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Conclusion The Difference that “Difference” Makes Elisabeth Israels Perry “Do I think a woman’ll ever be President? How do I know?” exclaimed Dr. Malvina Wormser, one of Sinclair Lewis’s more sympathetic feminist characters in his 1933 novel Ann Vickers. If only I’d been as evasive when students and colleagues asked me that question. Instead, starting around the mid-1990s, I’d answer: “2008.” Here’s how I arrived at that date. The night Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, he and his running mate, Al Gore, came out on a stage in Little Rock,Arkansas, and promised us a government that would“look like America.” These words thrilled me. After previous presidential elections, I used to clip press photos of new governmental appointees, tape them onto my office door, and scrawl underneath,“Does this look like America?”And of course, it never did. Most of the images (and sometimes all) were of a homogeneous set of white middle-aged men. The Clinton administration kept its promise pretty well. Feminists were especially pleased by Janet Reno’s appointment as attorney general, a socalled “hard”cabinet post that no woman had ever held. Clinton broke other new ground when he named two African American women to“softer”posts, Hazel O’Leary to Energy in his first term and Alexis Herman to Labor in his second. He named Donna Shalala head of Health and Human Services and Madeleine Albright ambassador to the United Nations, and when in his second term he made Albright his secretary of state, she became the first woman to hold that post. Other cabinet appointments, such as those of Ron Brown (Commerce) and Federico Fabian Peña (Transportation), broke racial and ethnic barriers. Feminists cheered when Clinton appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a lawyer and judge with a long-standing commitment to gender equity, to the U.S. Supreme Court. These appointments, I thought, would help Americans get used to seeing women and people of color in high places and to accept their exercise of authority as a matter of course. I expected Clinton to be reelected in 1996 and his vice president Al Gore to succeed him in 2000. Gore, I fantasized further, would diversify government even more, and after his two terms Americans would be ready for a woman to be president. Then all my calculations went awry. Clinton was impeached, an event that, though it ended without his removal from office, discredited his presidency. In 2000, instead of Al Gore we got George W. Bush, and in 2004, thanks (in part) to the horrific events of 9/11 and the subsequent anxieties over terrorism and war, we got him again. Bush deserves credit for increasing the number of women and minorities in high-profile positions, most notably when he appointed two African Americans as secretaries of state, first General Colin Powell and then Condoleezza Rice. Women and members of racial and ethnic minorities occupied other cabinet seats (Gale Norton, Margaret Spellings, Ellen Chao,Ann Veneman,Alberto Gonzalez, Rod Paige, and Carlos Gutierrez). At the same time, the numbers of women in higher office were also rising, albeit slowly. The percentage of women in Congress increased to 16.8 percent of the full body, and more women were winning statewide executive posts, including governorships.1 Thus I still believed that a woman might actually reach the White House in 2008. During this entire fifteen-year period, I never imagined an African American getting there first. Colin Powell’s name kept coming up on the Republican side, but he had refused to run. Barack Obama was on the Democratic horizon, but mostly as a “too-soon-to-tell” political novice. Then Hillary Rodham Clinton began to emerge as the Democratic Party frontrunner. Could she be the first female president I had predicted for 2008? Perhaps, but her candidacy worried me. Despite their rocky marital history, she and her husband were still “a couple,” and too many ordinary Americans could not bear the idea of Bill back in the White House, even (or especially) as “First Gentleman.”Her supporters countered that she shouldn’t be penalized for his behavior, and I agreed. But, as Kathryn Sklar observes in Chapter 1 of this anthology, many people considered Hillary merely a surrogate for Bill, and as Susan Hartmann suggests in Chapter 6, Bill could never qualify as the husband “beyond reproach” that a successful female presidential candidate requires. No other woman prominent in politics had Hillary’s name...

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