What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (40 page)

As Elders [a group of global leaders who work together for peace and human rights], we are fully committed to the principle that all human beings are of equal worth. We highlight equality for girls and women, not just women’s rights. That is important, as girls, especially adolescent girls, have been almost invisible in debates on equal rights. Yet it is in adolescence that events can have a huge effect on a girl’s life
.

        
—M
ARY
R
OBINSON, FIRST FEMALE PRESIDENT OF
I
RELAND

Girls have to fight against a lot of the same stuff I did growing up . . . peer pressure, exploitation, et cetera. But what worries me the most is this trend that caring about something isn’t cool. That it’s better to comment on something than to commit to it. That it’s so much cooler to be unmotivated and indifferent. . . . It’s really important for girls to be reminded that the sky is the limit, and anything they want to do is possible
.

        
—A
MY
P
OEHLER

Share your voice. We live in a moment where communication is so, so important and so, so accessible. You have something to say and you should say it. We’re all listening
.

        
—D
ONNA
K
ARAN

ELIZABETH LESSER

“It is not just getting a vagina in the White House; it’s everyone, men and women, looking really deeply at our values
—
leadership values, at least, and social organizing-principle values
—
which came from the fact that only men were in the halls of power when the laws were being written, when the values were being determined. So it’s not as easy as just getting a woman in the White House; it’s also hoping and working to make sure that that woman, or the next woman, or the women she brings along with her, are also talking about our social values.”

E
LIZABETH
L
ESSER IS
the cofounder of Omega Institute, the United States’ largest lifelong learning center, focusing on health, wellness, spirituality, creativity, and social change. She is the
New York Times
best-selling author of
Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
and
The Seeker’s Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure
. For more than thirty years, Lesser has worked with leading figures in the fields of healing—healing self and healing society. Her work at Omega has included leading the organization, developing its curricula, teaching, and writing the yearly Omega catalog, a reference book that describes the work of some of the most eminent thinkers and practitioners of our times.

For the past ten years, Lesser has spearheaded Omega’s popular Women & Power conferences, renowned gatherings featuring women leaders, authors, activists, and artists from around the world. She is the founder of the Women’s Leadership Center at Omega. In 2008, she helped Oprah Winfrey produce a ten-week online seminar based on Eckhart Tolle’s book
A New Earth
. She is an ongoing host on Oprah’s
Soul Series
, a weekly radio show on Sirius/XM.

MARIANNE SCHNALL
: Why do you think we have not yet had a woman president?

ELIZABETH LESSER
: Well, that’s a multilayered question. I think it’s embedded in the psychology of women, men, girls, boys, nations, organizations, and schools that what it takes to lead—and what it takes to lead something as important and large as a nation that has an economy and a military—is anathema to what we have told ourselves is appropriate and charming for a woman. It’s so deep in our psyche. It’s deeper than we know. No matter how liberated we are as individual women and how much work we’ve put into convincing ourselves of our inherent equality with men, we still don’t even believe it ourselves. And how could we? It’s embedded in every part of our culture. There’s religion; there’s art, the greatest authors, the greatest playwrights; there’s the hero’s journey. Every single mythology and area of human expertise is still, either consciously or unconsciously, pervaded by the idea that it is beautiful for a man to exert his ego, his will, and his leadership, and it is beautiful and charming for a woman to defer, to support, to nurture, and not to push her way and her will.

So, yes, it’s amazing and promising that an African American overcame the stereotypes of having a smaller brain and all of the terrible, untrue things we’ve told each other about racial differences. It doesn’t surprise me that that one fell before the stereotype of a woman not being a natural
leader fell, because I think that’s even more deeply in our subconscious. And from the very first myths and creation story—every creation story, or let’s say most of the creation myths that still infuse our psyches: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, the Asian religions’—the creation stories still have man being created first and primary, and woman being, I would think, from an afterthought to an evil addition to the story. So that is my long, rambling answer.

MS
: Given everything that you just said, are you feeling like we’re moving in a direction where our consciousness, men’s and women’s, is ready to see a day when a woman will be president? Do you think you will see a woman president in your lifetime? And what will it take?

EL
: It depends on how long I live [
laughs]
. The answer is yes. I am incredibly hopeful and, if not in my lifetime, soon we will see a woman president, so I do think we’re ready. I do think these things happen, the way it did with Obama, in surprising moments. It is like, are we ready? Maybe. And then, all of a sudden, it happens because of a perfect storm of a particular person and a particular time. So absolutely this will happen, and that will be impressive and a time for celebration, but I will not rest. It will not be a time to say, “Whew, we made it. On to the next.” It will be the very first of a continuing work in progress of women and men being seen as equally valid for leadership. And by that I mean it is not just getting a vagina in the White House; it’s everyone, men and women, looking really deeply at our values—leadership values, at least, and social organizing-principle values—which came from the fact that only men were in the halls of power when the laws were being written, when the values were being determined. So it’s not as easy as just getting a woman in the White House; it’s also hoping and working to make sure that that woman, or the next woman, or the women she brings along with her, are also talking about our social values.

MS
: Something I know you have explored through the Omega Women & Power conferences is this whole notion of changing the current paradigm of power. What is your vision of how that needs to change?

EL
: It’s been so interesting, the language that’s caught on, this “lean in” from Sheryl Sandberg. It’s fabulous. I love the metaphor of it, and I’m so pleased that her book is doing so well, but a glaring omission from the whole concept of leaning in is, what are we leaning in to? Why would I want to lean in so deeply, with so much fervor and time, to something that is at the root of so many of our problems? Why do I want to lean in to a workweek that is so crushing to family? Why should I encourage young women to lean in to a corporate structure where there’s no maternity leave to speak of, no paternity leave to speak of? I am not just interested in women being paid as much as men; I’m also interested in [what they’re being] paid for. What are we doing this for? If it’s just to be equal in a system that is sort of akin to the Titanic, I don’t want to lean in to the Titanic. I want to get the hell out of the Titanic and lean in to something of my own creation and encourage other people to lean out and rebuild. So that’s the revolutionary in me. I realize that it’s also critical that we lean in to the institutions we already have and make change from within. I’m not just throwing this whole message out, but I’m asking that as we lean in, we also try to create more humane structures that honor other aspects of life than money and power, and that we create systems that support the beauty of families and the Earth.

MS
: I 100 percent agree with you on that, and I think there’s a catch-22. On the one hand, in order to get into some of these positions of influence—to even make those changes and get more women in politics—Washington right now is such a dysfunctional place, and running for office is such a
nightmarish, corrupt experience, that it’s hard to convince people who may have those sensibilities to want to go through that machine. And yet it’s the machine that’s running things right now, so even to transform it . . .

EL
: It’s a real catch-22. And all of us will have our different roles, and they’ll all be really important. That’s why I’m not on the “let’s trash Sheryl’s message” [bandwagon], because there are some people who just point-blank are saying, “I’m not interested in leaning in to corporate America.” I’m not being as revolutionary as that, but I do think that you can lean in and out at the same time. As Carla [Goldstein, cofounder of Omega Women’s Leadership Center] was saying, “Let’s just stand up and poke our head out from the trance of ‘equality means getting exactly what men have,’ when what men have is something that’s taking us all down.” You know, I know so many younger men, especially, who have taken seriously this call by their women to be more involved with their family, and they’re finding it now just as impossible to stay within structures that don’t really allow you to have a family. So I honor the people who are staying within the system and trying to make change from within, and sometimes that does require you to just fight like hell in the old style, just to get in there. But what usually happens, and we have history to teach us this, is that once you get in . . . you know, [it’s like] Nietzsche says: “Be careful, when fighting monsters, you don’t become one.”

MS
: When I interviewed Anita Hill, she said something about how she was concerned that women—because one of the things that may hold back our perception of having a woman in the White House is this notion that maybe she wouldn’t be tough enough to deal with a military situation or war—might be more inclined to prove their toughness if they do get to that position, which I found actually interesting and a little bit concerning.

EL
: Margaret Thatcher . . . that’s the whole notion there that the first line of women presidents and women leaders will have to prove themselves and overprove themselves, and hopefully they’ll get in and allow the next group of women to be a little more aligned with their true values, and the next. That may be true, but it will only be true if we constantly remind ourselves that this system we are trying like hell to get into was not created by us. And if you get these awful, sick feelings in your stomach about what it is you’re perpetuating, pay attention to them. Listen to them. Don’t let what happened to men happen to us, where it turns into heart attacks and it turns into a soul-crushing experience, where you emerge forty years later and you think,
Whoa, that was my life?
So we have the benefit of being strangers in a strange land, and strangers to a system are often the ones who feel the inhumanity of it the most. And so it behooves us to stay strange [
laughs]
and not to go all the way in so that we can’t report back to the powers that be and say, “Guess what? We’re here, and we’re going to change it also.” And that’s why they don’t want us in there, by the way. A strong woman is dangerous! A strong woman who stays attentive to her body, her feelings, her heart, is going to make real problems for the status quo.

MS
: It feels like that’s part of the catch-22 that women have, even the conversation that’s coming up with Sheryl’s book and the likability factor. If women are perceived as too soft or too emotional, they’re penalized, but if they seem to be ambitious or strong, they take a likability hit. It does seem like you can’t win whichever way you go.

EL
: The only way you can win—and we can win and we are winning and we will win—is if . . . first of all, we want everyone to win, because this isn’t about men losing and women winning. But the real way we can win is, as we do this leaning in and gaining our voice and toughening our aggression muscles, all of this is really important, but at the same time,
we also have to try to keep our hearts open, our femaleness, and whether it’s by nature or nurture doesn’t even really matter anymore. Females do tend to be more attentive to others, with a more nurturing spirit, a longer view of what’s helpful to multiple generations down the line. We have to stay attentive to those values that we have honed over millennia by being keepers of the family and keepers of the heart, so we can become more aggressive, more strategic, less concerned about whether people like us . . . and at the same time, we can stay centered in our feeling function, be proud to be emotional creatures, and hone the multi-intelligence that lives in every human being: intelligence of the heart, intelligence of the body, of the spirit—not just these mechanistic intelligences of rationality. We can lean in, lean out, and stand up, all at the same time.