What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (44 page)

MS
: It’s funny, because I just happen to have in front of me an interview I recently did with psychologist Carol Gilligan, and she had this quote: “The rule of older white men is patriarchal—it’s not democratic. This election is the key, and why the Republicans didn’t anticipate the outcome, is they didn’t see women, people of color, young people—these are all the categories that are dis-empowered in a patriarchal view. That’s what the fight is about. It goes to the core of what I see as feminism, which is the movement to free democracy from patriarchy.” Do you have any thoughts on that?

EHN
: Yeah, I certainly agree with that. I tend to be more political—using the 2010 election as an example. They didn’t think that these groups would come out [to vote]. They looked at the poor economy—as far as women and people of color were concerned, it was still poor. And I think that Romney even [admitted] that he was so late to concede because after the 2010 election, when the Republicans won the House, their pre-election models said that particularly people of color, but also women, wouldn’t bother
to vote, but their base of white men and to a lesser extent white married women, those people vote. Republicans underestimated how deeply people of color felt. And remember, all these groups had been attacked. Women had been attacked in the worst way, as to their reproductive health; Hispanics were maligned in the Republican primary; and blacks would just be on the back of some bus if you would have listened to some Republicans. So part of what happened in the last presidential election may not be repeated according to whether we are able to continue to motivate people to vote. Because it’s true that the base of the Democratic Party is less likely to vote than the base of the Republican Party. So if you don’t have Barack Obama on the ballot and you don’t have flame-throwing retrograde Republicans on the other side, you have to ask yourself, will you get the same response from women and people of color? And our job is to make sure we do and not to assume that we’ve crossed the river and it’s always going to happen.

MS
: You have always seemed to have this innate sense of self and this courage to know your calling and to be pretty fearless about just speaking out for what you believe in. Was that something that came naturally to you or that you had to learn or develop? Where does that come from in you?

EHN
: I had a head start being the oldest of three girls. And I’ve only come to this understanding, certainly a long time after I was grown, after this played out in my life . . . I think that gave me a head start. But remember, I went to law school when very few women or blacks went, so I’ve got to think that that had something to do with it. But I have to tell you that reinforcement whenever I did something good had a lot to do with it. Reinforcement for having good grades, for achieving things large and small, had a great deal to do with it. I wonder if we reward girls as easily as we do boys.

MS
: On the flip side, what limiting obstacles did you face that you had to overcome and how did you overcome them?

EHN
: I have no idea. I don’t even think of my life in terms of obstacles. You know, the fact that I was born in a city that had no democratic government—I mean, we had no local government, no democracy. Or that I was a black child that went to segregated schools, because the D.C. schools were segregated until the ’54 decision. Or that I was a woman. I have never considered any of those things to be obstacles [
laughs]
. They’re the things that give you fight. I just think if you sit down and count the obstacles, you’re counting yourself out. I didn’t think I had any obstacles. I just had to do it.

MS
: That’s a great answer. President Carter appointed you to serve as the first woman to chair the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission. How significant was that at the time?

EHN
: At the time, it was [significant], but if you look at it today, nobody even takes a whimper at it. At the time, it was very significant. Not only because it was the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, but because there were so few women in high positions in government. I recall no cabinet officials in that administration; there may have been women cabinet officials, but I can’t remember who they were. This agency is not a cabinet agency, but it was a very high profile agency at a time when women didn’t have anything approaching equality. It mattered to me, largely because I had wanted to be a civil rights attorney all my life and because I had been in the streets protesting to get precisely this commission without even a dream that I would one day lead it.

MS
: If you had the ear of all the women and girls today, what’s the message you think is most important that you would want them to hear?

EHN
: I would just say, “Your time has come, your time has come,”—that’s what I would say. “Just grab it.”

MS
: What does that look like, “your time has come”? What does that mean?

EHN
: It means the bases are cleared. You can step up onto them. That’s what I would say, not that there are still a thousand things for women to do before they can become elected officials or anything else.

MS
: Are you feeling optimistic?

EHN
: Oh sure, because I have studied history. It does take a long time, if you’re as impatient as I am, for the obvious to happen. I could not afford to be pessimistic. When I was young, I couldn’t understand why people weren’t in the streets protesting racial segregation. Now I understand. I came to consciousness when it was possible to get into the streets, and even then, it took a woman sitting down and risking everything on a bus in, of all places, Montgomery, Alabama, to strike the spark that led to the non-violent civil rights movement.

AS YOU REACH UP, PLEASE REACH OUT

I have said this many times, that there seems to be enough room in the world for mediocre men, but not for mediocre women, and we really have to work very, very hard. I think that it is also very important for women to help each other. It is hard to be the only woman in the room. Having a support system is very important. When I was in office, I had a group of women foreign ministers that were my friends throughout the world, and my little saying is that there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other. So I think there has to be the sense that once you have climbed the ladder of success, that you don’t push it away from the building
—
you are only strengthened if there are more women. But you have to work hard; there is no other way around it. There is no way of talking your way into or out of things, you just have to deliver
.

        
—M
ADELEINE
A
LBRIGHT, FIRST FEMALE
U.S. S
ECRETARY OF
S
TATE

I’m probably the only person that’s going to say this: I have trouble with some of the events that I go to that congratulate women, give them opportunities to network, leverage the power that they have, to have more power. I feel they could do more and I feel they need to do more, because what we’re asking disenfranchised women to do is a lot more with fewer resources. I would like women in power in this country to do a lot more than they’re doing to help others. It doesn’t make me feel that great to go to events which are just about “them” getting more resources to climb
. . .
I would say to women, “As you reach up, please reach out.”

        
—A
NNA
D
EAVERE
S
MITH

I always think it’s important for communities to join forces . . . You know, you hear everybody talk about the importance of being a part of a network, a part of knowing that there are women out there who are thinking like you and moving like you and organizing like you, and who understand what you’re going through . . . Ram Dass talks about the illusion of aloneness, and I think that’s what we all sometimes fall into, as women, as people of color, as
educators, as organizers
—
this illusion that we’re trying to do this all alone or that we’ll never make a difference. Coming together is what allows us to keep moving forward
.

        
—K
ERRY
W
ASHINGTON

Sisters: talk to each other, be connected and informed, form women’s circles, share your stories, work together, and take risks. Together we are invincible
.

        
—I
SABEL
A
LLENDE

I advocate that every woman be a part of a circle and a circle that meets at least once a month, or if you can’t do that, once every two months or every four months. But you have to have a circle, a group of women
—
smart, wise, can-do women
—
who are in the world doing their work, and you need to meet with them as often as you can, so that they can see what you’re doing and who you are, and you can see the same. And you can talk to each other about the world and about your lives in a circle of trust and safety. It’s crucial. It is crucial for our psychological health and our spiritual growth. It’s essential
.

        
—A
LICE
W
ALKER

MARIE WILSON

“The first thing I thought about after I had worked on The White House Project for a few years was this: how are we going to get women to trust themselves, and how are we going to get the world to trust women? But how women can trust themselves, Marianne, I know now: we start to form groups. This is what The White House Project trained everybody to do, which is get a circle around you. And I say this in every speech: all women need about five women who really see them
—
who will give them good feedback, tell them the truth, and who will encourage them and give them courage to trust themselves and trust those values that are different. Because it’s hard, when the world keeps shoving this other stuff at you, to really trust that the way you see the world is okay. So you have to have that. I think every woman needs that. I need that, don’t you?”

M
ARIE
W
ILSON HAS
created and led women’s organizations for almost forty years. She is founder and president emerita of The White House Project, creator of Take Our Daughters to Work Day, and author of
Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World
.

In 1998, Wilson founded The White House Project to build a truly representative democracy where women lead alongside men in all sectors. For fourteen years, The White House Project educated and trained
thousands of women in how to run for office and changed how women in politics were represented in popular culture and the media. Wilson is an honorary founder of the Ms. Foundation for Women, where she was president for nearly two decades and where she pioneered a microenterprise for low-income women.

Wilson has been profiled in
The New York Times
“Public Lives” column and
O, The Oprah Magazine
, and she has appeared on
The Today Show, Good Morning America
, CNN, National Public Radio and other national programs. She has received several honorary doctorates. Wilson has five children and ten grandchildren. She lives in New York City.