Authors: Marianne Schnall
MS
: Part of it is getting men on board for this and realizing this isn’t just about “women’s issues” but about the benefits of having equality in leadership positions. Why do you think this is important? I know it’s sometimes hard to answer these questions without making generalizations, but what special qualities do you think the world needs most now that a woman president would bring to the table?
CM
: I think that I’m one who steers pretty clear of essentialist arguments about how men’s and women’s leadership differs. But I do think—just given the way women are socialized in contemporary society and the constraints, unfortunately, that are on working women in terms of the lack of support—women do have to develop this multitasking muscle in a very different way than men do. So that would really be at play in terms of what seems to be the “ultimate” job in multitasking, which would be the president. Then I also think it would be really interesting to see, is this woman a mother? Because I feel like—not being a mother myself, but having had a mother, obviously, and having lots of friends who are becoming mothers—I just don’t think that could be underestimated in terms of how that must influence them. Obviously you can speak to that better than I could, but how that influences your priorities and how you understand the world and how it works. I think perhaps the motherhood piece, more than the female piece, to me, would be really significant in terms of how it shapes someone’s leadership.
MS
: That’s interesting. On the other side of the equation, I remember when I was first talking about doing this book, Gloria Steinem was making this point—which I think we all agree with—that it’s not about biology, it’s of course about the issues. For example, it’s not about electing
any
woman; it’s about electing a woman who also represents pro-women causes. How do you feel about the conundrum of women in politics who aren’t progressive when it comes to women’s issues?
CM
: I don’t even think of them as conundrums. To me, it’s so obvious that there are women who are not going to act in the best interest of other women. Because I’ve seen in so many movements throughout history that people do things that are not in the service of their own people—whether it’s the violence of the genocide in Rwanda, where people are basically destroying their own people, or men in various situations of historic war sort of undermining their own. I just think it’s a very normal part of human nature that some people, in order to compete and get to the top and get some sort of perceived amount of power, will not only sacrifice what would serve themselves, but those who are like them. So in some ways I just don’t think of it as a conundrum; I think it’s an over-romanticization to assume that women would be automatically more caring about women’s issues, because I think we live in this society that is corrupt, in terms of how the political system works, and is sexist. So of course people are going to internalize sexism, and if they get really pulled in with their egos into getting some power, they’re going to do whatever they can to get it, including making policies that don’t even serve women like themselves.
MS
: How do you think we can help women to trust their own natural wisdom and instincts so we’re not just perpetuating old paradigms of power and leadership?
CM
: I think one thing I say a lot is, “You’re testing your own outrage,” which is something I really attribute to my parents’ instilling in me. And I think it’s core that this book, in part, stems from your own daughter having this moment of quizzical outrage, of, like, “Really? There’s never been a woman president? Why?” I can say a lot of it is about fostering that little-girl knowing, that childlike knowing, and questioning. And then on the other side, it’s kind of a paradox, because it’s very much about fostering the capacity to navigate really muddy waters—I mean, I don’t
think you can be involved in politics as a purist. There are just so many compromises and so many things you have to figure out about your own work-life balance and what kind of funding you accept and how you figure out how to stay true to your own values while policy making but also pay attention to who your constituency is and how they’re going to react to that. It’s just this never-ending tightrope walk. So I think on the one hand, it’s like, how do we train women to hold onto that native knowing that they have, and on the other hand, how do we train them to really navigate some supremely muddy waters? And I find the former much easier than the latter. I mean, the latter is why I was saying that I don’t know if I could run for office, because I just find it so complicated and so compromising in a lot of ways.
MS
: That is the catch-22, because, as you were saying before, you need women to get into the political arena in order to transform it, and yet they’re deterred because of the way it is.
CM
: Right, exactly.
MS
: I was remembering in the film
Miss Representation
when Caroline Heldman says that when children are seven years old, boys and girls say they want to become president in roughly the same numbers, but by the time that they’re fifteen, the number of girls who say they would like to be president drops off dramatically, as compared with the boys. Why do you think that happens, and what do you think we can do to reverse that trend or change that trend?
CM
: Obviously, Carol Gilligan and others have written really intelligently about some of the psychology of this. From my perspective, I think of it as sort of a power analysis—at what age are you learning which things are
powerful? And I think as you creep into those adolescent years and you’re paying attention to what seems to deliver the most power, it no longer ends up being these formal places of leadership, but it ends up in being beautiful or being cool or being hip or being ironic, or whatever. So I think it’s a really sophisticated analysis on the part of teenage girls who say, “I want to be powerful. Clearly, our system of political leadership isn’t looking all that powerful anymore—it looks like those girls are the ones who got socially shunned—so I’m going to go with a route that looks like it delivers some power.” And so I think it’s less about those individual girls and more about the culture and the way the power is distributed at that age, and how we get in and disrupt that process.
MS
: What role do you think that media plays in all that?
CM
: I think media plays a huge role, but I’m also someone who feels like we tend to think about the media analysis because it’s easier to think about it sort of “out there,” by “those people.” For me, there’s a lot more personal stuff at stake. As I wrote about in
Perfect Girls
, I think those same teenage girls are watching their own moms obsess about their bodies and/ or compromise their own health. And those things are also speaking really loudly in addition to the media messages. So I think media does play a role, but I’m someone who almost feels like I need to compensate for the fact that it feels way too easy for most of us, in the feminist and the criticism world, to constantly be pointing at the media instead of recognizing that media is part of it and there’s also a lot of stuff we personally do to perpetuate these ideas.
MS
: I know part of the problem is that powerful and ambitious women are sometimes portrayed as unlikable—think back to the Hillary nutcracker comments. How can we get past that stereotype? I think we did see that
a lot when Hillary ran, and just in general the comments that are made about women like Nancy Pelosi—these perceptions that prevent not just girls, but women as well, from wanting to step out because it’s perceived in a negative light.
CM
: Right. I think my prescription would be, we just need to get to that tipping point. So much research shows that generally, if you can get 33 percent of women in any one community—whether it’s a corporate board or the op-ed pages—that you shift the social dynamic and you shift the way people perceive your leadership. And I think that what we’re experiencing is that we’re really approaching that tipping point with women, where unfortunately, Nancy and Hillary and others have been the ones who sort of laid the groundwork and dealt with all that backlash. And once we get a critical mass of women in political office and into very visible leadership positions, I think not only will it become normalized, but there will just be more styles of leadership for people to look at. Not every female political leader needs to be like Hillary. She has a very particular leadership style, as does Nancy. So the more options we have, the more people will be able to identify. Women in particular will be able to say, “Well, I actually do kind of identify with this woman—I didn’t with Hillary, or I didn’t with Nancy, but that really feels like me. Maybe I could run for office.”
It’s interesting—I’ve experienced this a little bit in my own life, because my partner has sometimes talked about potentially wanting to run for office, and when I first met him and he talked about that, I said I would be the worst wife to have, ever. [I thought it was] a terrible idea. And then I started to notice that there are these women, Michelle Obama being one of them—even though I really look forward to a day when she can actually play big, because I know she has to play pretty small—but also this other woman, Connie Schultz, who’s a columnist in Ohio and married to a political leader there. I’ve been watching her and I’ve been feeling like,
wow, I identify with her so much. She’s so outspoken. She’s so authentic, and it’s totally working out. So I’ve experienced that on a personal level in kind of the political realm, just seeing more kinds of “first ladies” who I felt help me try on what it would be like to be a powerful, authentic journalist whose partner happened to also be in political leadership, political office. So I think, having experienced that personally, I just feel even more convinced that the more versions of female political leadership that we have out there, just the sum total of them, will continue to shift some of that backlash and those stereotypes.
MS
: There was a moment that I was really interested in during the race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. I’m sure you’ll remember this time where there was some really interesting dialogue around race and gender. There were actually some pretty divisive splits, and it was pretty generational, about the importance of supporting Hillary in terms of the milestone of having a woman president over an African American president. Did anything useful come out of that conversation, do you think, around these notions of race and gender and the intersections?
CM
: Yeah, I think it was hugely fruitful in the end. It was obviously incredibly divisive in some ways, and I think a lot of people felt battered and bruised at the end of that election season from within the feminist movement and within racial-justice movements. But ultimately I think it was a really important conversation, in large part to those who are outside of those movements. It was this huge opportunity for those of us who think about these things all the time to serve as educators at large and say, “Here’s why this isn’t about whether women or black people are more oppressed. Here’s why this isn’t about which group has been historically more put down.” To explain how that is not productive and is not the way feminism approaches these questions anymore—that intersectionality has
really transformed even the perceived need for that kind of a debate. And so I think we’re always looking for a timely moment when we can insert our feminist values into the mainstream debate, and this was just handed to us on a platter in some ways. Again, I know a lot of people who were really hurt by the discussion, and it was tough, but I just think that it ultimately served us to get outside of the choir and really speak to people who don’t read feminist blogs or women’s media to understand how these issues interact, and ultimately that’s going to be good for all of us.
MS
: I know, because it did feel that it was also a little bit generational. It seemed like some of the older women were like, “How could you not support Hillary in this historic moment? It’s an opportunity,” where it felt like the younger generations did see it in a more intersectional way and didn’t see it as black and white like that. Do you think that’s true that the younger generations don’t see it that way or don’t think of it as important, perhaps? Part of my question around this is, there’s a misconception that younger women have a sense of complacency around feminism, which isn’t really true. What do you think about how younger women feel about this, and do you think there needs to be more of a push from younger women in terms of women’s equality and advancement?
CM
: No—I just think that the younger women I know and interact with think of it as politics first, policy first, values first, sex second. So I would rather vote for a more feminist man than a less feminist woman. And not that that was the dichotomy with Obama and Clinton—I think it was much more complicated than that—but generally there’s this feeling that symbolic leadership is not enough, that it needs to be a woman who actually holds and practices and lives and breathes and walks feminist values. That, I think, is probably a pretty generalizable stance on the part of young women, in part because we’ve seen the examples of women in leadership
who have not honored feminist values and haven’t looked out for the most vulnerable people, and so we’ve kind of learned our lesson in that regard.
Having said that, I felt very conflicted throughout the Obama-Clinton run, and still do, about just how much was lost by not having Hillary in office, even though I was an Obama supporter. I don’t think there was a simple answer. I don’t have a regret, so to speak, but I feel sad that I had to make that choice. It sucks that the very first election I actually felt that there was a candidate I cared about, it turned out there were two that I cared so deeply about, and to have to make a choice between them was sort of an embarrassment of riches and ended up making me feel just really conflicted and really sad about it.