Forget rocking the cradle. It’s way beyond time that women rocked the system — and the Oval.
Play like a girl. Can it be that we’re finally serious about putting a woman in the Oval? Two hundred twenty seven years since good ol’ George Washington was president, it’s seems only right that we finally seat a woman in Maison Blanc. We pride ourselves on being an enlightened country with an advanced culture, yet other mainstream countries have boasted women leaders for decades. Where have ours been?
Sure, after years of struggling, we finally have had women candidates, a woman Speaker of the House and women in SCOTUS, but the welcome mat has been askew. The ERA amendment, a critical step towards equality, still has not been ratified. Even when it finally is, will it erase the mindset of ingrained patriarchy? I doubt it. Decades of bias and attacks on gender have never been never felt by male counterparts who assumed leadership roles as their anointed right. Yet, however educated and supremely capable, women have never seemed to make it to the Resolute desk.
We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly. Margaret Atwood
Helen of Troy. Indira Gandhi. Golda Meir. Margaret Thatcher. These iron maidens didn’t exactly epitomize warm and fuzzy. They brought their A-game, exactly what their countries needed in their time. They led their countries to war within a male hierarchy, conforming to values that allowed them to lead in the first place. Angela Merkel of Germany, New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, Finland’s Sanna Marin and the European Union’s Christine Lagarde knew how it’s done because they, too, had to overcome gender bias. And, like Nancy Pelosi, even at 80, they had to outmen men – in heels.
I’d like our country to see for itself, in this critical moment in time, what we would look like with a woman in charge. Could this country possibly do worse than the previous Potus’ appalling tidal wave of incompetence? Yet, blatant, outrageous accusations are unleashed with abandon when a woman has the audacity to claim the same positions men have taken for granted through the centuries. Minutes after our first female VP was named, the Facebook and Twitter universe was on fire with vile gender and racial attacks. Now that the same woman has been handed the baton to actually run for President, I can’t imagine the vitriol that will erupt. Wait, yes I can.
More than 50 years ago, tiny Sri Lanka was the first to break the political gender barrier; India followed a few years later. The UN reported that, as of September 2022, 30 women were serving as Heads of State and/or Government in 29 countries. While those countries thrived under their leadership — none of them are in the Americas. The fact that we, as an educated superpower have still not achieved that designation, is in itself cause for collective head scratching!
In business, there are still many more leadership seats where glass ceilings are neatly intact. Apparently, the idea of women as true equals seems as surreal as aliens landing in NYC. While it’s true we are hardly the only place in the world where patriarchy rules, we should be committed to putting equality, in all dimensions, on the menu. Even in my own little world, I saw lines drawn within the advertising agency my husband and I jointly owned and partnered. I created and ran the business, was its creative director, social media and promotion maven; my husband was the PR counsel. Yet, I had to constantly remind clients, who insisted on talking to ‘the owner, the boss’, that I was that person, too. Even in small business, it seems hard for people to accept that the person in charge isn’t a ‘he’.
Some leaders are born women. Geraldine Ferraro
If women did man the Oval (no pun intended), perhaps infant and mother mortality wouldn’t number among the highest in the civilized world. Maybe we’d think twice about 1% of the population having wallets equaling the worth of 3.6 billion people. Women, who represent 80% of consumers, might better address sustainability, safe food technologies and affordable pharmaceuticals. A mom Potus might be more concerned about climate change that may very well end the world as we know it for our children. And women have a particular dislike of guns killing those kids in classrooms.
Every man on this planet was born of and nurtured by a woman. “Men can boast about occupying top slots in history’s long list of conquering ‘heroes’, bloodthirsty tyrants, and genocidal thugs.” said Steven Pinker of Harvard University. “Women have been and will be a pacifying force. Traditional war is a man’s game.” Amen.
Continue reading “A Woman’s Place is in the House . . . The Peoples House.”
The Other Shoe 