pain when they’re in office, and that can un-elect people. Things get done because people make them happen,” Tara McGuinness, a senior executive at the Center for American Progress (CAP), said. (Shortly after we spoke McGuinness went to work in the Obama White House on implementing the Affordable Care Act.) McGuinness believed that women had mastered some of the plays in the political playbook, such as becoming successful candidates, but that they fell short on others. “I don’t think you could find a member of Congress who says, ‘I’m worried when I don’t vote for an update of Family and Medical Leave Act. No one’s going to cut off my money or run an ad attacking me for being anti-family.’ There are some missing pieces of the political architecture on the issues that matter to women.”
Soon after his election to the presidency, in the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt legendarily told a group of advocates lobbying him for their cause, “I agree with you. I want to do it. Now make me do it.” Every democratic advance in America, from the end of slavery to the end of child labor to the end of Jim Crow, from women’s suffrage to the Americans with Disabilities Act, happened because ordinary men and women made politicians act. The American ship of state does not shift course unless pushed. The founding fathers designed the system to make change difficult. Change happens only when people outside the government, acting together through social movements or interest groups or political parties, apply strategic pressure.
McGuinness saw signs that women were learning the formula and crafting the missing pieces. “I think some of the smartest strategists really see that change is not made in a one-size solution. You need women champions in Congress and you need some edgy, activist organizations. You need rank and file boots on the ground and you need traditional organizations working with a common set of goals. And there are really a lot of the pieces in place now.” The emergence of a new generation of women leaders gave McGuinness hope. “There are just so many great young women leaders right now who are taking the helm of organizations and anchoring some new big ideas,” she continued. “You’ve gone from John Podesta to Neera Tanden at CAP, from Malcolm to Schriock at EMILY’s List, from Nancy Keenan to Ilyse Hogue at NARAL. You have the first woman president of a major union, with Mary Kay Henry at SEIU. I don’t want to sound Pollyannaish about it, but it feels different and exciting to watch and be a part of.”
NARAL Pro-Choice America, founded in 1969, is the nation’s oldest abortion rights organization and was a leader in the early campaigns to win the legal right to abortion. I met Ilyse Hogue, the organization’s new president, at her corner office a couple of months before the 2014 midterm elections. Hogue, in her midforties with auburn hair, a mischievous glint in her eyes, and a confident stride, describes herself as a proud Texan and a total extrovert. The whiteboard in her office is covered in scribblings and there are randomly placed stacks of paper and books. But you get the impression Hogue is oblivious to the nondescript ‘90s decor of her office. There are just too many fires to put out and too many opportunities to mine.
“I never thought I would end up sitting here,” Hogue told me. That was in part because, like her colleague and friend Schriock, Hogue was not part of the feminist movement during most of her career. She attributes her present circumstance, leading a woman’s organization, to a series of epiphanies. “My degree is in ecology. I’m an advocate at heart. The first part of my career was all international work, where environmental integrity met human rights, and I loved it. I loved it,” Hogue said. Her job took her to Papua New Guinea and Latin America, among other places. “One of the things I found was that anywhere we were facilitating negotiations between corporations and communities, where women were empowered the negotiations went better and tended to stick more. So I thought, that’s really interesting.”
After the 2004 election, Hogue went to work for MoveOn, the online organizing community that was pivotal in revitalizing the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. “One of the things we found at MoveOn,” she continued, “was that disproportionately our best volunteers, our most dedicated members were women. People say, ‘Oh, that’s because they have time.’ No, that was not true. They were working women who had a deep investment in making a difference. Again, that was interesting for me.” She was at MoveOn, essentially working as the group’s top congressional liaison, during the passage of the Affordable Care Act. “The health care fight was a real eye-opener about how the progressive community had not fully integrated an understanding of what was required to bring women to full equality in the bill,” she continued. And then in the 2012 election, women and women’s access to contraception and abortion took center stage.
“There was all this awareness that women voters made the difference, and yet I could foresee that it was not going to result right away in substantial policy change,” Hogue said. So when NARAL approached Hogue, when they were looking for a new leader to engage millennials after Nancy Keenan decided to retire, Hogue was surprised. But, she thought, let me see what they think about my ideas. She stepped into the post in 2013.
Not only was Hogue concerned that women weren’t going to capitalize on their electoral clout, but she was also convinced that the reproductive rights movement had ceded too much ground to their opponents. She wanted to go at the issue more directly. Hogue explained, “If we lean into our values and say what we mean—specifically, say what we mean around abortion access—we can win more races than we’re winning right now. When we win by talking about our issues, then we have more clout to follow through on the policy components of it.”
And to make real progress, they would have to flex some political muscle.
IN 2013, PRESIDENT Obama nominated Georgia state judge Michael P. Boggs to a lifetime appointment on the federal bench, a position that requires Senate confirmation. When Boggs was a state legislator, he had voted to maintain the Confederate flag as part of the Georgia state flag and to ban same-sex marriage. Not only was he pro-life, he had also voted to post on the Internet the home addresses of doctors and nurses who provided abortions.
Hogue decided NARAL was going to block his confirmation. “It was lonely. A lot of people did not want to jump on this campaign,” she said. If you haven’t heard of Boggs, you aren’t alone. Few people pay attention to judicial appointments below the Supreme Court level, and that was exactly the problem. Hogue continued, “We looked and couldn’t find a time when we had won something like this. Because the president didn’t have a movement at his back, he was going to do what any good negotiator would do, and say, ‘I’ll take four good judges for your two bad ones.’”
Civil rights and women’s groups thought Boggs would be terrible, but they did not want to pick a public fight with Obama over a cause they viewed as unwinnable. Hogue had no confidence that the typical business-as-usual below-the-radar lobbying would work. “We couldn’t put millions of women’s fates in his hands,” she said. “But it was also time to draw a line in the sand. The other side was running a real campaign to say abortion can’t be a litmus test. We went along with it for decades and this is what got us the judicial system we have.”
So NARAL publicly called on the Senate to reject Boggs’s confirmation and spearheaded a public opposition campaign by a diverse array of forty-two organizations, including the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, and other women’s health groups like Planned Parenthood. They used all the tools in the advocate’s arsenal. They reached out to local activists and the press in Georgia and then spread the news about Boggs’s views nationally. They organized a social media campaign, as well as face-to-face voter delegations to senators. Forty thousand NARAL members contacted members of Congress to express their opposition. The coalition sent a letter to the president and Senate Judiciary Committee members, which they also released to the news media. “We made sure that the story was being told through the political press that covers the judiciary, not just through the reproductive rights press,” Hogue explained. “That was critically important.”
As the Senate committee hearings commenced, NARAL kept a running tally on what each senator said and how it looked like they would vote. “There was a point when Sheldon Whitehouse said he might vote for Boggs. He heard from a lot of people in his state and reversed himself within twenty-four hours,” Hogue recalled. She was impressed to see Democratic senators asking Boggs hard questions and actually using the word abortion. “They were emboldened by the fact that they had heard from people all over the country and from us.” The 113th Senate adjourned without voting to confirm Boggs, and Obama declined to renominate him.
It was a textbook case of how the real decisions in American politics get made.
“We’ve absorbed this idea that if we don’t talk about abortion, the other side will shut up and go away. We’ve seen how that has played out,” Hogue continued. Since 2010, states had enacted almost 300 measures restricting access to birth control and abortion. “If we’re afraid to be the ones who say we are here to protect and expand access to abortion because it is fundamental to women’s human rights, who do we expect to say that? Now I would like to change people’s hearts and minds and I work every day to do that. But I’m also a political pragmatist. So my short-term goal is to convince people that it is bad political strategy to buy into the opposition’s narrative.”
“WHEN I BECAME president of Center for American Progress, I realized that at a point in my career when it mattered the most about whether I was going to move up, I just happened to win the boss lottery,” Neera Tanden said laughing. “I was very lucky. But the problem with American policy for families, and particularly for women, is that’s like all we have—you better win the boss lottery or you’re screwed.”
The boss Tanden was talking about was Hillary Clinton. Before becoming the first woman president of the nation’s leading progressive think tank, the Center for American Progress (CAP), Tanden had served as Clinton’s top domestic policy aide. When she was twenty-seven, Tanden was hired right out of law school to work on policy in President Bill Clinton’s administration, and she had been assigned to the First Lady’s office. From there Tanden joined Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, then became her Senate legislative director and rose to become policy director on the 2008 presidential campaign. (Tanden was one of the few people from the Clinton ‘08 team who moved into a top position in the Obama ‘08 campaign.) Tanden took the helm at CAP in 2013, after CAP’s founder and Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff John Podesta stepped down. Dark-haired and just clearing five feet in heels, Tanden is quick-witted and intense. Speaking in a rapid clip and dropping mild obscenities here and there, she is blunt and self-revealing in one-on-one conversation. And much like her former boss, she is more calibrated in public.
We had been discussing CAP’s new focus under her watch on women’s participation and leadership when the conversation turned to her own experience juggling work and family. “We’re just asking too much of families to actually achieve our goal of true equality. We have fewer women leaders of business and politics because they’re not moving up in the same way, because a million times a day they make a choice, where they have to offset their career aspiration to be a good parent,” Tanden said. “I remember when I was pregnant with my daughter, my first child, and I was kind of freaked out because, what am I going to do? I wasn’t working for Hillary at the time, but she found out I was pregnant and called me. She said, ‘People do this. It’s going to be okay.’ My husband is an artist, and she was like, ‘Ben’s an artist, he can be more flexible. Just make him understand that he can be more flexible.’”
Tanden and her husband managed, and she was soon back in Clinton’s Senate office as the legislative director. Clinton gave her flexibility to leave the office to have dinner with her kids, put them to bed, and then finish her work. By the time the 2008 presidential campaign rolled around, Tanden had a toddler and a preschooler. Still, like any working mother, Tanden faced stark choices, moments when being a good parent clashed with the demands of what she described as an intense and stressful job. She recalled the time a debate prep session was scheduled for the same morning as her daughter’s pre-K graduation. Tanden was in charge but she decided that her deputy would handle the session with Clinton. “Did I have a fear about my career prospects having handed it over? I did. It was the beginning of the campaign when you’re still proving yourself to your colleagues. I mean, I knew Hillary really well, so I wasn’t super freaked out,” she told me. Hillary found out about the graduation and rescheduled the session so Tanden could lead it. “She’s fantastic. But it’s also, from an economic perspective, she had invested in my human capital. Hillary knew that I knew her policy choices, so it made more sense for her. But I’ve worked in male situations and, I’ll just say, no one is ever accommodating. They just don’t think that way!”
In 1997 when Tanden had been assigned to the First Lady’s policy office in the West Wing, she was inducted into a close-knit group, mostly made up of women. Prior to Clinton, First Ladies had always worked out of the East Wing of the White House, from where they attended to social and ceremonial duties. (POTUS is the head of government and the head of state and in the latter capacity has duties similar to those performed by kings and queens in other nations.) Hillary Clinton was the first to have a West Wing office. And it was out of this office that Clinton, her chiefs of staff Maggie Williams and Melanne Verveer, and a staff of wonkish, workaholic women launched a series of policy initiatives. True, there was the failed health care reform effort, but also, once the dust settled, there was the successful push to provide health insurance to poor children, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), and, as we’ll see later, Clinton’s global campaign on behalf of women’s rights.
One day Clinton overheard her scheduler answer the phone, “Hillaryland.” She loved it, and the moniker stuck. “We were our own little subculture within the White House,” Clinton wrote in her memoir Living History. Karen Finney, who worked for Bill Clinton and then moved into Hillary’s office, described the atmosphere to me. “I was twenty-five years old. It was 1993. Here the First Lady of the United States says, ‘I believe that you can do this job.’ In terms of being empowered, that was like, Whoa! I think people forget that it wasn’t so common for women at that time,” Finney said. “To me it wasn’t unique—my parents are divorced and my mom has always worked—but it was still a struggle for women. It was so different to be in an environment where you were working with mostly women on Hillary’s team. Nowhere was it like that.” She laughed, “We joked about some of the token men, right?!”
At a time when American work culture was still quite buttoned up—remember, not only had Google, Facebook, and the iPhone not been invented yet, but the Internet had just opened to public access—Hillaryland was famous for throwing birthday parties and for the camaraderie and intimacy of its members. As Washington Post reporter Lois Romano described it in a 2007 profile, “Among her own staff, Clinton has cultivated a nurturing culture of collegiality and loyalty, a leadership style based in teamwork, and often favored by women, that values consensus over hierarchy. The Clinton women have a personal connection virtually nonexistent among male colleagues.” In an interview with Glamour last year, Clinton was asked how she identifies women she wants to mentor, and Clinton said, “I look for people who have raw intelligence and a great work ethic and loyalty, and I can quickly identify people who have the right ingredients.”
More often than not, however, the media treats Hillaryland in feverish tones, as some kind of nefarious, secret conspiracy of yes-women, at once all-powerful and inept. In January 2014, the New York Times Magazine cover pictured Hillary’s face—grotesquely distorted, superimposed onto a bald, giant planet—with tiny faces of her friends and aides orbiting the image, as if they had been sucked into her gravitational field. Reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, authors of a largely flattering book about Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, reached back to the shopworn insults of the Cold War era—”troika,” “cult of personality”—to make their case that Clinton “still relied on an intensely insular inner circle that prized loyalty to Hillary above all else.” Do a Lexis search on “Hillaryland” and your feed will be chockfull of sophomoric, unhinged pieces by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. The way the press portrays Hillary Clinton’s closest staff and advisers, the women and men who have remained with her from the White House to the Senate to the State Department, you would think that no man ever had gotten an assist from his fraternity brothers, his golfing buddies, or his law firm partners.
Many Hillaryland veterans are back on Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, determined to elect America’s first woman president. Finney, for instance, is a senior spokesperson and strategic communications adviser. Others, like Tanden, are remaining outside the presidential campaign. But they’re making sure Clinton’s concern for women’s opportunity is part of the core mission of the institutions they lead. Tanden has beefed up CAP’s focus on women and families, especially regarding policies to boost women’s earnings and participation in the paid workforce. “The truth is, when I became president at CAP, I realized that there was a significant gap in policy making,” Tanden told me. Paid leave for new parents is at the top of the to-do list—the United States is one of only three nations in the world that do not guarantee paid maternity leave. The others are Papua New Guinea and Suriname.
To accomplish that, Tanden knows that she has work to do to inspire voters. “I went through Hillary Clinton’s campaign in ‘08, and she had a state-based paid parental leave program. She had that program because she believed in it. It wasn’t like there was a large swath of voters demanding it from her. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God, these people are on our ass and we have to do something!’ Which was exemplified by the fact that Senator Obama didn’t talk about it in the general election, and he didn’t do anything on it for several years, right?” Tanden recalled. “So, I thought, we need more public pressure. The president’s talking about it a lot more now. We pushed the White House to have the Working Families Summit. They were like, ‘Okay, we’ll do it if you do it with us.’ We do take a little bit of credit for moving the debate in Washington. Our goal for the next couple years is to create that public demand for positive change, in the presidential cycle as well.” In short, she intended to forge the hammer that women have lacked in the political arena.
I spoke with Tanden a few months before Clinton declared her candidacy, and I asked her how she anticipated Clinton might handle the issues around family and work should she become president.
“Well, I don’t speak for her, I am a separate person,” Tanden stipulated. “Hillary hasn’t just talked the talk, she has walked the walk. I’m not saying you have to be a woman to care about them. I’m a big fan of a lot of the men who have been president. There are definitely progressive men who are better then conservative women on these policies. But I think the priority you place on them, how you treat your own staff, it matters in a myriad number of ways. You can have very well-meaning people, but unless you live this experience of being a woman—” Tanden trailed off and collected her thoughts about the idea of Hillary Clinton as America’s first woman president. “I mean, I honestly think it is going to be transformative to the kind of topics we discuss. I just honestly believe, the more I’ve been in politics and policy, the more in an almost scary way it really matters who is making the decisions.”
OVER THE LAST three decades, a new guard has been at work inside government and behind the scenes to bring women into full and equal participation in American politics.
You get a sense of how much work was required and how far women have come when you talk to Eleanor Smeal, the influential second-wave feminist leader, former president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), and founder and head of the Feminist Majority Foundation.
“In the 1960s, you were taught that women didn’t care as much about politics as men did. Politics was a male arena,” Smeal recounted. “In fact, the leading book of the time was called Political Man, written by Seymour Martin Lipset, who essentially had as his major hypothesis that it was men who mattered in politics. He interviewed no women—that was acceptable at the time. Women were not supposed to be interested in politics. They said women didn’t vote as much. When more women voted, they said they didn’t vote at the same percentage. When women voted at the same percentage, they said they only voted their husband’s pocketbook. That was the theory. Now, there was no data at all to substantiate these assertions.”
Smeal was in graduate school when Lipset’s theory reigned supreme. Later, when she was NOW’s president, Smeal looked at the polls and discovered that wherever she could disaggregate the data by gender, men and women expressed sharply different views on the issues. “You could see the difference—about a 20-point difference on sending troops abroad. On Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, there was about a 15-point difference.” She became convinced men and women had different opinions on candidates as well.
“How I proved that there was gender gap on candidates is that I went to Lou Harris, who was the dean of American pollsters, and said to him, ‘It’s my assumption that there’s a gender difference in attitudes toward Reagan.’ And he said, ‘Oh yeah, there is.’ So I said, ‘Well, would you start reporting it by gender?’ We needed a short, pithy name to report the data. We called it the gender gap and that stuck.” And that is how the gender gap was born. “We leveraged the hell out of the gender gap,” Kathy Spillar, who succeeded Smeal as the head of the Feminist Majority Foundation, told me.
“They made nothing but fun of us at first,” Smeal said. “When Reagan won, they said, ‘See, it doesn’t matter anyway!’” But Smeal, with NOW communications head Kathy Bonk and political director Molly Yard, pushed back. “We knew we had a tiger by the tail. I must have done a couple thousand interviews between 1980 and 1982 trying to sell the idea. In 1982, the gender gap elects governors. By 1992, when women’s votes elect Clinton, then everyone can see it. In reality, it’s there the whole time.”
A woman’s journey to the Oval Office had its tentative start in Eleanor Smeal’s press office, in Barbara Mikulski’s Senate briefings, in Ellen Malcolm’s basement, in Candy Straight’s Rolodex. It gained momentum in the private “no staff–no memos–no leaks” bipartisan women senators’ dinners, in the K Street offices of EMILY’s List and NARAL, and others like them, in the policy shop at CAP and the First Lady’s West Wing office. Fund-raising? Check. Lobbying? Check. Policy analysis and lawmaking? Check and check. All the tools in the kit had been sharpened and the networks wired.
Women had built a machine to elect a woman president. But would voters go along?