What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (31 page)

MS
: There can often be a backlash that comes as a result of speaking out forcefully on an issue, which I know you have experienced. How do you deal with that when that happens? How do you brave through it and find your strength to speak out again?

JV
: I feel like if I’m getting a lot of heat, especially misogynist hate or something like that, directed at me, it makes me feel like I’m probably
doing something right. You know, if you’re making people feel uncomfortable it means that you’re shaking core beliefs, which is what we’re supposed to be doing, which is what we want to do. So I just remember that. And honestly, having a really wonderful community of feminists and feminist friends around me makes it all worthwhile. So when something bad happens, you can go to them and you have people that you trust and people that care about you, so I think that makes it a lot easier.

MS
: I know you wrote that great book
Why Have Kids?
It’s very interesting to watch you become a mother. I have kids, too, and I know how much it has transformed me, especially having daughters. Part of what’s coming out of Sheryl Sandberg’s book is about balancing career and family and how hard that is for women right now, which is just the truth of it. What are your thoughts on that in terms of what we, as a society, can do? And how may that be preventing women from becoming leaders and advancing in the workplace, because of the challenges of balancing both?

JV
: Well, I think part of the problem is that culturally we still tell women that they need to be mothers, first and foremost, above all else, and if you’re not a mother first and if you don’t put your identity as a mother first, then you’re doing it wrong, and I think that’s scary to a lot of women—no one wants to be thought of as a bad mother. And obviously of what that means culturally: Being a mother first means staying at home. It means not putting your kid in daycare. It means not taking a promotion. And I just don’t buy into that. I think that we need to change the way we talk about motherhood. Like, yes, motherhood is certainly an important part of my identity, but I’m a person first. I’m an individual first. And I think if we can foster that, it will be helpful to parents, especially younger women parents.

MS
: Are you feeling hopeful about where we are now? It does seem that it’s a little bit of two steps forward and one step back, but mostly do you feel like there’s a shift happening?

JV
: Yes. I do feel like there’s a shift happening. I think we saw it in the presidential election, [in terms of] who came out for Obama. There was a Gallup Poll two days before the election in swing states and it showed that women in swing states, when asked what the number one most important issue was, they said abortion. So even though it wasn’t necessarily being relayed publicly, I think women went into the voting booth and they were sick of it. I think they were sick of the Republican agenda on women. I think you saw it with Komen and Planned Parenthood—all the feminist online activism that’s been happening—so I’m very optimistic.

MS
: Man or woman, what do you think are the ingredients to successful leadership or the type of leader we most need now?

JV
: I would say empathy and compassion are really things that we need in a lot of levels of government—the ability to put yourself in other people’s shoes, no matter what their gender or identity.

MARIANNE WILLIAMSON

“American women are not holding up our part of the sky. But it’s not because we don’t care, so much as we’re distracted. It’s not because we’re apathetic, so much as we’re emotionally paralyzed. I’ve written about such things for many years, but now it’s time to forge ahead and no longer be distracted, no longer be paralyzed. It’s time to show up in a way we’ve never shown up before.”

M
ARIANNE
W
ILLIAMSON IS
an internationally acclaimed spiritual author and lecturer. Six of her ten published books have been
New York Times
Best Sellers. Four of these have been #1
New York Times
Best Sellers. A paragraph from
A Return to Love
, beginning “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure . . .” is considered an anthem for a contemporary generation of seekers. She has been a popular guest on television programs such as
The Oprah Winfrey Show, Larry King Live, Good Morning America
, and
Charlie Rose
. Williamson founded Project Angel Food, a meals-on-wheels program that serves homebound people with AIDS in the Los Angeles area. She also founded the Department of Peace Campaign, a grass roots campaign to establish a United States Department of Peace.

MARIANNE SCHNALL
: Why do you think we haven’t had a woman president so far?

MARIANNE WILLIAMSON
: We haven’t had a woman president yet for a multitude of reasons. More than anything else—and this is evidenced by the fact that we don’t have anything near 50 percent representation in Congressional and state leadership, either—I think American women haven’t yet developed, en masse, the emotional and psychological habits of power.

Politics in America is extraordinarily toxic, mean, even vicious. No man or woman goes into a political race, particularly a presidential one, without knowing in advance the personal price they’re going to pay. Whether because we have cellular memories of being burned at the stake for speaking our minds, or the lingering paternalism and male chauvinism that still permeate parts of our political machinery, or the projections of suspicion onto any woman (by both men and women, I’m afraid) who really gets in there and claims leadership today, a woman needs a lot of muscle—spiritual as well as intellectual—to push through what needs to be pushed through in order to embark on a presidential campaign. She’s going to have to be willing to not go along, in ways that are terrifying to a lot of women.

The good news is that I think we’re on the brink of a tipping point, because enough women have run for office and won, enough women are empowered in other areas of the society, enough books have been written on the subject of female leadership, and enough social change has accumulated over the last few years. Also, it’s obvious to enough people now that the old way is not working and that we need something radically new. I just hope that the woman who does break the barrier is offering something new, rather than just imitating how the guys have always done it.

MS
: You recently organized a huge conference in California called Sister Giant, which featured the tagline “Women, Nonviolence, and Birthing a New American Politics.” How would you describe your vision for a new American politics, and what role do you see women playing in that?

MW
: American politics is a subject that gets a lot of attention, obviously. But it doesn’t get very enlightened attention, at least not at this point in our history. There’s very little heart in the current political conversation, or real wisdom or philosophical depth. But among many people I know, there’s a yearning for that. People want the nation to transform in the same way they want their own lives to transform.

If you’re interested in transforming your life, you can’t just transform some things. You can’t try to fix some things, but sweep other things under the rug because it’s too hard to face them. And the same is true for a nation. America has a lot of dirty little secrets: our child poverty rate, at 23.1 percent, is second highest among thirty-five developed nations of the world (second only to Romania); our incarceration rate is higher than any nation in the world—we’re 5 percent of the world’s population, yet we incarcerate 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Citizens United, the National Defense Authorization Act—so many things that any reasonable person would consider at least an indirect threat to democracy, are staring us in the face as we speak. You can’t change your life by just looking at the fun things, and you can’t change your country by just looking at the fun things either.

I gave a talk at a university recently where several women students involved in social justice and human rights work were explaining what they want to do when they leave college. As they went around the table explaining what their plans were after they graduated, many of them said that they wanted to do “policy and/or advocacy work.” I remember inwardly tilting my head, thinking how odd it was that women graduating
from one of the best universities in the country—all of whom were really marvelous young women—wanted to go do policy and advocacy work, but not one said she wanted to be a senator or a congressman or a president. And in today’s world, policy and advocacy work, in my mind, means we take our activism to a certain point but no further. In other words, we want passionately to lobby and persuade those in power, but for whatever reason we’re not so comfortable with the idea of
becoming
those in power. And at a certain point, it’s not enough to have the audacity of hope, or even the audacity of activism. We need the audacity to wield power.

I see a need to create a new political conversation—one that isn’t so toxic, dysfunctional, and mean-spirited. I know there’s no place for that within the current system, but the current system is boring to me. I think it’s boring to a lot of people. But that’s not to say that it’s unimportant. This isn’t about ignoring politics; it’s about creating a new political conversation where conscience takes precedence over profit and humanitarian values trump economic ones. I know a lot of people think that’s extremely naïve, but what I think is naïve is thinking we can continue to treat our fellow human beings and the planet on which we live in such a violent way as we do now, and expect the species to survive for another hundred years.

MS
: Do you have a sense of what obstacles there are, either societal or self-imposed, that are preventing women from entering the political pipeline?

MW
: When it comes to politics, women have an internal glass ceiling. We stand as good a chance as a man to win a political race, but women don’t want to run at the same rate as men do. People point to the work-family balance issue, but I think it’s much more than that. Many women don’t have children, or have children who are no longer at home. There are some deeper psychological and emotional issues in play, like the fact that many
of us feel like the embarrassment, humiliation, and personal demonization in politics are simply more than our hearts can take. What stops us is fear.

Who in their right mind would want to go into politics today? But that question is a serious conundrum, because as the French say, “If you don’t do politics, politics will do you.” With our own country moving every day in the direction of a plutocracy and facing global issues—from intractable violence to unsustainable poverty—that are turning our future probability vectors in ever more dire directions, no conscious person, socially or spiritually, can just sit this out. This is not a time in American history to go numb. And being awake and conscious for just an election or two won’t cut it either. We need a sustained movement in the direction of a fundamental awakening of the heart—in politics as well as in everything else.

MS
: It occurs to me when we are talking about the missing representation of women in politics that some of these qualities you say we need to inject into politics—such as caring and compassion and connection to our hearts—are often deemed as “feminine values” and are oftentimes more naturally represented by women. How do you see that inter-connection and the devaluing of the feminine, both literally and in this metaphysical way?

MW
: There are feminine qualities in all people, and some men embody such forces as caring and compassion more profoundly than some women do. It takes more than a vagina to embody feminine values.

Which is not to say that women don’t have an important role as carriers of those values into the world. Look at the nature kingdom: how the adult female in any advanced mammalian species so fiercely protects her young. The mama tiger, lion, bear and so forth—they show a fierce insistence on care and protection of the young. Even among the hyenas, the adult females encircle the cubs while they’re feeding and will not let the
adult males get anywhere near the food until the cubs have been fed. Truly the women of America could do better than the hyenas. And the fact that we don’t do better than we do means we’re not displaying the ultimate intention to survive. Seventeen thousand children starve on this planet every single day. That fact alone should blow any conscious person out of their chair. You know, my mother used to say that a woman’s most important job is taking care of her children and her home. I laughed at that when I was younger, but I don’t laugh at it anymore. I just realize now that every child on the planet is one of our children, and the Earth itself is our home.