Can America Elect a Female President?
It seems the possibility of Hilary Rodham Clinton running for president has unleashed a whole storm of the questions concerning whether America can, could, or would elect a female president. NPR today did two stories on it, one with an interview from Senator Clinton herself and another involving both expert opinion & discussion and “person on the street” quotes. Bills addresses one comment from the second one rather well in this blog entry . I found both the NPR stories fascinating, but the second one makes me incredibly sad. And angry. The story talks about, among other things, what a woman would have to do to get elected—and of course issues like hair, make-up, and clothes become an issue, as does a few things that actually might really impact how well anyone can lead a country like leadership and military experience. However, there seems to be a big concern that people will particularly not feel comfortable with a woman running a country during war. Now frankly I can see (but do not completely agree) the argument that it is good for a president to have real military experience (and preferably experience in a war), but not all male presidents have had this and our incumbent has questionable military experience and certainly didn’t fight in a war (while the most recent candidate to run against him received purple hearts for being shot in war, and he didn’t get elected). So why must we judge women on different standards? Why must, according to the second story, a woman parade her accomplishments and always wear and show her power.
But most importantly WTF hasn’t America already had a woman president? And WTF aren’t we asking this question? We think of ourselves as this forward thinking (well some of us do) country that leads the world and is the flagship of democracy. As these things, it seems only logical that we would be the first country to elect a female president. After all more than 50% of our population is female, so shouldn’t more than 50% of our political representative of all shades and especially our presidents be female? But alas, we are more backward and sexist than we will admit. And we have been beaten in leading the world and democracy in one area—having a female in our highest office. We have been beaten by People’s Republic of Tannu Tuva, Mongolia, China, Argentina, Bolivia, Haiti, Nicaragua, Ireland, Liberia, Ecuador, Switzerland (source), India, Great Britain, Iceland, Pakistan, Myanmar (Burma, with 80% of the votes, although the military did not let her take power), Canada, Bulgaria, Bangladesh, and many more (source) and this is not counting queens and other women leaders (note that list does include prime ministers). Some of the countries that have elected women are countries that some Americans might consider “backward” and even far “beneath” the US. Yet these countries are more advanced, more modern, more forward thinking then the US and they have proven they can do something we haven’t. Frankly I think we should be embarrassed that we are asking if a female can be elected, and we should be ashamed our ourselves for not having already elected one.