Are women suited to leadership roles in politics? Ideally, this question should be redundant in the contemporary world where women from varied backgrounds have made their mark in virtually every field, be it science, technology, commerce, health, administration, arts or the sporting arena. We have had towering women leaders in Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto, who navigated all odds to become their respective countries’ executives, a shattering the highest, hardest glass ceiling.
But does that mean women now have a level-playing field in politics, especially when running for the highest office? Clearly not, if former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s memoir, “What Happened,” is to be believed. Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, even as she earned nearly three million more votes than her opponent.
Among the various factors she ascribed her electoral loss to Trump was an undercurrent of misogyny. Though Clinton also had an uphill task in that election combating the FBI’s investigations into the infamous email leaks and adverse public perception of her being a creation of “institutional politics,” the fact that men and women candidates are weighed on different scales was evident while that year’s campaign. Trump said Clinton didn’t look “presidential enough,” apart from openly berating her as a “nasty woman” in a live presidential debate, among other derogatory comments.
Some political observers argue that people like Trump feel empowered to belittle women without fear of public scrutiny, even when the woman in question is disproportionately more erudite as Clinton was to Trump, is because perhaps there is little or no public scrutiny to preclude the display of misogyny. More worryingly, there may be silent endorsement of misogyny, impeding a woman’s prospects in public life. These are common reflections when the question of a level-playing field for women is debated.
As Kamala Harris makes her case for securing the White House — she’s the second woman candidate from a major political party to do so in America’s 248 years of democracy — the questions surrounding a woman’s capability to lead have formed an intriguing interlude of the elections. At the rally in Las Vegas on September 20, Trump’s patriarchal instinct was again on display when he mimicked Harris’ several “thank you” exclamations a day earlier in Chicago while accepting her party’s nomination to run for president.
At first glance, this looks like banter aimed at breaking the dissonance of a keenly contested election. But a deeper contemplation gives away the calculations at work when men ostensibly “banter.” When a woman’s emotional reflexes are cataloged, the underlying intent is to relay a message that they are emotionally vulnerable, hence unfit to lead.
But will an educated society such as the U.S. buy innuendos questioning a woman’s agency? Many women are afraid it might. Female students as young as 14 years said they have sometimes experienced under-estimation because of gender. They shared the anxiety that a section of the media was building a misogynist narrative to tarnish an image of Harris as “scheming” and “opportunist” even as people are either okay with or indifferent to Trump, even as Trump according to them parades his various prejudices in public frequently.
“There’s so much innuendo about her [Harris’] character,” said Kaitlyn, a 12th grader student at the Muscatine High School in Iowa. “There’s a message being sent out that she built her career by using powerful men to her advantage. Trump, on the other hand, gets away despite being accused of sexual misconduct by nearly two dozen women.”
Her friend Maya, who is in the 11th grade in the same school, said she saw people in her neighborhood making unnecessary scrutiny of Harris’ body language and facial expressions during the presidential debate, despite the fact that she was clearly more articulate than Trump.
However, it is not men folk alone who fall for motivated narratives rejecting women in leadership roles. Melody, a 15-year-old girl in Iowa said that she was not particularly enthused by Harris’ bid for the White House. She said she is skeptical that Harris or any other woman she knew of in American politics will would make a great president.
“Perhaps women are too emotional, and too much emotion is not the asset of a strong leader,” Melody emphasized.
When asked whether Harris’ gender will be an obstacle in her bid for the White House, most of those interviewed in Minneapolis, Iowa and Washington told this reporter that they had no clear answer to it, but they did not rule out that misogyny is often undetectable, hence harder to contain.
To Harris’ advantage, many believe she has handled Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric better than Clinton did in 2016. Harris has not let the issues at hand get consumed by the inclination to buy patriarchal discourses on women’s suitability in leadership roles.
But will Harris be able to add the words “Madam President” to the U.S. political lexicon? We will know after November 5.
