What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (66 page)

MS
: During these interviews oftentimes people bring up the fact that it’s only recently that women didn’t even have the right to vote. Where do you think we are right now? I’ve heard some people saying that we’re stalled. Sometimes there are signs of progress; for example, there are more women in Washington, yet on the flip side, there’s all this backlash about reproductive rights and contraception and all these stories lately of rapes. When you’re looking at where we are, the pulse of the moment in terms of the status of women, are you optimistic?

AR
: I’m totally optimistic. I mean, I’m optimistic, because of what you said—you hear women in very prominent positions. You hear Hillary Clinton. You hear Sheryl Sandberg. You hear these women in traditional positions of power, saying, “You can do it, I can do it, we can do it,” and you see the numbers. They’re not monumental change, but you see the numbers change incrementally.

MS
: You visit college campuses all the time. I don’t even know where this necessarily comes from, but there’s a sense that maybe younger women are more apathetic, they take their lives for granted, or they don’t call themselves feminists. What’s your take on young women today?

AR
: So statistically more women identify as feminists, just in general, than in any other generation. They started these polls in the seventies—CNN and
Time
and different places have done them—and consistently more women today identify with feminism than any other moment in time. And more women in the 18–24 age bracket identify with feminism than any other age cohort, so the numbers prove it. But I really see it time and time again that young people are very connected and energized and passionate and connected to a movement for social justice for women. That said, I don’t think they’re reading
Ms. Magazine
. I don’t think they’re joining the National Organization for Women or the AAUW. I don’t think they’re necessarily turning up at a Hillary Clinton rally. I don’t think they’re expressing their feminism in a way that is typical of women from other generations, and so that I think makes it hard for people to see them being passionately feminist.

MS
: I think that another reason why feminism as a movement has become a loaded term is because it’s often viewed as being only for elite white women and not as inclusive. Do you have a sense if that’s improving and what the feminist movement can do to be more inclusive?

AR
: I think there are two ways. I mean, Loretta Ross always says that by continuing this assumption that it was a white women’s movement, you erase the contribution of black women. And so I think sometimes we have to resist that label, because it does discount the work that’s being done by non-white people and has been done by non-white people in this
movement. And I think we’ve fallen into the trap—“we” meaning people who really talk about feminism—when people sort of say, “Well, what does feminism achieve?” and, “Show me some examples of how feminism has changed society.” The examples we give tend to be white, middle-class examples. How many are university presidents? How many women are going to colleges? How many women are graduating from graduate schools? So the examples that we give of women’s progress are very much weighted towards the white, middle-class experience, and so I think that we have to equally talk about how the landscape has changed for
all
women, not just those who have accessed traditional avenues of male privilege and power. Because I think those who’ve done that tend to be white, tend to be middle class, tend to be straight, tend to be very highly educated, tend to be very privileged. And so [we need to] use better examples of what we mean by feminism’s legacy and what feminism is prioritizing.

I also think that we have to—and this is not so much as people who are working exclusively on feminism, but just everybody—I think we have to label things feminist that we haven’t traditionally labeled feminist. So calling it out, when you’re reading it in the news media, for instance, the story about Hurricane Sandy and how everybody’s moving the elderly out of old-age homes that had to be evacuated. You know, that’s likely a woman’s story, because I’m sure that 80 percent of the residents of an old-age home in Far Rockaway were women. So also trying to expand what feminism is, by taking things that haven’t been labeled and exposing the feminism piece in that.

MS
: As you were saying, there are other channels to create change, and you’ve written a lot and talk a lot about just promoting activism. A lot of times it’s hard, not just for women but for people in general to see themselves as “change makers” because certainly there are big, grand things you can do—you can run for office and you can head an organization—but
even in your own community there are opportunities. What advice or encouragement would you offer to somebody who is looking out at the world and seeing all of these problems, but not knowing if they can make a difference and so become sort of paralyzed? What would you say to them?

AR
: I think you have to look most minutely at your own life—and I think that activism traditionally is easier to do when it seems not as something that affects you directly. That’s why people get so outraged by the Taliban, but don’t get so outraged by the conditions in Brownsville, New York. I mean, people are so much more willing to care when it’s farther away, in part because it seems much more desperate, but in part because you don’t have to assume responsibility if it’s happening so far away. It’s a problem they can just help to “solve” without having to take responsibility. And I think that you actually have more effect and impact if you look at your own life and your own community and you start to make change in very minute ways there—and that, collectively, can add up to something much bigger.

MS
: I have two daughters, so I’m very aware of all the messages and influences that try to get them to focus on trivial things, to conform, to obsess on their looks, to suppress their true voice. How can we help girls? What message would you want to say to girls to have them value their voice and know that they have what it takes to be a leader or a change agent?

AR
: Girls—and this is proven time and time again—they do what they see, not what they’re told. So I think the more that you can expose them to examples of people
doing
—especially women, but equally expose them to men who are taking on child rearing and men who are leaving work at five o’clock and women who are doing the things that sort of defy stereotypes—then that exposure is going to become so valuable. . . . And
the more you can expose them both in personal and professional ways to those differences, the more that’s going to become their sense of normalcy, and the more they can see women in positions of power from early on. It’s not going to be abnormal. I mean I feel like I do a disservice to my boys when it comes to sports, because most of the professional sporting events we go to tend to be men’s basketball. And they see women in positions of power, they see Sheryl Sandberg and Hillary Clinton and they see political power. But I think the way that I’m not doing them a service is in the athletics and sort of showing them that “Oh, my gosh, really we value men’s sports; we don’t really value women’s sports.” And that’s why I worry. I should take them to Liberty Games, so the sooner they can see, “Oh, girls are good basketball players, too,” that’s going to be their sense of normal, rather than later in life discovering, “Oh, I guess girls can play basketball.”

MS
: And the second part to that question—because you are the mother of two boys—what advice would you have in terms of raising boys? What do you try to instill in them so they can also embrace their wholeness and all their human qualities?

AR
: Well, I think—because I’m still convinced that I was supposed to have girls; I was like, wasn’t I supposed to have girls?—I think in some ways, I treat them as if they were girls. Meaning that I think it’s so cool to go to see Sheryl Sandberg speak, and they care about the things that I care about. Some of it is I do live my life in a way that is pretty authentically a feminist household. I tend to be the one whose work life is more dominant, and with that comes some greater decision-making power that I have. Not that I wield it, but I just think that, for example, I am not the one that has to deal with babysitting when I’m away. Because it’s just, like, I’m going to be gone all week, and they see their dad negotiating that stuff.

So I think that they’ve grown up really respecting women, and I would say that—this is a stretch, because who knows where their lives will go in the next several years—they’re both typical boys in a sense that they’re both very athletic, but I also think that they’re very good students, they’re very good listeners, they sit when they’re told to, I think they get something from that. I see it. I see it benefiting them, and obviously it could just be what their personalities are, but I think that some of that has to do with the way we live our lives.

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN

“We have to take ownership of the language and say, look, the Republican Party
is
a feminist party. When you look at the elected leaders and the people who are speaking on behalf of the Republican Party, traditionally in U.S. history, they were Republican women. And we’ve lost that feeling . . . nobody thinks of the Republican Party as the party of women, and we need to get back to that. . . . And looking at a word like ‘feminism’ and not choking at the sound of it would be a good way to start.”

I
LEANA
R
OS
-L
EHTINEN REPRESENTS
Florida’s 27th Congressional District. Born in Havana, Cuba, she was eight when she and her family were forced to flee from the oppressive communist regime of Fidel Castro. They settled in Miami and put down permanent roots in their community.

In 1982, Ros-Lehtinen was elected to the Florida House of Representatives and the Florida Senate in 1986, becoming the first Hispanic woman to serve in either body. In 1989, she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives—the first Hispanic woman to serve in Congress—following a special election to fill the seat held by the late Claude Pepper. She has been strongly returned to Congress since, winning 60 percent of the vote in 2012.

Ros-Lehtinen is a strong advocate of programs that address the serious problem of domestic violence against women. She was a lead sponsor of the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which increases
resources toward the prosecution of domestic violence, dating violence, and sexual assault. She is chairman emeritus of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and is now chairman of the Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa. In this role, she continues to voice her strong support for the state of Israel and human rights, including her opposition to Castro’s dictatorial regime in Cuba. She has also led on pressing foreign policy issues, including the fight against Islamist extremism and support of free-trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea.

MARIANNE SCHNALL
: Why do you think we’ve not yet had a woman president? What do you think it will take to make that happen?

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN
: Well, I think a farm team is still pretty weak and in formation, and that’s where good ball players come from, from the farm teams and the college teams, before you get to the big show, the pros. And we’ve had many women elected at the local level, but there’s a big disconnect between local, which is city, mayor, school board to state, which is state representatives or state senators or governors. And then another huge disconnect between the state levels and the federal level—members of Congress or senators or members of the Cabinet and then the presidency. So because so many of our presidents have come from the governorships, those seats have not been filled by too many women, but these past two years have really changed and now I think that we will see more viable women candidates because more women are holding governorships and there are more women U.S. senators, more women members of Congress, which is where the stepping stone is usually to run for the presidency. So there’s been a big disconnect between the local levels, where there are many, many, many women elected and any other higher level. So I think
it’s going to really change now. I think that’s why we haven’t seen women presidential candidates, because they have not been on those stones where they step off from, to run for the presidency. But that has really changed in these two years and we are going to be hearing a lot about women candidates who are governors and are thinking of running for the presidency or the Senate or Congress. So it’s changed a lot now.

MS
: In addition to whatever structural obstacles that there are, I’ve heard in some of my interviews that there may be psychological obstacles, of both men and women, to envisioning a woman in that commander in chief role. Do you think that our consciousness is ready to have a woman president?