What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (32 page)

When women think of power, we shouldn’t think of it only for ourselves. We should be thinking about what we’re going to do with power once we have it. Women should be standing up powerfully and passionately for the care and protection of children, as well as the care and protection of the earth itself. Women’s voices should be front and center in protecting both our young and our habitat. That’s the way it is in any species that survives.

MS
: And part of this that’s key is women having access to our own authentic voices and wisdom, and honoring and listening to our true inner voice. And yet there are so many messages and forces that, from girlhood on, try to get women to do the opposite of that. How do we get women to follow their true voices and instincts so that if we do get into positions of leadership, we do not just perpetuate old paradigms?

MW
: If you’re getting your guidance about who you are and what to do with your life only from the external world, then by definition you’ll be led away from your authentic truth. Your authentic truth isn’t in the material world. It’s counterintuitive, but you have more power in the world when you know you’re not of it.

A primary goal of the spiritual life is to learn to quiet the mind—through prayer and meditation, through spiritual practice—so that we can hear what in both Judaism and Christianity is called the small, still voice within. You stop whining so much about how the shallow voices of modernity do not love you when you remember who does. We become less emotionally attached to the approval of the world, once we access the deep level on which we don’t approve of it either! There’s a bigger game going on here than the worldly eye perceives. We’re here to self-actualize individually and collectively, and the effort takes more than the intention to love—it takes the courage to act on it.

MS
: I’ve also been heartened by seeing the trend of supportive men coming to understand that women’s equality isn’t just about equality or fairness, but realizing that the status of women is interconnected with so many other issues that are facing the planet that would serve all of humanity.

MW
: To say that this is a conversation about women is not to say that it’s a conversation against men! Men aren’t holding us back anymore, so much as we hold ourselves back. And too often women hold each other back, unfortunately.

MS
: Do you see the rising of women and feminine energy as part of the healing force coming to save the planet? Is that part of why the focus is on women?

MW
: Yes, but the rising feminine doesn’t mean much unless she’s rising up through actual people. The goddess is asking for more than crystals and cut velvet scarves. She’s asking for some fierceness and courage, too.

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.

MS
: You have that very famous quote, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” How does that fit into this conversation?

MW
: Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “Our lives begin to end on the day we stop talking about things that matter most.” There is a perverse comfort zone to living a small life. For women, that zone has to do with the fact that we’re less likely to be challenged, we’re less likely to be criticized, we’re less likely to be called angry or strident, if we simply go along and acquiesce to the prevailing patterns of thought and behavior. But as Krishnamurti said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” It’s insane to let your children starve, to let your fellow man suffer needlessly, to allow the Earth to be raped when you could do something to help. Gandhi said that the problem with the world is that humanity is not in its right mind. That’s still true, and the antidote to that is for enough of us to be in our right minds.

When we’re in our right minds, we are hopeful. Because the arc of the moral universe does bend toward justice, nature does bend toward healing, and the heart does bend toward love. Our problem isn’t that the universe isn’t on our side; the problem is that too many of us are numb these days. Some of us need to stop whining. It’s not like we’re the first generation who faced serious challenges. But others rose to the occasion, and we need to, too.

MS
: You often talk about turning love into a social and political force. That’s something you don’t normally hear candidates talking about, but what does that look like to you?

MW
: We need more than new policies. We need a new worldview and a new bottom line. We need to replace economic values with humanitarian values as our ordering principle. What we’re doing now is unsustainable and certainly undemocratic. If you have, as we have in the United States today, a situation where financial leverage determines political leverage, then only those with money get to wield political power. That automatically pushes aside the needs of children, because children have no financial leverage. That’s why the women of the world must be their voice.

There is simply too much unnecessary suffering in our world. And we should see that as a national security risk, by the way. Given enough time, desperate people will tend to do desperate things. At a certain point you won’t be able to build enough prisons or enough bombs to eradicate the effects of all that violence inside so many hearts.

The suffering of sentient beings matters, and it should be central to our political conversations. Right now, we have political and economic systems that practically guarantee the unnecessary suffering of millions of people—and then we just leave it to clergy and psychotherapists and doctors and charities (if not prisons) to clean up the mess. Give me a break. I’m all up for a conversation about personal responsibility, but we need societal responsibility as well.

MS
: One of the things I feel always gets lost is the benefit of getting involved in creating positive change. It sounds very draining, and it’s something you do for others, but what are the soul rewards? I think there’s a piece that often goes missing about what it does for you and your own experience of
life to get involved and give back and be a part of this hopeful movement we’re talking about.

MW
: What’s “draining” is the life we’re living now. We’re living separated from our own deep humanity. We’re living separated from our own vigor. We’re living separated from the excitement that comes from being involved in the world. It’s not as though life now is easy, and showing up for the world is hard. No—the way many of us are living now is diseased and dysfunctional, and showing up for the world is one of the ways we heal.

MELISSA ETHERIDGE

“Leadership in the future, whether it’s male or female, I believe will start to come from a place of the idea of this great experiment called democracy . . . and to do that, we have to have it inside ourselves to know not to fear any diversity, but to be able to coexist with everything and anything, and that’s where power and strength for communities and our country comes from.”

I
N
F
EBRUARY 2007
, Melissa Etheridge celebrated a career milestone with a victory in the Best Song category at the Academy Awards for “I Need to Wake Up,” written for the Al Gore documentary on global warming,
An Inconvenient Truth
. Over the course of her more than two decades as a performer and songwriter, she has shown herself to be an artist who has never allowed “inconvenient truths” to keep her down. Earlier in her recording career, Etheridge acknowledged her sexual orientation when it was considered less than prudent to do so. In October 2004, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, a health battle that, with her typical tenacity, she won. Despite losing her hair from chemotherapy, Etheridge appeared on the 2005 Grammy telecast to sing “Piece of My Heart” in tribute to Janis Joplin. By doing so, she gave hope to many women afflicted with the disease.

In 2011, Etheridge made her Broadway debut as St. Jimmy in Green Day’s rock opera,
American Idiot
, and received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2012, she embarked on a worldwide tour, performing for sold-out crowds throughout Europe, Australia, and North America.
When not on tour, she records her syndicated Melissa Etheridge Radio Show for daily broadcast on stations throughout the United States and Canada. Her latest studio album,
4th Street Feeling
, debuted at number eighteen on the Billboard 200 chart.

MARIANNE SCHNALL
: This book will touch on a variety of arenas—a woman president as a symbol, but also all sorts of themes connected to women’s leadership and other areas. It was partially inspired by a conversation with my eight-year-old daughter, Lotus—we were talking about how there had been no woman presidents—and she was just astounded and she asked, “Why?”

MELISSA ETHERIDGE
: She can’t comprehend it.

MS
: We’ve grown up with it, we’ve taken it for granted, it’s just the way it is. But it got me thinking. What are some of your thoughts on why we haven’t had a woman president?

ME
: Well, it must be like when I was a child. I was a child in the sixties, and it was 1968 or 1969, and we were taking our first big family trip, and we went down to Florida from Kansas. On the way—in Georgia, I think it was—we stopped at a gas station to go to the bathroom, and I walked around the back and there were three bathrooms. It was W
OMEN,
M
EN,
and C
OLOREDS.
I remember going, “Coloreds?
What?”
That concept was so ridiculous. But now, our children look at gay marriage—that’s probably the last one; before that it would be women’s rights. I remember telling my daughter that my mother used to work as a civil servant for the Army—she worked in computers, war games and scenarios, and she was a GS-15, the
highest civilian rank you could get in the Army—and she was still paid half of what the guys who were working for her were paid. And my daughter’s like, “Why did they stand for that?” That’s why things like nursing and secretarial jobs don’t pay as much, because those were the jobs that women were allowed to have. And we’re just waking up. Our generation is in charge now. We’re the ones. So in the sixties, it wasn’t even okay to be a strong woman, and that beautiful movement we had in the seventies . . . I was a teenager, and it was women’s lib, and in this liberation women were going to work and I didn’t have to get married! It emancipated me as a teenager, as a woman. And that nugget of women is going to be in politics, and someday there’s going to be—it was the prize—a woman president. There had never been one, and someday we will [have one].

I remember when Geraldine Ferraro in the eighties was chosen to be the vice-presidential running mate of Mondale, and that was huge. Huge. And we, here in California, the women who were elected as senators and these leaders who would come up . . . I remember Shirley Chisholm. My parents sat me down, and I remember listening to her speech at the Democratic National Convention. Those [women] were, as my friend Steven Spielberg always says, “Someone has to lie down on the barbed wire for everyone to go across.” Mondale had to go down in flames so that my generation could experience and see and go, “This is what it looks like to have a woman running for the highest office.” And they lay down on the barbed wire. And now it is totally conceivable, I would say highly probable, that Hillary Clinton is going to run for president and become the first female. I mean, I can see that; my children can see that. I wouldn’t be going too far out on a limb, at all, to say that.

So we have—our generation, the women of the fifties and sixties and seventies—done our job. What we’ve done is to bring thought, because it’s all about how we all perceive what’s going on and the thought that a woman could be a leader. That if a woman leads us, we’re not going to
be overtaken by those evil forces out there because we’ll be weak. That’s the unspoken thing behind it: we will be perceived as weak. That’s why Maggie Thatcher was elected as the first female prime minister of England, but she was the most conservative Iron Lady. She had to come from that, some would say “male,” side of us to be elected. Now, can we actually stand up and say, “Okay, I feel safe, I feel protected, and I believe that a woman can comprehend what is best for us.” It was always, “Well, she has babies. She’s not going to go to war; because women have babies, they won’t ever support war.” Well, isn’t that a good thing? [
laughs]
I think we have come to that point; we have changed the world in our thought to where, wait a minute—that might be a good thing. Let’s try to get out of this now. I think we are tired of the business of war. That’s the unspoken thing in all this [discussion about] a woman president.