What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (48 page)
Authors: Marianne Schnall
MS
: You’ve written a whole book about how we think about power. I know one of the things you aim to do is to inspire women to embrace their power. Do women not do this enough? And if not, why?
GF
: Women resist embracing power because we have that old narrative in our heads that power means having power
over
, and that’s a very negative connotation. And it’s for good reason, because women have been discriminated against, women have been beaten and raped and power over us has been very unpleasant. So there’s a good reason for that. There’s also a risk in changing any power relationship. There’s just a risk when you’re shifting how you’re interacting with people within a culture. And there are many women, and I think this describes many of the women on the right, who take refuge in traditional roles, traditional gender roles, because they’re getting the benefit of certain kinds of protection, and there’s a risk if you lose that. You may risk losing your spouse. You may risk losing the love of people in your family who are important to you if you change yourself. But the risk of not making that change, in my view, is greater than the risk of making it. The risk of not making that change means that we will be stuck forever in this world where we are struggling just to have a fair shot! We’re not asking to be given special privileges. We’re just saying we want to have an equal place at the table and to have the same shot that a man does at being successful, at being a leader in government.
MS
: I know a lot of studies have shown that women need to really be persuaded to run for office. Why do you think that is? What can we do to help encourage more women into the political pipeline, especially when, as you’re saying, the system right now is very dysfunctional and corrupt, so it’s not that enticing, and running for office is such a hard machine to go through because of all that dysfunction?
GF
: Yes, absolutely. And even under the best of circumstances, politics is definitely a contact sport and you can get hurt in the process. But, to me, the reward of being able to implement policies that you know make life better for people outweighs the risks. And I think we need to teach
young women to take risks, to understand that losing a race is not losing, really. It’s just your next step on the way to winning. That’s how men look at that.
I’m going to do a little promo here, because this is why I am currently starting Take The Lead, an initiative to make sure that women reach parity, across the board, in leadership roles by 2025. And I think it has to be a movement. It isn’t just training. It has to feel like a movement. And there are two key pieces that I think are missing in most of the efforts that try to help and encourage women to run for office. One of them is, we need to spend more time helping women embrace their own power—the power that they do have—and to love it, to value it, and in the process, to release their fear of controversy and conflict. There wouldn’t be controversy if the issue were not important. So you can take that and use that for your benefit.
The second part of it is that we need to teach women the principles of movement building, which is not the same as carrying a picket sign and walking out on the sidewalk, which is how many of us think about movement building. But it is learning the basic principles of what I call sister courage. Be a sister—reach out to other women, ask for help when you need it. Women are very inclined to isolate ourselves and to feel like we have to solve our own problems alone, but we don’t. Have the courage to put the issues out on the table if we see an injustice, if we see something that needs to be fixed. Have the courage to put it out there, because almost always, there will be other people who have that point of view, too, but they haven’t had the courage to talk about it. And then . . . put those two pieces together with a plan, a strategic plan. Go for it. And it’s not rocket science. It makes me feel very sad to think that my generation of Second Wave feminists didn’t really pay attention to teaching those kinds of nuts-and-bolts aspects of movement building to the next generation. I think that’s why there’s so much intergenerational discord and distress that goes on. Because there’s great joy in joining together with other people to make
something big happen. Huge joy. Even to make something small happen. But it’s the joining together that gives you the joy.
MS
: That is one of the things I really respect that you’ve done: you constantly reach out to younger generations. I know you have an intergenerational group that you started. A lot of people’s impression—which I know is wrong, and I’m sure you would say this, too—of younger women is that they’re largely apathetic, not grateful for these hard-won rights that we have. But to some degree, there’s something healthy to that, too, that they now
can
take certain things for granted; they do have more choices available. But what is your impression, through speaking to and working with the younger generations of women? Do you think it’s true that they are complacent and apathetic? What is your characterization of the young women whom you meet today?
GF
: Well, I think everybody has lots to do in their lives, and younger women today, particularly, have very full lives, and very often by the time they’re in their thirties, they’ve got their jobs, they’ve got a relationship, they’ve got children, they’re balancing so many things. Whereas for me, I had my kids first. And then I did community volunteering. And then I went to work. It’s really different when you do it in that sequence. So I just think every generation is different, and every generation has to speak in its own tongue. You enter the world from where you enter it, and I think that one generation can never blame another generation, or it doesn’t do any good—let’s put it that way—to blame another generation for that inevitable fact that you enter the world from where you enter it. The one annoyance that I have is that to young women who say, “Well, we have so many choices that it’s making us crazy,” I just want to say, “Yeah, try living life without any choices. See how you like that.” So that’s my one little bit of semitough love [
laughs
]. But other than that, basically I think we need to
cut each other a little slack and understand that everybody has to speak in their own tongues. And I think that younger women—and maybe I’m just lucky that I have the chance to interact with so many younger women who are so engaged and who have started amazing new ways of being activists, like Emily May with Hollaback!, and the Ultra Violet founders—there are so many new ways that young women are actually activating themselves. I’d like to see them think bigger. I’d like to see them thinking more systemically, because a lot of those activations are about fighting back against something that’s wrong. I think where we are is, we need to be creating our own agenda for what is right. That needs a different kind of activism. It’s harder. It’s harder to get that kind of activism going. So I would encourage bigger thinking. But they’re brilliant in the use of social media for activism. Think of the things that get changed every day because somebody starts a petition. I think it’s fantastic.
MS
: Me, too. It’s very hopeful. This is, of course, about equality and fairness and parity, but overall, why is it important that women be equally represented in all of these sectors?
GF
: I actually think that while you and I have fought based on the parity-and-fairness argument, today the argument for the economic benefits of women having an equal share of power are equally strong. And that those are the arguments that may turn the tides, especially in the business world and even in the political world. If you can make the case that having more women on your board is a better investment or brings you more return on your investment, suddenly that becomes an easier case to make. Suddenly people can think they’re doing something because it’s the right thing, but really they’re doing it for economic reasons. Well, fine—I don’t really care [
laughs]
. Fine with me. I just want my daughters and granddaughters to have an equal chance!
“I feel like there’s a real kind of tipping point happening, and so to have the crowning achievement of that tipping point be a woman in the highest office in America, I just think it would be fantastic and totally organic and make perfect sense. Which is why I really do think I will see it in my lifetime. I feel like there’s enough momentum among the feminist movement
—
and even those who don’t necessarily identify as feminists but are really newly aware and excited about these issues
—
that it just has to happen.”
C
OURTNEY
E. M
ARTIN
is an author, blogger, and speaker. She has written five books, including
Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists
and
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection Is Harming Young Women
. She is editor emeritus at
Feministing.com
, founding director of the Solutions Journalism Network, and partner at Valenti Martin Media, a social media strategy firm. Her work has recently been featured in
The New York Times, Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor
, and
More
magazine, among other national publications. Courtney has appeared on
The Today Show, Good Morning America
, MSNBC, and
The O’Reilly Factor
and speaks widely on millennials’ reimagining success and social change. She is the recipient of the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics and a residency from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. She is the leader of The Op-Ed Project’s
Public Voices Fellowship Program at Yale University and a strategist for the TED Prize.
MARIANNE SCHNALL
: One of the most general questions that informs the theme of the overall book is, why do you think we have not had a woman president so far?
COURTNEY MARTIN
: I think it’s a perfect storm that’s prevented us from having a woman president thus far. On the one hand, I think there are perception issues around leadership and authority. Gloria Steinem speaks so eloquently about people’s unconscious hunger for sort of that “big-daddy” authority figure as a president, and the ways in which that has informed who we support and how we vote. So I think that’s really at play.
I also really feel like the structure of the political system—and the electoral system, specifically—is really at play. As someone who cares a lot about political issues and feels very comfortable being vocal and being sort of in the spotlight, I know I would never run for office, because I see the ways in which the system itself is so corrupt and forces people to essentially become fundraisers, as opposed to change makers. So I think that compromise feels too big for a lot of women. I think there are really legitimate reasons why women aren’t as interested in running for political office, which, as I said, has to do with the structure of politics, but I also think we have to get inside the system in order to change it. So I whole-heartedly support any of my sisters who actually do want to navigate that system and feel like they do have the chops for getting involved in something that requires so much fundraising and so much biting your tongue. I think it’s a really complicated reason why there still hasn’t been a woman president, but I feel hopeful there will be.
MS
: What factors or conditions do you think need to be in place to make a woman president, and do you think that, in terms of our consciousness, we’re ready for that?
CM
: I think that when I look at the landscape of women who might run, people like Kirsten Gillibrand or others, it feels like we’re really getting closer and closer. I feel like we are on the brink. The other thing was, Michelle Obama gave the Democratic National Convention speech. A lot of people were writing on Facebook, “Michelle, run!” And that sounds really exciting to me. I would love to see what the unleashed Michelle Obama leadership would look like. So I feel like, on a very practical level, I see a lot of women who I think are real contenders in the next two decades, let’s say, for that kind of a position.
The question of are we ready for it, is the American consciousness ready for it, is a really interesting question. I’ve never felt like we were more ready for it—I think Hillary’s failed run in many ways has sort of laid the groundwork for a woman to win, because I think it normalized a lot of things about women’s leadership and women’s authority, even as people were rebelling against it and there was all this sexism in the media. But I think just the sum total of impressions that people had of this woman running and this woman being taken seriously—she really did lay some groundwork, so I think that was probably something that needed to happen.
And then finances, I think, are the other big thing. We have organizations like EMILY’s List that are obviously really central to this. I think women are going to have to, first and foremost, really financially support other women who are running. And then beyond that, we’re going to have to get the guys on board to support women who are running, because you just can’t become president in this country right now without a massive amount of money.
