“We’ve reached a national milestone,” proclaimed Hillary Clinton on the evening of June 7, after her primary victories that day together with commitments from superdelegates gave her a majority of delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
It was, as she said, “the first time in our nation’s history that a woman will be a major party’s nominee. Tonight’s victory is not about one person; it belongs to generations of women and men who sacrificed and made this possible.”
All true, though outside the U.S., it’s not quite as rare. Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of Britain’s Conservative party in 1975, 41 years ago, and Golda Meir ascended to be head of the Labor party and prime minister of Israel in 1969, 47 years ago. In neither case did she owe her elevation to a spouse’s or father’s political career, as did Sirimavo Bandanranaike did when she became prime minister of Ceylon in 1960 and Indira Gandhi when she became prime minister of India in 1966.
In the intervening half-century women have become heads of government in Argentina, Portugal, Dominica, Norway, the Philippines, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Bangladesh, Turkey, Canada, New Zealand, Indonesia, Finland, Ukraine, Germany, Jamaica, Liberia, Chile, Lithuania, Australia, Australia, Brazil, Thailand, Denmark and South Korea. A female chief executive is not a novelty in the world any more, any more than is Hillary Clinton, who over the past quarter-century has persevered in the public spitlight as first lady, U.S. senator, secretary of state and presidential candidate.
Nonetheless, there is no position in the world as powerful as the presidency of the United States, and at least in the minds of some Americans there has been a particularly shatterproof “glass ceiling,” which is a term Clinton used in her concession speech after the primaries eight years ago, preventing women from seeking this nation’s highest office. Now, it is up to American voters.
Yet it should be remembered that women have played a major role in American politics going back long before ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, a year after the birth of Hillary Clinton’s mother. Clinton herself made reference in her victory statement to the Seneca Falls women’s rights convention of 1848. This was just part of an efflorescence of political reforms championed, ultimately with success, primarily by women — including not only women’s rights, but also abolition of slavery and (the temporarily successful) prohibition of liquor.
These extraordinary able and dedicated women reformers, as historian Daniel Walker Howe has noted, were mostly Whigs and Republicans rather than Democrats, and many, like the women’s suffrage advocate Susan B. Anthony, passionate opponents of abortion. And even teenage girls, writes historian Jon Grinspan in his study of 19th century young Americans’ politics, participated actively in rallying support for political parties. Starting in the Wyoming Territory in 1869, women were granted the vote in 29 states even before the 19th Amendment completed the process nationally in 1920.
Still, in 1937 when Gallup first asked Americans whether they would vote for a woman for president “if she were qualified in every other respect,” only 33 percent said yes and 64 percent said no. By 1948, they were evenly split. In 1971, two-thirds and in 1976 three-quarters said they would: large numbers, but still enough disagreeing to cause politicians and partisans to have qualms about a female nominee. The symbolic candidacies of Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith in 1964 and Democratic Rep. Shirley Chisholm in 1972 didn’t tip the balance.
By the 1990s, opinion had changed. Connecticut Democrat Ella Grasso became the first woman elected governor other than as a successor to or surrogate for her husband in 1974. Her campaign ads featured a shot of her presiding and giving directions to the men on each side of a conference table. She was the first of 22 female state governors (15 Democrats, seven Republicans) elected in her own right. In these same years, 29 women have won election to the U.S. Senate (19 Democrats, 10 Republicans), each of whom had launched her political career independent of her husband, with the single exception of Hillary Clinton, who served as senator for the last 17 days of Bill Clinton’s second term as president. At that point, Gallup’s most recent survey showed 92 percent of Americans willing to vote for a female president.
These increases in the number of female officeholders came just as the voting habits of women and men started to diverge. For many years women voters tended to be more risk-averse than men, less willing to vote for protest candidates like George Wallace and Henry Wallace, but in partisan terms there was little difference between them. Then in 1980 came the “gender gap,” in which women starting voting significantly more Democratic than men. This was portrayed as a problem for Republicans, but it challenged both parties; if Republicans would win more elections with more women’s voters, Democrats would win more with more men’s.
These days there isn’t so much a gender gap as a gap between single women, who vote heavily Democratic, and married women, who vote pretty much as men do. And on abortion, which became a litmus test issue for both parties in the 1990s, many polls show more women than men as pro-life rather than pro-choice. In addition, there no longer seems to be a gender gap in Democratic presidential primaries. In 2008 women of all ages tended to vote for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. In 2016, older women supported Clinton over Bernie Sanders by wide margins, but Sanders carried young women by 2-1 or more among younger women.
Which is not to say that some women — and indeed some men — are genuinely moved or thrilled that a major party is now about to nominate a woman. Clinton gets especially fervent support from women of her own generation, who were brought up to believe that their main responsibility was to raise a family and that taking a job outside the home was frowned on. In the early years of Clinton’s adulthood, millions of women started working outside the home, and most did by the 1980s. Many resented the resistance they encountered and the charge made by others, and sometimes by themselves, that they were neglecting their children. For these women, “choice” was not just a euphemism for abortion rights but also for other choices they had made in their personal lives that they were raised to disapprove of.
Children raised in the 1970s and 1980s, who now are voters approaching their 50s, grew up with different expectations. For them, women in the work place were part of everyday life and women in high public office were increasingly commonplace. The nomination and election of a female president probably seems far less remarkable to them than it does to their elders. Polling suggests that Americans have been ready for the last two decades to elect a female president, and that as Democratic nominee, she has a very good though not certain chance of being elected.
But it’s also clear that for most Americans the election of the first woman president won’t be as thrilling as the election of the first black president eight years ago.
