The much discussed distrust of women as U.S. presidential candidates, be it Hillary Clinton few years ago, or Kamala Harris now appears puzzling at first sight. Google, IBM, Xerox, Yahoo, HP, the Fed, government departments, national advisers, never mind fashion and cosmetics – all have had women at their helm.
The UK had Margaret Thatcher (and Queen Elisabeth and Queen Victoria in the past); Germany had Angela Merkel; constantly under-threat-of-war-and-terror Israel had the late Golda Meir. Can it be the case that none of the American women candidates have been adequate, or is there something else going on?
Surprisingly, the fact that many women having been elected in Asian and Latin American countries (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Philippines, Myanmar, Argentina etc.), helps answer the question since these women were either daughters or wives of fathers and husbands who presided over troublesome, traditional societies, and were not “self-made.” It turns out that Hillary Clinton’s and Kamala Harris's cases bear closer similarity to the Asian/Latin experiences than the three cases noted above.
By “traditional”, I mean that women in these much poorer, centralized societies stayed at home, had kids, raised them, all far more time consuming endeavors there than in richer ones. The visibility of daughters and wives of men in power in these societies was not a consequence of any proven record of accomplishment but of either marrying the right men and the right time, or having been a member of a political dynasty and inheriting their network. They visited hospitals, did charity, or as Juan Peron did, appointed Argentina’s best-known export – his “cry for her”-wife-Evita – to run the Ministries of Labor and Health, the charitable Eva Peron Foundation, and the Female’s Peronist Party. As these women rarely had any achievements before getting to power, the electorates expected them to follow “their men in their lives” path, corruption and defaulting on debts included – in Argentina’s case.
In contrast to the aforementioned Asian and Latin American societies, women in the U.S. have had far more opportunities open to them for the last 50 years. Since the 1970s, roughly two generations of women moved away from two traditional out-of-home endeavors: teaching and nursing, where they excelled, but which offered limited opportunity to master business acumen. Recall that public schools worked well until the 1970s since smart, well-qualified women, who could have excelled in many other sectors, had few options.
These qualified women accepted relatively low pay, difficult working conditions, and gave their best. Women’s liberation opened up opportunities for women and the 1964 legal change making divorce much easier diminished expectations that only “death will tear them apart” from their prince, inducing the pursuit of career.
Gradually women gained experience in fields such as accounting, finance, technology, science, management – but less so in managing armies and military conflicts, though two Western societies’ women leaders mentioned above presided over wars. Thatcher did so over the successful Falkland war (though over an island with more sheep than people), and Golda Meir, on the almost-disastrous Yom Kippur war. Her male ministers, with great military experience, all gave her the wrong advice, and suffered nervous breakdown during that war. Although Meir had the right intuition about having the army better prepared and call up some reserves, she acknowledged that she failed to stand up to these generals’ “expert’” advice. Complacency (including that built up after the 6-Day War in 1967) can lead to huge blunder – as the October 7, 2023 events proved - again. Perhaps one has to be a 17-year old female, as Joan d ’Arc was when leading France to victory, and who stood up to pressures. Though even she would up being burnt on the stakes.
Which brings us to the U.S. electorate's not quite articulated feeling about women candidates for the top political job. Drawing on experience, the electorates perceive that while forty to fifty years may be enough for women to acquire great business, financial, political negotiation skills, they see too that four to five decades are not enough to acquire those not easily definable skills to be in position of standing up to “experts” in all fields, military in particular. So in Hillary Clinton's case, Ivy League certification notwithstanding (which anyway lost much of its glamour), it was more similar to that of a “traditional society” woman having married a popular president. Only in the U.S., this was not enough.
As to Kamala Harris: although her career path appears different on paper, the fact that she started her career by being handed two government jobs by her some 30-years older politically well-connected boyfriend (this is no gossip but fact), and her dubious track record since, suggest that distrusting her has little to do with her being a woman, just as was Hillary Clinton’s case too.
The lack of experience required to be commander-in-chief is the obstacle women in the U.S. running for the top political position face as of now. Speculations of misogyny are just that - speculations of people pretending to be mind-readers.
