What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (9 page)

MS
: In terms of where women are today, I feel hopeful on one side, because it seems like there are a lot of promising signs, and then on the other side of things, you see all this pushback on things that we thought we had already settled—on contraceptives and reproductive rights, as well as some of the misinformed rhetoric about rape that was going on in the last election. How do you view the moment that we’re in as it relates to the overall status of women in the United States and in the world?

DB
: There are always people who are going to lag behind. When you run a race, not everyone comes in first, and when you make social change or make progress, there will be those who say, “Not now, and not ever.” What you see today is a backlash—there’s no question there’s still a backlash. It’s cultural and it’s religious. Whenever there’s a dry moment in the forecast, some people use that as an opportunity to try to take us back to another, bygone era. But this is another reason why we have to remain ever vigilant. Let’s be honest: How many models do we have in the world to look toward? So we have to, as Gandhi often would say, “be the change that we wish to see in the world.” And as women, as leaders, we have to continue to fight for those priorities and champion those issues that will ultimately make our lives better and allow us to be coequal citizens on this planet.

MS
: Many people I spoke with made the point that we need to support Republican women candidates as much as we do Democrats. I want to make it clear that this is not a partisan issue.

DB
: There are so many Republican women. Because, look, I don’t believe that we can afford to put all our eggs in one basket. The political parties
exist—and you have to have the structure, because you can’t just be president without securing the nomination, so there’s a role for political parties. But when it comes to promoting and pushing women in leadership positions, we should work all across the court, even women who might disagree on issues. We need to find common ground with the notion that once we get to the table, we might be able to break bread.

MS
: If you could have the ear of women and girls today, what would be the one message you would most want to get out there?

DB
: Believe in yourself. No one is going to give you the tools to make you the success that you want to be, so you’ve got to find it inside you. I often tell people that I think we already come prepackaged, but we fail to open up and become who we are because society has put so many daunting and challenging things before us. So be who you are.

MARY FALLIN

“The Republican Party has embraced women in leadership positions. And I get frustrated at times when different news media outlets, and certainly the opposite party, say that Republicans don’t care about women, because it’s not true. We’ve proven that by the numbers that we have in leadership positions, not only in governor’s offices, but in Congress and legislative positions.”

G
OVERNOR
M
ARY
F
ALLIN
was elected November 2, 2010, during a historic election in which she became the first-ever female governor of Oklahoma. In 1994, Fallin made history by becoming the first woman and first Republican to be elected lieutenant governor of Oklahoma, an office she would hold for twelve years. Fallin used her position as president of the Oklahoma State Senate to allow the citizens of Oklahoma to vote on Right to Work, which ended the practice of compelling workers to join and pay dues to a union. In 2001, Oklahoma became the first state in the country to pass such a law in more than twenty-five years. Fallin was elected to the U.S. Congress in 2006, where she represented the Fifth District of Oklahoma. As governor, Fallin has cited job growth and retention, education reform, government modernization, and protecting Oklahoma from the intrusions of Washington, D.C., as top priorities. During Fallin’s administration, Oklahoma has consistently ranked among the top states for job creation. She is married to Wade Christensen, an
Oklahoma City attorney who is the state’s first “First Gentleman.” The couple has six children between them.

MARIANNE SCHNALL
: What do you think it would take to make a woman president?

MARY FALLIN
: I think the biggest challenge facing our nation, as far as more women getting involved in politics, is just the fact of women stepping up and being willing to run for office—to put everything on the line, to do the hard work, to go through the process itself, to risk winning or losing, and to step up to any kind of office, whether it’s president or heading up a major corporation.

MS
: One of the things I’m hearing about the political pipeline, and especially leading up to the presidency, is the importance of having more female governors. Being the first female governor of Oklahoma, do you have a sense of why we don’t have more female governors?

MF
: Well, I think in the past, when I first started running for public office, back in 1990, there were some stereotypes of whether a woman could get the job done, whether a woman would be effective. And frankly when I ran for office back in my thirties, I was a young mother, I was a professional businesswoman, and I became frustrated with things that weren’t happening at the Capitol, such as improving education and healthcare. And being a businesswoman, I thought we needed a better business environment for our state. I decided to run for office, and I was young; I was in my mid-thirties. I had a three-year-old child at the time and worked my job full time, and then I would go out nights and weekends and campaign. And
several months into my own first election, I was feeling a little sick in the mornings, and there I was, working a job full time and campaigning nights and weekends and had a three-year-old, come to find out my husband and I were expecting our second child. So when I announced—even though I was already several months into my campaign—that I was pregnant, I had people come up and tell me that I wouldn’t be effective, that I needed to drop out of the race, that I should have an abortion because I wouldn’t be able to get the job done. And, you know, I kept focus on what I wanted to accomplish in the end, which was to go to the Capitol and make changes on these different policy issues. So I kept running my campaign, and on election night I was eight months pregnant, and then I actually had my son between the primary and the general election in September—the election was in November. And I didn’t have an abortion; I, of course, continued on with my pregnancy and that was twenty-three years ago. And not only did I win the House of Representatives seat back in those early days, I was able to pass over a dozen pieces of legislation into law. And I was very much in the minority in the Oklahoma Legislature. I was one of three Republican women at that time, so I was very much in the minority as far as political party and being a female.

Then I went on to run for lieutenant governor, four years after that, and by that time my children were four and seven. And I ran for a statewide office, which was not easy, because I had the regular things a mom does—you have to bring your children to school, picking them up and going to their after-school activities—and trying to deal with some tough issues as lieutenant governor. But I won that race and served twelve years as the first female lieutenant governor of our state. Then, in between all of that, I became single and was a single mom, and that was challenging. I also had a mother who became sick at that time and bedridden, and she was widowed so I was taking care of my mother and my children in a state-wide elected position, which was tough. But then I just kept working
hard. I basically prioritized my time to where—certainly my faith is very important to me, which carried me through that time—but my children were a top priority, and then my work was my third priority and keeping that balance of what was really important in life helped me be effective. And then I ended up running for Congress and became the second woman elected to Congress. We elected our first woman in 1920, and she only made it through one term and was voted out of office. We hadn’t had a woman go to Congress since 1922.

So I served four years in Congress, and it was challenging as a woman trying to live between two states. By that time, I had one child that was in college and one that was a sophomore in high school, and I was coming home every weekend, trying to take care of them and balance family and work and do my job effectively. Then after four years of doing that, I was recruited to run for governor, and that was challenging, too, trying to be in Congress and come home on the weekends to not only see my children and take care of things at home as a single woman, but also run for statewide office again.

And to my surprise, during all that time, I reconnected with an old college friend, a wonderful man that I had known thirty years ago, and in between all of that, a life surprise came up and within a couple of months, he asked me to marry him! I was like, are you kidding? [
laughs]
I’m in Congress, I’m a single mom, and I’m running for governor. I’ve got a little bit going on in my life right now. I said, this is a serious thing, to remarry, but there are times in your life when you know that you know it’s the thing to do. So we actually got married during my campaign for governor. He had four kids, I had two, so now we have six together. So I started a new family, a new phase in my life, right in the middle of running for governor and being in Congress!

You know, I’ve kind of gone full circle in my life and meeting life’s challenges and opportunities face on, pushing through them, walking by
faith that it would all work out the way it was supposed to. And here I am three years later. Later this year, I’ll take over as the first Oklahoman to ever be the national chair of the Governor’s Association. So I’ve kind of run the whole gamut of trying to balance family and work and be effective. And I’ve had a great time as governor. So it’s been an interesting walk in life, but one that’s been very rewarding—not without its challenges. It’s not an easy job.

But back to your original question, I think women just have to be willing to step up, take risks, take chances, know there will be some setbacks. One of my favorite sayings is that setbacks are always an opportunity for a comeback. I think when you’re willing to take those risks, no matter what they are, that it can be a very rewarding, satisfying career, no matter what business you decide to go into.

MS
: Going back to the notion of having a woman president, do you think that we’ll have a woman president in your lifetime? And is that a path that you have ever considered?

MF
: I do think we’ll have a woman president. I think a woman has to prove herself, just as a man does, that they have goals, they have ideas and solutions to problems facing people, businesses, the nation, a state. And when a woman can articulate those things and be bold and courageous, be willing to take risks, then people will follow a woman—and certainly follow a man, too—but I think if a woman demonstrates those things, she can get elected to public office. There used to be a thought, many, many years ago, that if you were a woman and you ran, people might vote for you just because you were different, because women don’t always run for office that maybe you could get some votes. But I really think that people vote for women based upon their ability to get things done and their accomplishments and the respect that they have for a person. I remember back in
the early 2000s, we had a major issue in front of our state, and I was the lieutenant governor at that time. And many times I would go to different meetings, or different Cabinet meetings, with the former governor, and many times I would be the only woman at the table. But we had this big issue that came up in front of the House and the Senate, and that was the issue of Right to Work, and throughout the history of Oklahoma, no one had ever been able to get Right to Work passed through the Senate and the Oklahoma Legislature, much less to the other people. And I was the president of the Senate, but it was more of a ceremonial position, because [I didn’t] actually run the Senate. But anyway, they had an amendment on the floor to put the issue of Right to Work to a vote of the people, and the Senate got into a big fight and they went into recess to try to stall and hopefully kill the amendment. And I got a phone call from one of the senators saying, “You know, constitutionally you have the power to go up and sit in the Senate chair and take over the Senate. It’s never been done, but you do have that power to do that. We think you should come back and take over the Senate.” And it was an opposite political party that was in control, and so I said, “Sure, I’ll do that. I believe in what we’re trying to accomplish here.” So I came back; I was out of the Capitol and I came back to town. I walked in the Senate with just a handful of my colleagues in my party and took over the chair from the opposite party of the Senate while they were out on recess and tried to get a quorum to get them to come back to just vote on allowing the issue of Right to Work to go to a vote of the people. Well, of course, the opposite party, the majority, wouldn’t come in. They actually walked out for three days on us and I was sitting there with my colleagues of the Republican Party, and we sat there for three days. They had all kinds of schemes and plans that they were going to have me physically carried out of the Chamber. They were going to have me arrested. They said, “You’ll never win another election again from doing some stupid stunt like this.” And I can remember sitting
those first couple of hours in the chair, and of course all the TV cameras and news media was there, because a lieutenant governor had never taken over the Chamber on a controversial issue like that. I remember thinking,
Boy, this could either make me or break me. I may never get elected again to any public office
. It was really a risky thing to do, but I believed in my heart it was the right thing to do for Oklahoma. And this is one of those issues that had never been able to get resolved in our state’s history.