LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA. June 19, 2014. A line three people deep stretches out from the Barnes and Noble entrance, around the corner, and along Third Street for a quarter of a mile. It is early morning and about 3,000 men, women, and children are chatting on the sidewalk, cars whizzing past, waiting to meet Hillary Clinton.
“Well, I’m here because she is a trailblazer,” Twyla Hodges says. “She has stood as a glass ceiling breaker and she is making history right now. I think that she is a great role model for women, for children, for the generations to come. It’s great that she is coming out here and actually supporting and campaigning with her constituents—actually caring about us. Especially since she is going to become the next president. I have very strong faith in that.”
In fact, Clinton won’t officially declare she is running for president for another ten months. Her visit to Los Angeles is only a stop on her summer book tour.
“I’m hoping that Hillary breaks the glass ceiling this time out. I think it’s long overdue,” Tony Cowser, a slender, forty-three-year-old African American man, a few hundred people down the line, told me. “I like her integrity and I like what she represents. I think that she deserves to be the next president. I’ll share with you a little story. I was in college and she was First Lady and I was driving to work one day. I remember this disc jockey said that Hillary Clinton was a briefcase-toting bitch. It was such strong lingo that I nearly had an accident. I felt that statement was so foul that I vowed that day that whatever she did, I was going to support her. So that’s why I’m here.”
Across the street at the Farmers Market people were milling about, carrying plastic bags with Clinton’s new book, Hard Choices, showing through, grabbing breakfast before they got back in line for their moment with Clinton a few hours later. Joe Boccolucci, who had gotten into line at 4:00 AM, was seated at the counter of Phil’s Deli and Diner. “I was going back and forth whether I should do it or not because I have a little son and I had to find somebody to watch him,” he said. “I was a huge Hillary supporter in ‘08, so I was excited to have her book come out and support her in 2016—hopefully, if she runs.” When I asked him what he liked about Clinton, he said, “The whole Democratic platform. She’s about immigration reform, equal rights for everybody, women’s rights.”
“—He’s a gay dad—gay rights,” Boccolucci’s twenty-eight-year-old sister Katelyn Rydzewski interjected.
“—Millionaires paying their fair share when it comes to taxes and stuff like that, and Clinton’s all about that,” Boccolucci continued.
“I think she needs to run, I think it would be stupid if she didn’t,” Rydzewski said. “I think she just has everything that we need, and I think it’s time for a woman to be president. I would love to see that myself.”
“She’s the right woman, too. She’s smart,” her brother said. “It’s the right time.”
The new America was thrilled Hillary was there to meet them face-to-face. There was something uncynical, even old-fashioned, in the way they described Hillary—”my hero,” “inspired,” and “icon.” Many people spoke of their hopes to elect the first woman president and be part of history in the making.
Wherever Clinton traveled for book signings in the summer of 2014, large crowds of fans appeared—more than 1,000 in St. Paul and Philadelphia, 1,200 in Seattle, thousands in Saratoga Springs. At Common Good Books in St. Paul, one woman told the St. Paul Pioneer Press, “I just look up to her so much. I think she’s a great role model for young women.” (Her nine-year-old daughter dreamed of being a congresswoman when she grew up.) One man had come straight to the bookstore from church with his two sons. “Clinton will be an excellent candidate if she decides to run,” he said. “It would be good for a woman to be president.”
GERMANS, BRAZILIANS, AND Brits have done it. Catholics, Muslims, and Hindus have too.
The citizens of more than fifty nations have elected women to lead them. But not us. Two and a quarter centuries after George Washington became the first POTUS, nearly 100 years after women won the right to vote, Americans have still not elected a woman president. Meanwhile democracies that are no more than ten, twenty, or thirty years old have chosen women to lead them. Indeed, the United States, birthplace of modern democracy, ranks a mediocre 72nd on the 2015 World Economic Forum index of women’s political empowerment.
It is a national embarrassment.
Yet 2016 could change all that. America is at a historical inflection point. The old barriers that once blocked a woman’s ascent to the Oval Office have crumbled, more so than we realize.
Like many political junkies, I started thinking about the 2016 presidential election just weeks after the 2012 votes were counted. I love a good political horse race as much as the next guy. But this coming election calls out for more than just the “she’s up–he’s down” daily punditry. We stand on the cusp of a historic milestone, and that’s a story that needs to be told.
Granted, there are those who would say that we went directly from resistance to a woman president to apathy about it—in effect leapfrogging over the zeal-to-make-history stage. Several political consultants I interviewed insisted that only a tiny minority of voters would be motivated by the idea of electing a woman. When I mentioned this to Jennifer Granholm, Michigan’s first woman governor and a Democratic Party leader, to get her opinion, she shot back, “What?!”—as if she didn’t hear me right.
“I totally disagree with that, I totally disagree with that!” Granholm said. “Any woman who has run for office will tell you that you go down these parade routes and you see two things. You see women who are in their eighties or nineties who say, ‘I want to vote for you because it hasn’t happened before.’ Or you can’t get away from parents pushing their daughters forward and saying, ‘Look, there’s our governor, see? That’s her!’ The implicit message is, ‘That could be you one day.’ It is not about me. It is about what is possible for their daughters.
“People understand the symbolic significance and the real significance of putting somebody into office who has broken through a barrier,” Granholm continued. “They did so with President Obama, and we saw that huge flood of excitement. I think a similar type of excitement will be there for Hillary Clinton. Hopefully this becomes a nonstory by 2020, that a woman has won the presidency. But it still is a huge moment in history because it has not happened yet.”
THIS BOOK IS about the making of America’s first woman president.
Of course, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party front-runner, is a central figure in this story. And yet this book is not only about her—because there is a bigger story to be told. Clinton’s achievements—for instance, as a United States senator, as secretary of state—are inconceivable without the foundation laid by many others, past and present. Consider this: Just thirty short years ago, no Republican woman had ever served as governor and no Democratic woman had ever been elected to the Senate in her own right.
Moreover, Clinton is not the only woman who is capable of making a credible run for the presidency, and Republicans also look forward to a woman president—granted at this moment with more reservations. In the lead-up to 2016, close observers of U.S. politics widely agreed there were many women on the short list of potential presidential contenders. All of them, such as Democrats Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Amy Klobuchar and Republicans Susana Martinez, Nikki Haley, and Kelly Ayotte, were governors or United States senators. Although most major nonpartisan outfits found a large partisan gap between Republicans and Democrats in the desire to elect a woman president, that was largely because no Republican woman who could win entered the primary. (The only one who ran was Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Fiorina had never served in elected office, and as we’ll see, that pretty much disqualified her from any serious consideration by voters in a general election.) As Kay Bailey Hutchison, Texas’s first woman U.S. senator and a Republican, who had in the past seriously considered running for president herself, put it, “I’m always going to vote for the best candidate, because I think America should have the right leadership for the respect in the world. I would want a woman who would represent my view of America and what I think is right for America. But I’d love for it to be a woman. I don’t think it’s in any way a negative anymore. I think it’s a positive now.”
This book is an effort to answer the fundamental questions raised by the prospect of a woman president: Why has America never elevated a woman to the Oval Office? Can a woman win? If so, how did it become possible and what obstacles might she face by virtue of her gender? Do women political leaders bring different styles or perspectives or priorities to their jobs? Finally, why does it matter and why should we care?
In the spring of 2013, I set out to answer these questions and I began talking to women leaders and experts on women’s political leadership. In the years since then, I have interviewed senators and governors and ambassadors; Democrats and Republicans; men and women; political operatives and political scientists; girls and women from the age of nine to ninety-two; fathers of tweens, a mother of triplets, and a surprising number of parents with twins; men who are passionate about electing women and women who could not care less; single men, gay married couples, and women who are childless by choice; children of migrant farmworkers, recently naturalized immigrants, and the great-granddaughter of a president. The book is also based on scores of scholarly articles in the social sciences about American elections, women’s leadership, and gender, as well as my own research and teaching over twenty years as a working historian.
What I’ve found may not be what we would expect.
Today, the S word—sexism—will not get us very far in understanding the current landscape for women in politics. True, America’s history of gender discrimination in law, politics, and culture rendered it impossible for a woman to be president for much of our nation’s life and then tilted the playing field against women for decades. How much the double standard still holds women back is a central issue and one that we’ll look at closely. Yet America is long past the date when sexism itself explained the absence of an American woman president. Likewise, you will find here no misty-eyed affirmation of the superior virtue of the double X’s. Instead, we have to look unflinchingly at some of the less heroic episodes of women’s history. Consider this: One of American women’s first major contributions to public policy was Prohibition. Or take recent women-on-women battles, such as the ones provoked by Sheryl Sandberg’s effort to help women win an equal share of corporate power or by Beyoncé’s ambiguous representations of feminism in performances of “Flawless.” As we’ll see, women themselves have not always been the most effective advocates for their own political power.
If you bring up the subject of a woman president, you will often hear some variant on the theme “not just any woman.” The concern is pervasive. For instance, when I asked U.S. senator Benjamin Cardin his views on a woman president, he said, “It is critically important that we have a woman as president. It is. Now, we only have one president and it’s got to be the very best person. In Hillary Clinton, we have a candidate who is eminently qualified to be president of the United States.”
Cardin, it seemed to me, was trying to strike a balance, one that became familiar to me as I talked to men and women about their feelings about a potential woman president. How can you simultaneously express different values of equal importance, especially in our current media environment when words are ripped from their context to provide the most tantalizing or damaging sound bite?
So, before we dive in, let’s acknowledge these considerations one by one:
First and foremost, any presidential candidate must be prepared for the most difficult job in the world, and anyone who isn’t is out of consideration.
And yet, at the same time, America’s history of gender discrimination has betrayed our highest democratic ideals.
Therefore, electing a woman president is a threshold the nation must cross. And better sooner than later.
As Cardin continued, he said, “My point, though, is that we haven’t had a woman president. It’s important to reach that milestone in this country. I am proud that we have had an African American as president of the United States. To me, that was a huge moment for America. The best person won, but we had to reach that point, and the same thing is true on gender. It has clearly been a difficult track for a woman to ascend to the presidency of the United States. That’s not fair and I hope that we overcome that by electing a woman president in my lifetime.”
When it comes to the presidency, Americans vote only for candidates who share their values, their ideals, and their dreams. In every case in our history, Americans have only elected men who possessed the right experience and qualifications. We can be confident that any woman who makes a credible run at the presidency won’t be just any woman. There are plenty of women in the current pool of viable contenders, and their numbers grow—albeit slowly—every election.
Likewise, women—who make up the majority of American voters—are not looking for a figurehead. That should go without saying, but unfortunately, it has to be said. The all-too-common notion that women are motivated by identity politics when they express enthusiasm for women candidates is a myth. Many elections have disproved this patronizing charge, most dramatically the 2008 presidential election. Only 43 percent of American women voted for the McCain-Palin ticket, despite the campaign’s well-documented play for women voters in the choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate. When Hutchison said she would insist on a woman who represented her view of America, she underscored an important truth universally confirmed by political scientists: When Americans are making up their minds about whom to vote for, partisanship and ideology trump gender. (As they also trump race, ethnicity, and any other particular identity—but that’s another book.)
Finally, on the subject of political parties, it is helpful to enter here with an open mind. The 2016 election, like nearly all presidential elections, will be close, and there is no guarantee Clinton will prevail. The next time up, the woman with the best shot at the presidency could be a Republican. It is not hard to imagine a scenario in which Americans had already elected a woman president and she had been a Republican. For fifty years after women won the right to vote, politically active women—many of them self-identified feminists—found a congenial home and political power within the GOP. The first woman on the Supreme Court and the first credible woman presidential candidate were both Republicans: Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Senator Margaret Chase Smith, respectively. Although Republicans have of late alienated women voters—and many men too—with their positions on equal pay, gay marriage, abortion, and women’s health, it’s important to keep in mind that the partisan landscape often shapeshifts quickly and dramatically.
“I DON’T THINK women are better than men, but I do think that women have experiences, we have perspectives, we have talents that really should have an impact on public policy,” Melanne Verveer, head of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security and former ambassador for Global Women’s Issues under Secretary of State Clinton, said. “Public policy is being made for me, even if there aren’t many people like me making that public policy. Why haven’t we had any progress on child care in this country? Why are we still struggling with equal pay for equal work? I think that if we had larger numbers of women—Democrats and Republicans—we would have made more progress on these issues. They impact women, yes, but they impact fathers as much. They impact families. But these issues are not put to the forefront as critical ones as much by men in positions of power as women put them there.”
On many measures, women lag behind men in the United States. Although women make up six out of ten college graduates, at every educational level and in almost every field of work, women are paid less than men for the same work. In nearly every professional field, there are far fewer women than men at the top. Even among CEOs, women are paid less—an average of $1.6 million less—than men. At our current rate of electing women to Congress, we will not reach parity until 2121.
Nor are we doing as well as women in many other countries. On broad measures of gender equality, the United States ranks only 28th in the world, behind Germany, Rwanda, and every Nordic nation. Our gender wage gap is worse than that of seventy-four other nations. Even though women make up more than half of all Americans employed in professional and technical jobs, the U.S. ranks only 50th in the percentage of women in top management positions.
Such shortfalls on women’s leadership and economic opportunity are not just bad for women and girls. They also place a tremendous burden on men and boys. They constitute a rich vein of untapped national potential. So expanding opportunities for women and girls would clearly be in the national interest.
And yet, the significance of a woman president for women shouldn’t be discounted. As we’ll see, the academic research is unequivocal that when women participate fully in political leadership, the lives of women and families improve.
Bringing women and girls into full participation in every sphere of our national life is one of the big items of unfinished business in the 21st century. To accomplish it will take visionary leadership and political will.
A woman president is more likely to keep her eyes on this prize.