What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (74 page)

JZ
: Yeah, I think it is. I think there’s been a lot of progress recently, and I especially noticed it in terms of this “having it all” workplace balance debate, where I think specifically on this issue a lot of men are weighing in. I think there was an article in
The New York Times
really recently—a man wrote about how he hasn’t had it all either, how he’s had to make sacrifices, which I thought was a really great article. Because we have to acknowledge that the work-life balance issue, as well as other critical issues, are necessary for men and women to work on and there will be no solution until we all address it. And I think, generally, I’ve always been committed to making men’s voices heard on The FBomb. What I’ve noticed, just in my own personal life, is that young men sort of have the same reaction toward feminists that young women do. But then when you push them, when you ask them if they support equality and about pointed issues, they will also say that they align themselves with a feminist agenda. I think we’ve definitely reached a point in our society where men are very open to those ideas and are supportive of those ideas, especially in conversations about family life. Again, men today see themselves as being
involved fathers and really want to have a balance in their homes. These are all very important issues.

MS
: I don’t know if you remember back to this—but I thought it was really telling when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were running against each other and there was this interesting friction that was going on between this whole idea of the milestone of voting for an African American president and voting for the first woman president. And I remember it seemed like there were generational differences. I often think younger generations see these movements more broadly, where all these forms of oppression and injustice are interconnected. Kimberly Crenshaw uses the term “intersectionality.” Do you think that part of the reason why the feminist word isn’t as appealing to younger generations is that they tend to look at the broader lens of all these classifications that society uses to divide us? For example, the linkages of racial equality and gay rights and women’s equality, rather than seeing them all as independent communities and movements?

JZ
: I definitely think we do. And I think that a more intersectional movement is one that my generation is more likely to get behind, because I think we were raised in this climate where . . . I mean, of course we haven’t reached equality, but I think young women and young men growing up didn’t really see themselves divided in terms of gender in the same way previous generations might have. And just to use the Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama example, when a lot of people from my generation were talking about that election, we kind of rejected that idea of identity politics. I think we really were considering them in terms of their own merits as candidates, whereas so much of the media conversation was about whether we would have a black president or a woman president. I think my generation definitely comes at it from more of an intersectional approach.

MS
: Even at such a young age, you seem to be very outspoken and stand up for what you believe, and you are now becoming an important voice for your generation. It also takes a lot of courage to come out and be like, “I’m a proud feminist.” I’m just wondering, where did that come from for you to be so bold so young? To what do you credit that?

JZ
: You know, it’s actually funny because I’ve heard that before. People will tell me that, they’ll be like, “It’s so brave of you to come out and call yourself a feminist.” I would say, retrospectively, I’m not sure I even looked at it that way. I just came across this movement and identified with it. And I think I grew up in a feminist household. It was never really an overt thing. I think my parents have actually started to call themselves feminists after all of this happened and seeing what I’ve done. So, in a sense, it came out of nowhere, but it was really just a matter of me finding this movement and learning about it and just identifying with it so much and feeling so much conviction in the fact that I knew that this was right. And I think that’s the thing that just drives everything that I do—it’s just a complete and total belief that this is the movement that will lead us to the way the world needs to be. I mean, I think at the end of the day—and I try to impart this to other people my age—I think we worry so much about what other people think about us, and at the end of the day I just don’t see how that matters so much. And obviously that’s a hard conclusion to come to for most people my age, but it’s just something that’s always been there in me. I just really don’t care what other people think. I really believe that this is right.

MS
: Would you ever consider running for office? Is that something that you could ever fathom doing? I think you’d be great.

JZ
: You know, actually a few years ago, I really wasn’t that interested in politics, maybe for all of the reasons that I’ve mentioned already, but
I think it was really the last election that I really started to follow it and became very interested in it. It’s definitely something that I consider doing, yeah. I actually wonder if having called myself a feminist will be a hindrance, though, and I hope it wouldn’t be, but that’s something that I also think about.

MS
: In terms of the status of women today, I’m always hopeful on the one side, because there are so many positive signs of progress in the world, and then on the other side there’s some real cause for concern, whether it’s about the alarming instances of violence against women in the United States and internationally or this crazy backlash against reproductive rights and contraception—issues we thought were settled. Where’s your sense of where we are right now in the arc of women’s history?

JZ
: I think it’s really scary how much misinformation there is out there and how much we still need to educate people about women’s basic rights; the things that elected politicians say about topics like reproductive rights are just insane. But at the same time, I almost think that—especially with those comments about “legitimate rape” and these really ridiculous comments—it has sort of rallied my generation in a really positive way because I think we see that there are still people like that out there. And we see the need for movements like feminism and we see the need to really put ourselves out there and rally around the things that we believe in. So ultimately I am really hopeful and I think my generation, probably more than any other generation in the past, I think we’re on the same page in terms of social issues. I think that there was a poll recently, just in terms of the issue of gay marriage, where something like 80 percent of millennials support legalizing gay marriage. I think we’re coming to this point where we are on the same page in terms of social issues, and I am really hopeful about that.

MS
: If you had the ear of girls and young women today, what wisdom or advice would you want to give to younger generations to come?

JZ
: I guess to sum it up, I would say “go for it,” which is really cliché, but the thing that I notice most often about my generation is that we have all the tools. I think we have the intelligence, the drive, we have everything going for us. But—this idea goes with the whole
Lean In
conversation—I see so many young girls just feeling like they’re defeated already, that they’re not special enough, they could never possibly accomplish the things that they want to. I see it even in the examples of people submitting for The FBomb—I constantly get emails to The FBomb, which is open for submissions, saying, “I really want to write about this, but I don’t know, I feel like I’m probably not a good enough writer . . .” And of course I encourage them, and then they’ll send something and of course it’s brilliant. I really think that one of the biggest things my generation needs to work on is putting ourselves out there and believing in ourselves.

STEPHANIE SCHRIOCK

“These campaigns, they are tough business, but they’re not impossible. And the good, I swear, outweighs the bad. You meet the most amazing people on the campaign trail. You get support from people that you didn’t even imagine. And when you get there, I know you watch television and it feels like they get nothing done, but the truth is you really do make so much difference for so many people, every day
—
whether you’re in Congress, you’re in the Senate, you’re in the state house, or you’re in the city council
—
every day you make a difference for somebody and that’s a pretty important piece of what our democracy is about. It’s well worth it to take it on.”

E
MILY’s L
IST
P
RESIDENT
Stephanie Schriock is a recognized leader, bringing more than twelve years of fundraising, management, and strategic planning experience to EMILY’s List, a group of men and women committed to electing Democratic women and empowering women donors and voters in order to achieve progressive change. She’s been described as “inspirational,” a “star in American politics,” and “a spectacular campaign manager.”

Schriock has been at the forefront of some of the most challenging and innovative political campaigns of the past decade. As the national finance director for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, she built and led the team that revolutionized political fundraising. By harnessing the power
of the Internet and implementing other creative fundraising strategies, Schriock’s team raised more than $52 million in a Democratic primary, far exceeding previous records. The accomplishment caught the eye of a farmer and state senator in Schriock’s home state of Montana, who was looking to unseat an eighteen-year Republican incumbent U.S. senator in a state with an eight-point Republican advantage. As the campaign manager for Jon Tester, Schriock oversaw every aspect of a $5 million race, ultimately leading Tester to defeat conservative Republican Conrad Burns and help Democrats take over the Senate. Tester quickly made Schriock his Senate chief of staff.

When Democratic leaders in Washington were looking for the right person to manage Al Franken’s Senate campaign in Minnesota, they turned to Schriock. Franken’s $18 million campaign against Republican Senator Norm Coleman was, not surprisingly, one of the most-watched races of the 2008 election cycle. The hard-fought Franken victory solidified Schriock’s reputation as a major force in Democratic politics.

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

STEPHANIE SCHRIOCK
: Well, first off, we’ve had 250 years of a male-driven established political culture, in which for 150 of those years, women didn’t have the right to vote. So you’ve got to start there, with a culture that decided that only men would vote—and this is women in the United States, obviously. So women get the right to vote in 1920. We begin to see a handful of women, in fact, before 1920. My home state hero, Jeannette Rankin, ran for Congress and became the first woman in Congress in 1917, before women had the right to vote. I love that little story. So you see a
handful of women stepping up and running over the last ninety years since that significant moment, but it really has been during the last forty years where women have been given the opportunities in
all
aspects of life for advancement in careers, across the board. So we have now in the last forty years finally seen women coming out of college in equal numbers to their male counterparts. The doors have been opened because of the great work of women like Gloria Steinem in the sixties and seventies, and so many of her sisters who broke down those barriers that we have women who think that it is possible. It is possible to run for the United States Senate; it is possible to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company; it is all possible. So we had to go through that whole process.

Now we’re in the place where we are building off of what is really about a forty-year network, to make this final big change. And I believe that one of the largest and most important things that has happened in these last forty years—and I realize that I am a little biased because I run it—but twenty-eight years ago a group of women got together and said we needed some sort of funding network to support women candidates, because they had nowhere to go. Because there was this long two-century network of men that women just did not have access to in any real way. And so EMILY’s List started because women had nowhere to go to get the resources they needed to run for office. And so as EMILY’s List started building that network and started electing women to the United States Senate, to the House, to governorships, you now see this building pipeline of women at the local levels, the state levels, and beyond that has really been built by the work of EMILY’s List and other organizations over the last twenty-eight years. And so now we’re in a place—because of all that groundwork to get women in the pipeline, because all of that work in building this network, which is now at EMILY’s List, two million members strong—to say let’s take it to the next level and let’s say it’s our time
for a woman to become president of the United States. We have the candidate possibilities and we have the network, and now it’s time.