What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (10 page)

So I remember picking up my cell phone as I was sitting in the president of the Senate’s chair, and I called my mother and said, “Mom, when you watch the news tonight, I’ve got a little something going on at the Capitol today. So I’ve taken over the Senate and it’s going to be all over the news. It’s controversial, but I’m okay, don’t worry about it. I just think this is the right thing to do.” And sure enough, from that point on for three days, there was a massive fight in the Senate, and senators were leaving. Finally on the third day they came back. The Senate president came in an hour ahead of time, of course. The Senate started and took over the chair of the Senate from me, and I came walking back in at the regular time it was supposed to start, and I took the chair back away from him and he told me, “We’re going to play this game with you, but here’s what you’re going to do: you’re going to recognize a certain senator, he’s going to make a motion to kill this amendment on Right to Work. And when he kills it, we’ll have a vote and it will go down, and then you can go back to your office and then you can be the lieutenant governor and cut ribbons around the state.” This was his opening. He said, “You’ve got that?” I said, “I hear what you say.” He said, “Well, that’s what you’re going to do, right?” And I said, “No, sir. Go sit down.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Go sit down.” He said, “Well, you’re going to recognize this senator.” I said, “No, actually, I’m going to recognize another senator. Go sit down.” So I forced him to go sit down and I called the vote and I recognized the other senator who made the motion
to allow this vote to go on the floor to have the amendment go to a vote of the people. It actually fell by one vote—all pandemonium broke out on the Senate floor. But the very next year, the Senate actually ran an amendment to send Right to Work to a vote of the people, and it passed. And that’s how we passed Right to Work in Oklahoma. We were the first state in twenty-five years to do that. It was really risky for me to do that, because politically I would be campaigned against by the opposition to that issue, but in actuality I think people appreciated the fact that I had the guts and the courage to try to make a change for what I thought was right. And it has been good for Oklahoma, so taking the risk, standing up for what you truly believe in, doing things that maybe people have never done before, always [believing] that you can truly earn the respect and trust of people, [will help you] to be able to make further changes later on down in your career.

MS
: That’s a great story.

MF
: I will tell you one other little part of that story. The senators who were the opposite political party were so mad that I did that, that if you look in the histories of the journals of the Senate, which are published every day, you won’t find that incident. They wouldn’t publish it. They were so mad at me. It’s all in the papers, you can read it in magazines and books and history books, but in the old Senate Journal, they wouldn’t publish what I did.

MS
: Wow, that’s wild. Are there specific challenges for being a woman in the Republican Party, or do you feel like it’s the same? Do you feel like there’s been progress made? Do you have a sense of the situation for Republican women?

MF
: Actually we have more Republican women governors in the nation than there are Democratic governors in the nation. There are four Republican women governors at this point and one Democrat. And those numbers change year to year. But the Republican Party has embraced women in leadership positions. And I get frustrated at times when different news media outlets, and certainly the opposite party, say that Republicans don’t care about women, because it’s not true. We’ve proven that by the numbers that we have in leadership positions, not only in governor’s offices, but in Congress and legislative positions. My mother was mayor of a town when I was growing up, so women can get into office, once again, if they have a vision for what they want to accomplish and they’re able to articulate that in the right way.

MS
: When people look at the world right now, it can all feel very discouraging, especially the possibility of running for office. What makes it all worthwhile?

MF
: Making a difference in people’s lives. Being actually able to create change, to shift the paradigm and a challenge that’s within in my state—whether it’s addressing our child welfare system, whether it’s being able to pass initiatives that create major changes, like the Right to Work initiative that I talked about. I’ve been able to have a tax cut; I’m proposing another one this year to give people back some of their hard-earned money to help improve the quality of their lives. I mean, the people of Oklahoma’s per capita income has gone up in our state since I’ve been in office. So being able to create that change to make people’s lives better. I’ve certainly been able to sign into law a lot of education reform to improve the education system for our children in our state, creating jobs—it’s all very rewarding. And I’ll just tell you, too, that from a personal standpoint, I’ve been elected as the vice chair of the Governors Association. I’m the only woman on the
Executive Board right now, and so I get to go meet with the president and his cabinet and sit in the West Wing with the president or have a personal phone call with the vice president or a cabinet secretary in the administration—and to have a seat at the table, as a woman, to me is a big deal. I mean, there are times I’ll be sitting there with the president and his cabinet or other governors, and I’m sitting there as the only woman, thinking, This is really neat, [because I’m] a small town girl—I grew up in a town of 2,000 people. My mother and father were not wealthy people; they were just small-town, good people. But they taught me the value of hard work and public service and giving back to your community and that one person truly can make a difference if they’re willing to take a risk, take a chance, and work really hard.

JOY BEHAR

“I think that humor is a powerful tool to use . . . When I first started stand-up comedy, I think part of my motivation for getting into it was that I felt powerless as a woman in this society. I was becoming invisible. I was already thirty-nine. After thirty-five you become invisible, pretty much, certainly to men. I was just becoming more and more invisible, and I was like, I have things to say. I have to do it . . . Of course, no one was going to listen to me if I was just talking, so I had to make them laugh, and then they listened to me. So I think that it has a very powerful effect on people.”

J
OY
B
EHAR IS
an Emmy-winning talk-show host, comedian, best-selling author, and actress. For more than sixteen years, she cohosted ABC’s
The View
, which earned her a Daytime Emmy Award as Outstanding Talk Show Host. Behar is the host of
Joy Behar: Say Anything!
on Current TV. In theater, Behar had a successful run in the off-Broadway hit
The Food Chain
, earning rave reviews in the starring role, and also in the critically acclaimed
The Vagina Monologues
. Behar received GLAAD’s Excellence in Media Award, presented to media professionals who have increased the visibility and understanding of the LGBT community. She is the author of two children’s books, as well as the
New York Times
Best Seller
Joy Shtick: Or What Is the Existential Vacuum and Does It Come with Attachments?

MARIANNE SCHNALL
: This book was partially inspired because right after Obama was elected, my then-eight-year-old daughter, Lotus—when I was saying how wonderful it was that we finally had our first African American president—looked at me, completely innocent, and asked, “Why haven’t we ever had a woman president?” And I found that this very simple, honest, innocent question was actually more challenging to answer than you would think. So, starting there, why do you think we haven’t had a woman president?

JOY BEHAR
: You mean, besides the obvious answer that it’s been a very sexist country for many years? I mean, women didn’t even get the vote until 1920. In fact, African Americans got it before women, so they were even lower down on the respect scale. I’ve been around a long time now, and I remember when Gloria Steinem and the rest of them in 1970 basically started the Second Wave of the feminist movement, I think they called it. It was 1970. My daughter was born in 1970. She’ll be forty-three now, and it’s not that long ago. They’re trying to reverse the Voting Rights Act now, in some of the states that have a history of racism, trying to prevent black people from voting, so I think that it’s very hard to change these entrenched notions and ideas that people have, particularly when men are controlling everything. I’m not surprised. Are you?

MS
: No, I guess it was just sort of funny, because it’s become so ingrained in our psyche, we just have accepted it, that I think when you have a young girl asking you, point blank—

JB
: They don’t get it, exactly, because they haven’t lived the lives that we have lived, and so they don’t know what we had to go through. I forget
where I was hearing this—in 1963 or 1964 or 1965, women couldn’t get their own credit cards. This sounds like such a preposterous notion to girls today. Who would ever have thought that when I got married in 1965, the first time, a lot of girls were just in college to get their “misters”? We never even thought about what careers we would have. I had an uncle who said to me, “Why do you have to go to college? You’re a girl. You’re going to get married.” I actually heard those words.

MS
: Well, what about now? Do you think you’ll see a woman president in your lifetime? Do you feel we’re ready for a woman president?

JB
: Yes, I do. I was hoping that it would be a liberal president, a female liberal, because England had Margaret Thatcher, but she was to the right of Ronald Reagan, and so I thought in this country, they’re going to pick a woman. But it’s probably going to be a conservative. Then, of course, the crop of conservative women was very disappointing. We had Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, and people on the right would say to me, “Well, shouldn’t you support a woman just because she’s a woman?” No, no. You want a woman president, but you don’t want a woman president who’s going to fight women and who’s going to vote against women’s interests. So it can’t just be any woman. But I think that it’s becoming clearer that Hillary Clinton is in the bull pen and she is going to be running in 2016, and I will work as hard as I can to get her in the White House if I’m able to.

I can just add that she had a very tough assignment as secretary of state. She had to show that she had as much testosterone as she had estrogen, and I think that she showed it. She was as tough as any man in the world arena, and that’s why men respect her. That’s why she would be a very, very good candidate.

MS
: It’s been a tricky balance for women—this whole question of the likability factor, of how women who are openly ambitious and confident are sometimes treated.

JB
: It’s a tricky road that women walk in politics. Even on television, where I work, you have to have a likability factor to survive, and that’s why people like Rachel Maddow are very valuable, because she is likable and she is smart and she does have a good brain.

MS
: Sometimes this gets framed as a “women’s issue,” but obviously, having more women in positions of power and influence isn’t just about fairness or competition, but it has benefits to all of humanity, including men. What special qualities do you think women would bring to the Oval Office, or to leadership roles in general, that the world most needs today? Why is this important?

JB
: You know, I’m really not sure about that, because when women get in positions of power, they can be just as bellicose as men, so I’m not sure that sort of knee-jerk [reaction of], “Oh, a woman won’t be as tough,” or, “A woman won’t be as warlike,” or what have you, is true. You know, Golda Meir was very tough and very conservative and kind of a war hawk in many ways, and so was Margaret Thatcher. Listen, Hillary voted for the Iraq War, and that pissed me off big time. So I can’t say that just because you’re a woman, I’m going to love everything that you do. But what special qualities does a woman bring to it? I don’t know. I’m asked that same question as a comedian.

MS
: Maybe the other way to frame it is also about overall diversity, in terms of our government looking more like America.

JB
: That’s right. That’s why you need diversity. And I like the idea that someone’s up there that shows other young women that they, too, can be in those positions. Sometimes I think that women are more reasonable in many ways.