When I was on a blog talk radio show last Friday a caller asked about the impact of a possible Hillary Clinton win on the world. My answer was that a woman as head of state might still be a big deal in parts of the United States but it isn’t in many parts of the world — and on this the U.S. is behind the times.
Now, John Hughes, former editor of the Christian Science Monitor, and currently a professor of communications at Brigham Young University, looks more closely at this topic in a Monitor column. Here’s part of it:
On Sunday, millions of French men and women will determine whether a woman should become their president. Socialist Ségolène Royal is running against conservative Nicolas Sarkozy. Should she win, both France and Germany, two of the major countries in Europe, would be presided over by women. Angela Merkel is the German chancellor and currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union.
Although the current political wisdom in France is that Mr. Sarkozy holds the lead, Ms. Royal’s campaign has captured international interest and draws attention anew to the role of women in politics and government. Other women of extraordinary talent, such as Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, India’s Indira Gandhi, and Israel’s Golda Meir have led their nations successfully, winning lasting praise in the history books. But they are in the minority.
When national leaders gather for the photographers at various international conclaves, it is still men who dominate the picture, and women seem almost a rarity.
In the United States, women can become astronauts and Supreme Court judges and cabinet ministers and governors and newspaper editors and publishers and secretaries of State, but the presidency has so far eluded them. Geraldine Ferraro was nominated in 1984 as the Democratic candidate for vice president, but the Democrats did not make it to the White House.
Now Sen. Hillary Clinton is running for the presidency, and, though a victory for her would make history, she would actually not be the first woman to be nominated. That was Victoria Claflin Woodhull, nominated by the National Woman’s Suffrage Association in 1872 on a ticket of National Radical Reformers.
America has already gone through the “Can a Catholic be elected president?” and the “Can a Jew be elected president?” debate. This time around, the country is having the “Can a Mormon be elected president?” debate. But though the barriers to candidacy on grounds of religion have been crumbling, till now there has been a kind of tacit sub rosa gender bias against women.
Read it ALL.
I’ve long contended that political gender bias for America’s top political job has been a bit puzzling given the successes of women in politics elsewhere in the world. I lived and worked as a reporter in New Delhi, India during the days of the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (where I met TMV coblogger Swaraaj Chauhan, who was then one of his country’s up and coming print journalists).
In fact, I was at one foreign correspondents’ dinner where I was first in line, as the youngest journalist, to greet the Prime Minister. She looked coldly at me until the TV lights came on and then smiled warmly and stopped smiling when the lights went off. “After all, she didn’t want to waste it,” a British journalist later explained. She was considered one of the shrewdest, toughest people on the Indian political scene and a master of politics.
There are several American women political figures who probably would have advanced to higher offices in their respective parties if politics had earlier been played on a more level gender playing field. But you get the sense that with the campaign of Hillary Clinton that has now changed — that win or lose the barrier has been shaken, if it’s not down yet. And the day will soon come when it won’t be a big news event to some people if a woman is President.
NOTE ON JOHN HUGHES: When I wrote for the Monitor as their Special Correspondent in Madrid (a kind of super stringer/contributor who wrote all of the paper’s original reporting dealing with the immediate post-Franco transitional era while in that position in Spain) I would visit the Monitor’s office in Boston when I was briefly in the U.S. The editors I worked with would then take me into say hello to John Hughes. Hughes was (and is) one of the most solid journalists around who always knew how to keep things in perspective. His periodic columns in the present incarnation of the Monitor are must-reading for those interested in serious opinion journalism versus angry rants.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.