What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (2 page)

When I first set out to create this book, I estimated that I might do twenty interviews. As it turns out, I more than doubled that number. And since these important topics of women, leadership, and power have come up frequently in so many of my past interviews with high profile figures, I decided to also include some of their insightful quotes on spreads interspersed throughout the book. Writing this book has indeed been a fascinating journey and adventure in and of itself, and has almost had a life of its own. I was so heartened and felt so supported by the many incredible people who not only granted me an interview for this book but also suggested others I should talk to, often giving me contact information or making introductions for me. From this response, I realized that this is a topic that is on everyone’s mind right now, and, as many of the people I interviewed—from Donna Brazile to Pat Mitchell—seemed to indicate, “now is the time.”

These are issues that I think benefit from a hashing-out of multiple perspectives: men’s, women’s, Republicans’, Democrats’, racial, and generational. I tried as best I could within the limited time, capacity, and access I had to include and reach out for that diversity, but, of course, I do recognize that this is but a small sampling of outlooks. My hope is that this book will be enlightening, educational, thought-provoking, and entertaining, as well as a call to action.

While it does not necessarily offer any easy, quick, or complete solutions to the complex, multifaceted questions of how we can help women move into more positions of influence and leadership, my hope is that it will help to identify some of the obstacles so that we can at least be aware of them—and be woken up, as my daughter’s question did for me, to being proactive, rather than simply accepting the current state of affairs as “just
how it is.” It will take long, engaged, thoughtful conversation and effort, from both men and women, to move our systems and culture along.

I thank all of the remarkable people in this book for being a part of this literary roundtable and for the meaningful work they do on the many prongs of these issues. And, since I would still like to include so many viewpoints and ongoing resources, a portion of the proceeds of this book will go toward continuing the conversation and community around women’s leadership at the eighteen-year-old women’s website and nonprofit I run,
Feminist.com
. I hope you will join me in supporting this movement, and I hope by the time my daughter has her own children (if that is her choice!), we will live in a world where having a woman president seems not like an unachievable and daunting milestone, but instead like one that girls everywhere can aspire to and reach, if that is their destiny and calling.

MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY

“I am constantly telling the women in my classes that they should consider running for office, mostly because what we know is that when men are talented and when men are smart and when men show some leadership, it’s hard for them to even get to college without someone, at some point, asking them, ‘Hey, have you ever thought about running for office? Man, you would be a great president.’ Even as little tiny boys, right? It turns out that we don’t have those same kinds of standard messages for girls. So if a woman is very talented and can remember people’s names and she shows a lot of interest in politics, we tend to say things like ‘Good job’ or ‘Here’s an A on your paper,’ but we don’t tend to say, ‘Hey, have you ever thought about running for office?”

M
ELISSA
V. H
ARRIS
-P
ERRY
is host of MSNBC’s
Melissa Harris-Perry
. She is also professor of political science at Tulane University, where she is founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South. She previously served on the faculties of the University of Chicago and Princeton University.

Harris-Perry is author of the well received new book,
Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America
, which argues that persistent harmful stereotypes—invisible to many but painfully familiar to black women—profoundly shape black women’s politics, contribute to policies that treat them unfairly, and make it difficult for black women
to assert their rights in the political arena. Her first book,
Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought
, won the 2005 W. E. B. Du Bois Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and the 2005 Best Book Award from the Race and Ethnic Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.

Harris-Perry is a columnist for
The Nation
magazine, where she writes a monthly column also titled Sister Citizen. In addition to hosting her own show on MSNBC, she provides expert commentary on U.S. elections, racial issues, religious questions, and gender concerns for
Politics Nation with Reverend Al Sharpton, The Rachel Maddow Show, The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell
, and other MSNBC shows. She is a regular commentator on
Keeping it Real Radio
with Reverend Al Sharpton and for many print and radio sources in the U.S. and abroad.

MARIANNE SCHNALL
: Why do you think we’ve not yet had a woman president, and what do you think it will take to make that happen?

MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY
: I think we haven’t had a woman president because we live in a country that systematically disenfranchised women for its first 100 and some years. I mean, we’ve had fewer than 100 years of women as full citizens in this country, and so I think that’s obviously part of it. You can’t expect women to be in leadership when they don’t even have an opportunity to choose who their elected leaders are. And so part of it is not only couldn’t women vote, but in many places couldn’t run for office, couldn’t hold office, couldn’t have credit in their own names—any of the things that would make having public life possible for women. I mean, I guess there were states that still had coverture laws as late as the 1950s and 1960s, right? So even if you imagine that with the end of those
coverture laws, with the opening of the ballot to women and with the opportunity for women to run for office, that then you would end up with a pipeline situation. Even if at that moment all barriers dropped away, and I don’t think they did, but even if they did, then you would still have to begin the process of women entering into a field where they had previously been shut out. And then you would have to grow that pipeline until you got to the level of presidency.

I don’t think it’s a small thing that the first woman to get very near to her party’s nomination for the U.S. presidency actually came through the private sphere. She first came to the public knowledge, national public knowledge, as the
wife
of the president. Of course she had her own political career and ultimately became senator and all of that, but the first way that we got to know the name of Hillary Clinton was through her husband. That strikes me as kind of indicative of precisely how narrow that pathway has been—that women are still in the situation of coming to office under the terms of patriarchy and a coverture in that way.

I think it is fundamentally a different question than what are we going to do about it, like how do we end up with a woman president? I’m back and forth on this. I still believe that the first woman president is highly likely to be a Republican, and because of that, I guess I’m a little less enthusiastic for the first woman president [
laughs]
. On the one hand I really do [believe] that we must break this, and even if we break it with a woman Republican, then there will be a part of me that celebrates that. But I do think we have to be careful . . . from the very beginning of the suffrage question in this country, there’s been this assumption that women will bring something specific to the public sphere, as a result of their womanhood, and I don’t think that’s quite right. I’m not sure that we can say that there is a way that women govern, and, in fact, the women who are most likely to rise to the top of governing tend to govern an awful lot like men.

MS
: You’re not the first one to have said that, but I’m curious about your reasons. Why do you think the first woman president could possibly be a Republican?

MHP
: Well, just because we elect three different kinds of people as president in this country. We elect vice presidents, governors, and senators. And right now the most recent person to almost to be vice president, who was a woman, was a Republican. The majority of women governors are Republicans, and although there are Democratic women senators, I look at them and I don’t see—at least at this moment—I don’t see kind of a clear contender. So as much as I know people talk about Hillary, the fact is that we don’t really elect Secretaries of State as president; we mostly elect governors and vice presidents—every once in a while, a senator—and right now those pipelines are dominated by Republican women.

MS
: I agree with you that there aren’t magic qualities that women would automatically inject, but at the same time, why is it important that we have more women’s voices—not necessarily just in the presidency, but represented more in Washington and in leadership positions generally?

MHP
: I think there are basically two categories of reasons. One is descriptive representation and the other is substantive. So let’s take the substantive off the table for a moment. Let’s say that women don’t govern any differently than men, that women will pass exactly the same kinds of laws and use the same basic procedures for governing and that really it would make no difference to elect a woman than to elect her husband or her brother—that they’re just precisely the same. Nonetheless, there would still be a descriptive representation claim for having as close to 50 percent representation of women in legislature and in the executive positions—and that’s because part of how we think about what constitutes a democracy
is that all members, of all groups, or any member from a group, should have an equal opportunity for governing, based solely on merit and not on identity. So in order for democracy to be constituted as healthy and as fully democratic, with a little “d,” it simply needs to be true that your barrier to entry is primarily about your qualification, and not about your identity. So let’s just take it as the socially and politically relevant demographic groups—by race, by ethnic identity, by gender. Even if women are no different, you still need to have 50 percent women, or upwards of it, in order to be able to say that you have a completely fair democracy.

But then I think there
is
reason to think that there are some substantive differences in how women govern, both stylistically and in terms of the policy output. And again, that’s just the empirical work of women in politics—scholars who show us that, in fact, when you have more women in a state legislature, for example, you’re more likely to have real bipartisan bills passed, that women tend to introduce more legislation on issues of the environment and education than their male colleagues. So there do, in fact, seem to be substantive reasons for having women, but even if there weren’t, the descriptive ones, I think, are pretty strong.

MS
: You were talking about ideally achieving 50 percent. Sometimes we forget, even with all of the strides we made in this last election, that twenty senators is still really far from parity—and even when you look at the low numbers of female Fortune 500 CEOs or just in general the corporate world. Do you have a sense of what’s going on there? Why we are lagging behind? There’s been a lot of discussion right now that some of this may be self-imposed, that women aren’t pursuing these positions, or do you think more that it’s these other structural obstacles holding women back?

MHP
: Most of these things don’t have to be mutually exclusive—both that women may be making a choice more frequently not to pursue and that
that is because of the institutional barriers they face. It’s one thing to run a marathon; it’s another thing to run a marathon with one leg. There will be one-legged people who will run marathons and they’re kind of extraordinary, but when you have that barrier to overcome, too, more people are going to opt out of that. So I suppose what I would say is that the first piece of evidence we have is simply the reality of the incumbency advantage, so because women were shut out for most of the history of the country, when women tended to run, they were running against incumbents. And incumbents tend to win. That’s just kind of a political truism. The single best advantage you can have for office is already holding that office. Women tend to do as well as their male counterparts in open-seat races. So if you hold all things constant—so you have Man A, Woman B, and they have basically the same kind of résumé—in an open-seat race, women are just as likely to win as men are. But the fact is that we mostly aren’t facing open-seat races. You mostly have to win these national races, especially in the House of Representatives, by beating somebody who’s already there. It’s really tough for challengers, and women are going to be more likely to be the challengers. So that’s part of it.