Will America ever elect a female president?

By Sharon Krum

NEW YORK: At the start of this year, former president Gerald Ford was asked when he thought a woman might become president of the United States. In front of a large audience, he responded: "If she were elected vice president and the president, a man, should die, or get shot, or whatever." Ford then paused for effect, before adding: "And that's the last time we will ever have a male president."

The room burst into applause and Ford was celebrated in the press for his candor and wit. But privately, feminists fumed. What Ford said, despite the concluding nod to women, rankled. For the idea that a woman will default into the presidency instead of winning it on her merits has always been the great unspoken in American politics and here Ford was, articulating it publicly in 1999.

Americans have long held the view that women are not man enough to run the country, that testosterone, not estrogen, is a prerequisite for leadership. And, despite the impact of the women's movement, those beliefs show little sign of disappearing in a nation that is becoming increasingly religious and conservative, and undergoing a marked backlash against affirmative action.

Yet for a few months this year, it seemed glass ceilings in Washington may be starting to crack. Shortly after Ford's remark, Elizabeth Dole, former head of the American Red Cross, said she would be seeking the Republican nomination for president. Her campaign, the first by a woman since Democrat Shirley Chisholm in 1972, galvanized women across political lines. Why? Dole aggressively campaigned for the presidency, scolding reporters who dared suggest she might prefer vice president instead.

"It was interesting to see how many women responded to Dole, even though her policy positions were very anti-women," says Leslie Wolfe, director of the Women Policy Studies Center in Washington DC. "Even women who did not support her issues supported her running."

But the rapture surrounding Dole collapsed last week when she withdrew from the race citing a lack of funds. She had raised just US$4.7 million, in contrast to the $56 million raised by Governor George W Bush of Texas -- which in itself reveals what campaign donors think of a female presidency.

So now American women are back to square one. There is no woman running in the 2000 race and the doubts about a female candidacy Dole had hoped to dispel will merely persist until the next woman declares.

So what is the problem? Is it just the growing conservatism of the South and Midwest, states like Texas and California, whose voting blocs really decide the presidential ballot? Continued chauvinism among American voters who feel discomfited by women assuming power? Why is America, ground zero of the feminist movement, so averse to welcoming women into the presidential race?

These are all questions Marie Wilson intends to answer, then eliminate from the political debate. Wilson is president of the White House Project, a bipartisan public awareness campaign, set up last year, calling for a woman in the White House by 2008. Wilson believes it will take 10 years to shift the resistance to women wielding power.

"We started the project because we felt something dramatic had to happen with regard to women's leadership. We want to normalize the climate for women to run, have people view them differently, trust them as authorities."

This they plan to do through media campaigns and public debates, and by supporting all women running for office. Their first task, Wilson says, was to let Americans know viable female candidates were out there. This year they published results of a poll they conducted to select presidential women and came up with 20 names (including Hillary Clinton) voters could start considering for 2008.

A second poll on U.S. attitudes to a female president found a staggering 76 percent said they were ready to elect a woman to the office. But what people say to pollsters and what they do behind the voting curtain are often different things. Wilson concedes that, despite the positive statistic, there is a reluctance among Americans to back a female for president and one of the project's jobs is to counter that attitude with positive spin about women in executive positions.

"There is an attitude that leadership is a man's job, that a woman couldn't handle military and foreign policy issues. But we say, look at Madeleine Albright, look at U.S. Army General Claudia Kennedy. These women are changing perceptions. They prove women in power are highly effective."

Though women have had the vote since 1920, it was not until 1964 that Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine ran a serious presidential bid, only to withdraw, like Shirley Chisholm in 1972, due to lack of support.

In 1988, Democratic Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder also considered running, then withdrew due to lack of funds. Given that 23 countries have already elected women leaders this century, the fact that American women had to form a lobby group in 1998 to get a woman on the ticket speaks volumes about the ongoing reluctance among the backroom king-makers and American voters to endow women with power.

"For many women running for president, the first imperative is she project gravity," Schroeder said recently. "Men are assumed to have it, women have to prove they have it."

Mary Hawkesworth, director of the Center for Women and Politics at Rutgers University, feels that the problem runs deeper than voter chauvinism or lack of gravity, however. "I believe the bigger problem is that equal representation of women is not and has never been on the political agenda here in a constructive way like it is in the European Union. The stepping stones to the White House are the Senate or a Governorship. But we have a problem of old boys in the parties serving as gatekeepers, keeping women out of electoral contests, even though they are perfectly happy to have women do the support work in the party."

So where does the solution lie? Both Hawkesworth and Wilson suggest that American women must put pressure on their parties to run female candidates. Wilson adds that voters must be educated, via programs like the White House Project, to the advantages "of bringing balance to democracy".

Democrat Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to run for vice president in 1984, asked recently about the lack of women running for the leadership, told a story about two British children discussing their futures. "When the boy said he wanted to be prime minister, the girl said, you can't, that's a woman's job. It's important for little girls, and women, to see a woman in those positions," she said.

That, Marie Wilson says, is what Elizabeth Dole has accomplished. "Even though she dropped out, she has already changed the conversation in this country. She has made the idea of a woman president very real to everyone."

-- Guardian News Service