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33. Learning from a Year of Hope and Hard Choices
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33 Learning from a Year of Hope and Hard Choices Gloria Steinem It seems that as long as I can remember, I’ve heard two questions: “When will we have a woman president?” and “When will we have a Black president?” The tone might be angry, as in, “Will this ever be a democracy?” Or sad, as in “Will I live to see it?” But the longing was always there. I know this has been going on for at least forty years because that’s how long I’ve been volunteering in political campaigns; an addiction I owe to my mother. Her stories of suffering during the Depression before I was born, and how Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt helped us out of it, convinced me that politics were a crucial part of daily life. Because she also explained that both Roosevelts had been born class levels above us, yet identified with the poor, I grew up assuming that leaders were to be judged by what they did, not by who they were. This later helped me to see that a male feminist president could advance equality more than a woman of any race who wanted to be one of the boys, and an anti-racist president would be a relief no matter what group she or he was born into. Leadership was about content, not form, and the point was to make life more fair, not to get a job for one person. Still, when there was a leader who looked like “us” but behaved like “them”—say, Margaret Thatcher who opposed the women’s movement in England or any person of color here who didn’t support equality—it took the heart right out of me. I, too, longed for someone who truly represented the majority because she or he knew what it was to live as a female human being, a person of color, or both; someone who could inspire more children to see themselves as leaders, and who finally interrupted the unbroken line of White, male, married 251 252 / Who Should Be First? and otherwise preselected presidents. Expanding that small presidential talent pool seemed like a seriously overdue idea. The history of social change may begin at the bottom, but it still must transform the top. So I always answered with my best guess and highest hope: “We’ll have a couple of different varieties of men first, and then we’ll have a woman.” Even an Irish Catholic had been controversial, so I didn’t try to guess which men. Maybe a Jewish president? Maybe a Black or a Latino? It just seemed to me that female authority was still too confined to childrearing and the home to be accepted at the top of the public world, especially in this powerful nation. Indeed, the mere prospect of a woman in power seemed to make many men feel regressed to childhood, which was the last time they experienced a powerful woman, and some women couldn’t imagine it either. To change all this would take a lot more equality for women outside the home, and a lot more equality for men in it; especially in childrearing. Altogether, even I, hope-a-holic that I am, couldn’t see how a female human being of any race could become commander-in-chief in my lifetime. If that seems pessimistic, think about the two big training grounds for presidents: politics and the military. Experience in combat is still considered a big presidential plus—although most voters would probably prefer someone who resolved problems without combat—and women still are officially barred from it.1 Indeed, the fear of women as combatants helped to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have made sex discrimination as unconstitutional as that based on race, religion, or national origin. At the time, I amused myself by wondering if this resistance wasn’t just fear of all the overworked waitresses, welfare mothers, and battered women with a year or so of combat training. Now, I wonder more. Modern wars are one big combat zone with no front lines, and female soldiers—disproportionately of color or poor, and also better educated than their male counterparts—are being wounded and killed whereever they are; a fact that has caused a dozen countries, including Canada, to train women for combat. Nonetheless, Congress still excludes all females from ground combat on paper, thus preserving male command of the U.S. military; the largest managed economy...