What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (35 page)

MS
: One of the things I was thinking about today was when I interviewed Eve Ensler a couple of years ago. We were talking about the rising of women, and she thought we were going to see somewhat of a global backlash. And I was reading an article in
The New York Times
a day or two ago talking about the case in India, saying that part of the rise in violence against women could possibly be attributed to the increase in women’s freedoms that is causing tension. I couldn’t help but also think about here in the United States, where even over the recent election there was this whole retro backlash against women’s reproductive rights. Do you think that’s possible? That as women are rising up in society, there might be a backlash as well?

NK
: Yes, I think that is true. I think that backlash is real, is happening, that there are a lot of men who have been marginalized—that’s true of India, that’s true of the United States—and they feel resentful that there are women who are thriving and they aren’t. So I think that is real and that’s going to continue, but I think that at the end of the day, those folks are going to lose.

MS
: Are you hopeful that we will see a woman president during your lifetime? Are there any women on the political horizon who you think would make good presidential candidates?

NK
: Yeah, I think that we will see a woman president in my lifetime. I think it’s really hard to predict. I would have been certain that we would see a woman president before we saw a black president, and, well, that happened. Politics is very difficult to predict as far as who it will be [is concerned]—whether it will be Hillary Clinton or somebody else—but I think that it will indeed happen. I think that there are already going to be increasing benefits for people who have a running mate who is a woman, and that then puts people in line. So, one way or the other, I think your daughter is going to see a woman president, and if she is interested in politics, I think that she will be judged, when the time comes, much more on her policies and less on her chromosomes than would be the case today.

GLORIA STEINEM

“The deeper problem is that as children we are still raised mainly by women, so we associate female authority with childhood. . . . And I think we saw it in the response to Hillary in 2008 when big, grown-up, otherwise adult television commentators were saying things like, ‘I cross my legs when I see her. She reminds me of my first wife, standing outside alimony court.’ People who would not ever say such things, normally, were saying them about Hillary, because, I would guess, deep down they felt regressed by a powerful woman. The last time they saw one they were six years old.”

G
LORIA
S
TEINEM IS
a best-selling author, lecturer, editor, and feminist activist. She travels in the United States and other countries as an organizer and lecturer and is a frequent media spokeswoman on issues of equality. She is particularly interested in the shared origins of sex and race caste systems, gender roles and child abuse as roots of violence, non-violent conflict resolution, the cultures of indigenous peoples, and organizing across boundaries for peace and justice. In 1972 she co-founded
Ms. Magazine
, which has become a landmark in both women’s rights and American journalism. She also co-founded the Women’s Media Center and the National Women’s Political Caucus, a group that continues to work to advance the numbers of pro-equality women in elected and appointed office at a national and state level. She now lives in New
York City and is currently at work on
Road to the Heart: America As if Everyone Mattered
, a book about her more than thirty years on the road as a feminist organizer.

MARIANNE SCHNALL
: This book was partially inspired by my eight-year-old daughter, Lotus, who upon discovering recently that there had been no woman president, ever, asked this very simple, quizzical question of me. She just looked at me and went, “Why?” I actually found that simple, innocent question really hard to answer. And this book will be dealing with not just electing women to the presidency, which is symbolic, but overall themes around women and politics and leadership and power. Going back to that simple question, why do you think it is that we have not yet had a woman president?

GLORIA STEINEM
: One reason is that women weren’t citizens from 1776 through the constitutional amendment [in 1920]. We were possessions, like tables and chairs. So there was not the opportunity [for women] to own property, to have the right to one’s own earnings, to have the right to your own children. You could be forcibly returned to a violent husband. You were property, literally, like a thing. And the laws of slavery were modeled on the laws affecting wives, so that takes care of the long time through the 1920s [
laughs]
. And since then, we have been overcoming legal barriers. For instance, women couldn’t sit on juries, law schools didn’t accept women, or accepted a small percentage of women when I was growing up. When I would have gone to law school, Harvard accepted no women and Columbia accepted 5 percent. So those are just symbolic areas, but they’re illustrative, real, powerful barriers.

There are also what are called cultural barriers, but I’m not sure we should call them cultural, because it seems to me what affects men is called political and what affects women is called cultural. So the idea that only women could raise children, which is alive among men [
laughs]
, meant that also when this wave of feminism began in the seventies and we began to try to elect women, there were two frequent questions of women candidates. One: If you don’t have children, why not? And two: If you do have children, why aren’t you home with them? When the National Women’s Political Caucus began, which was the first organization devoted totally to appointing and electing women, the major way that women got into high political office was as widows. You married a man who was the governor or a senator. He died through no fault of yours [
laughs]
, and only then were you allowed to take over the seat—the supposition being that you were carrying on your husband’s work.

MS
: I remember when I interviewed you at the Women’s Media Center Awards in December 2011, and at that time you were saying, in regards to Hillary’s presidential run, that you didn’t think we were ready then for a woman president. Do you still feel that way?

GS
: No. Thanks in large part to the many courageous women in politics, but especially Hillary because she was so visible in 2008. And since then, as secretary of state, I think she’s helped to change people’s expectations.

But as I was saying then, the deeper problem is that we are still raised as children, mainly by women, so we associate female authority with childhood. We, as women, have our own example to go by, so sometimes we change—although there are also women who don’t think that female authority is appropriate to public life. But it’s more likely to be men, and I think we saw it in the response to Hillary in 2008 when big, grown-up, otherwise adult television commentators were saying things like, “I cross my legs when I see her. She reminds me of my first wife, standing outside alimony court.” People who would not ever say such things, normally, were saying them about Hillary, because, I would guess, deep down they felt regressed by a powerful woman. The last time they saw one they were six years old.

MS
: What a conundrum for women, though. Because if women who are confident or ambitious or powerful or in positions of leadership are seen as unlikable, how can women be accepted and respected as leaders?

GS
: You do it anyway. You just go forward, and you end up changing the image eventually, and you may take a lot of punishment along the way. But I do think that now we could elect a woman, including Hillary, as president, because of the bravery of a lot of women and especially Hillary. But Shirley Chisholm also took the W
HITE
M
ALE
O
NLY
sign off of the White House door all by herself.

MS
: So you do think that there’s a real possibility? That would be very exciting.

GS
: I do now. In 2008, I did not believe that a woman could win.

MS
: I feel like this whole conversation gets reframed incorrectly sometimes as almost like a fairness thing, a men versus women conversation, that it’s some type of competition. Why would electing a woman as president be important?

GS
: It’s important because we need the talent of the whole country, not just a small percentage of it. Once at
Ms. Magazine
we tried to figure out the talent pool from which we were choosing presidents. First you eliminated
half the country, the females. Then you eliminated by class, race—because obviously Obama had not yet been elected. Anyway, we ended up with 6 percent. So it’s important for the whole country that we are able to choose from
all
of our talent, otherwise we lower our standards.

Secondly, gender is still a social force, so it’s still probably true, not always, but probably true that women are somewhat less likely to choose an aggressive solution and more likely to choose a conciliatory one. Not that a conciliatory one is always right, but it’s just that it tends to be the least present in public life.

MS
: I don’t know if you saw the interview on ABC where Diane Sawyer was talking to a group of female members of the Senate. Two of the women, Susan Collins and Claire McCaskill, made statements that they felt women were by nature more collaborative and less confrontational.

GS
: I think it’s true. It’s not by nature, but it’s by culture. Because there is no such thing as gender; it’s totally made up, but it’s very powerful.

MS
: Those do seem like qualities that would be needed in Washington. I don’t know if you remember when I was considering doing this book, I emailed you and you said, “From a tactical point of view, your writing it would be good, because you know it’s not about biology or a job for one woman, but making life better for all women, hence not about Sarah Palin or Margaret Thatcher, who was elected to be anti-union, not pro-women. That sometimes gets lost.” That’s the other side of the coin. Can you talk about that distinction?

GS
: Well, people are people. We’re not into biological determinism here, because that would be to abandon men, among other things. Men are human beings, too, but they’re made to feel that they have to earn their masculinity
and to sometimes get into an extreme cult of masculinity that requires control and violence. Cesar Chavez used to say, “We want to rescue the executioner from being the executioner, as well as the victim from being the victim.”

MS
: We were just talking about society only wanting to see women in feminine roles, and this notion that power and leadership is often seen as masculine. Sometimes I think we’re talking not in literal gender terms, but conceptually, where sometimes feminine values like cooperation and care and empathy and compassion are seen as soft or weak, rather than part of the full circle of human qualities.

GS
: But that’s just because masculinity is perceived as superior, necessary, inevitable, conquering, winning—all those things.

MS
: I had an interesting conversation when I interviewed Michael Kimmel. He said that it is really important to make sure that this conversation is not anti-men—that men not only lately are being there to support women, they understand why it would be helpful to the world to have more women in these positions, but also to free themselves.

GS
: I’ve forgotten who said, “The woman a man most fears is the woman inside himself.”

MS
: I feel like Obama does have what you might call more “feminine” traits, in terms of being conciliatory and showing how important family is to him—

GS
: I think we ought to forget about talking about masculine and feminine altogether; we should talk about humans.

MS
: I actually think that’s where we’re headed. That’s why I’m always talking about how feminism has to be about more of the human conversation.

GS
: That is what it’s about, and it kind of sets my teeth on edge when spirituality people talk about the “eternal feminine.” Like we’re giving in to the difference.

MS
: I think a lot of this is the linguistics of things. While advocating for the fact that, of course, we do want equality for more women, but at the same time, being careful that it’s not framed as women are perfect or better—all these things that have always been part of the misconceptions of the feminist movement.