INTERVIEWER: For all practical purposes, do you think a woman in the United States today
can actually be nominated on the ticket as president?
CHISHOLM: Because how dare you?
Have you forgotten that you are a woman?
SCHROEDER: If I had to say that all of America was ready, uhhhh no.
It’s not quite there yet.
CLINTON: Well this isn’t the party I planned, but I sure like the company.
INTERVIEWER: For all practical purposes, do you think a woman in the United States today
can actually be nominated on the ticket as president?
CHISHOLM: Because how dare you? Have you forgotten that you are a woman?
SCHROEDER: If I had to say that all of America was ready, uhhhh no. It’s not quite there
yet.
CLINTON: Well this isn’t the party I planned, but I sure like the company.
CLINTON: Now, I -- I know -- I know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest
glass ceiling, but some day someone will and hopefully sooner than we might think right
now.
MARGARET CHASE SMITH: There are those that make the contention that no woman should ever
dare to aspire to the White House, that this is a man’s world and that it should be kept
that way.
Margaret Chase Smith was the first Republican woman to run for president. She was a three-term
senator from Maine.
QUESTION: Who will be your running mate?
SMITH: None of the announced candidates have indicated any desire.
The day she announced, Washington Post columnists had already dubbed her campaign “non-serious.”
NATIVIDAD: The idea of a woman running for President of the United States wasn’t taken
seriously
Smith had spent the previous 24 years in Congress, initially elected to her husband’s seat
when he died.
But around the country, opportunities for women to enter male-dominated jobs were shrinking
after WW2.
NATIVIDAD: Rosie the Riveter had to go back home and start making dinner again. Women
gained traction, if you will, as workers, but then the men came back and there was an
understanding that they had to be employed.
O’NEILL: There was no organized women’s movement there to fight for them and this
is why the 1950s women’s rights went into a deep, really a deep crater.
DEBBIE REYNOLDS: Don’t you think marriage is just the most important thing in the world?
I mean a woman isn’t really a woman at all until she’s married and had children.
This was the era when the National Weather Service started giving hurricanes female names
and when airline stewardesses were fired when they turned 32.
For two decades, there was little change in the percentage of Americans who said they
would vote for a female presidential candidate if she was qualified.
That stagnation coincided with a broad effort to reassert traditional gender roles as part
of the ideological battles of the Cold War.
LEAVE IT TO BEAVER: They say a woman’s place is in the home and I suppose as long as she’s in
the home, she might as well be in the kitchen.
It had become popular for Freudian psychologists to blame working women for society’s ills.
NARRATOR: Everywhere children with working parents are being left without adequate supervision
or restraint.
FARNHAM: Catastrophic social forces have propelled American women away from femininity and into
careers a terrific cost to themselves and society.
Political operatives were able to leverage these trends to end the career of Minnesota
Congresswoman Coya Knutson in 1958.
She lost her re-election after they arranged for her estranged husband to publish a letter
asking for her to come home and care for their family.
And those women who somehow managed to get a law degree at that time faced open discrimination
when they graduated.
SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR: I called at least 40 of those firms asking for an interview and
not one of them would give me an interview. I was a woman and they said we don’t hire
women.
When the women’s liberation movement got up and running in the late 60s and in the
70s, the early priorities were fighting job discrimination and securing equal rights in
the law.
During this time, the number of women in Congress barely changed, but the Democratic party saw
a female presidential candidate in Shirley Chisholm, a Congresswoman from New York.
CHISHOLM: I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for presidency
of the United States of America.
O’NEILL: She was a truly feminist, anti-racist lawmaker.
CHISHOLM: I believe we are intelligent enough to recognize the talent, energy and dedication
which all Americans, including women and minorities have to offer.
Chisholm was one of the prominent feminists who created the National Women’s Political
Caucus in 1971, with the goal of electing more women to Congress. In response, the Secretary
of State at the time reportedly joked with President Nixon that the women resembled “a
burlesque.”
By 1977, fully half of the country still agreed with the statement that most men are better
suited emotionally for politics than most women.
INTERVIEWER: You both have combined, it seems to me very successfully, marriage and politics.
What do you say to people that say the two are incompatible. How have you done this?
MINK: Well I think that’s probably the most offensive question that’s ever asked, because
I truly believe that men and women are equal. And I’ve never heard anyone ask a man, how
has it been on your family? I mean, it’s seldom asked.
MALCOLM: We had made very little progress from the dawn of the women’s movement. In
fact Democratic women had lost seats in the House.
Nevertheless, in 1984 women’s groups convinced the Democratic presidential candidate to choose
a Congresswoman as his running mate.
MONDALE: I looked for the best vice president and I found her in Gerry Ferraro.
NATIVIDAD: Oh, I thought our lives would change.
FERRARO: If we can do this, we can do anything.
MALCOLM: Women were coming out in record numbers, and they would bring their children and hold
their babies up, and show their daughters what it would be like to have a woman running
for vice president.
NATIVIDAD: Everything will be different after this. It wasn’t.
MEET THE PRESS: Geraldine Ferraro, the Democrat who wants to be vice president. Ms. Ferraro,
could you push the nuclear button?
BUSH: Let me help you with the difference, Ms. Ferraro, between Iran and the embassy
in Lebanon.
FERRARO: Let me just say, first of all, that I almost resent, Vice President Bush, your
patronizing attitude that you have to teach me about foreign policy.
The majority of women, like the majority of men, voted for the popular incumbent president
that year.
It would be more than two decades before one of the major parties nominated another woman
for vice president.
In the 1980s women caught up to men in college enrollment, and they’d surpassed them in
voter turnout rates in presidential elections.
But the public and the press still didn’t know what to make of women seeking elected
office, as Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder found when she briefly considered running
for president in the 1988 election.
SCHROEDER: The first thing you always get is, ‘Well you don’t look presidential.’
My answer was always ‘I know that. There’s never been a president of the United States
that looks like me. I find that regrettable. But, you know.’
O’NEILL: When she announced that she was ending or suspending her campaign — it was
clear that she was not going to win in the primaries — you know, she became emotional
just for a moment.
SCHROEDER: I could not figure out how to run and not be separated from those I serve. There
must be a way but I haven’t figured it out yet.
O’NEILL: She was roundly pilloried. ‘Oh, this proves it, women are too soft. Women
are too emotional.’ And you know, the impact on Congresswoman Schroeder was not very great.
I’ve met her, she’s an an amazingly tough, optimistic, extraordinary person. The impact
was on bystander women who might have been thinking that they might want to run.
Women running for office faced a double bind. They had to appear tough enough to lead, but
if they were too tough or too confident, they violated norms about how women are supposed
to behave.
This is how the Washington Post described Barbara Mikulski after she became one of two
women in the Senate in 1986.
MALCOLM: There was one Republican, Nancy Kassebaum, and Senator Mikulski, and 98 men.
Malcolm’s new fundraising organization, EMILY’s List had helped make Mikulski a
credible candidate. Together they set out to bring more Democratic women to Congress,
and they got a boost when law professor Anita Hill was called to testify about a Supreme
Court Nominee.
NEWS 4: Clarence Thomas called Anita Hill a liar. Hill says Thomas sexually harassed
her and she passed a lie detector test.
O’NEILL: The all-male panel doing the hearings for Clarence Thomas decided to simply attack
her.
HEFLIN: Are you a scorned woman?
SIMPSON: I would think that these things with you describe are so repugnant that you would
never have talked to him again, and that is the most contradictory and puzzling thing
for me.
O’NEILL: What Anita Hill was describing was absolutely resonant with what so many
women had experienced in their own lifetime. They knew she was telling the truth.
MALCOLM: Women were furious. And when they found out there were only two women in the
Senate, they decided they were going to do something about it. And they did.
CBS NEWS: They’re calling it the Year of the Woman. What impact will it have on Congress?
JORDAN: And what we see today is simply a dress rehearsal for the day and time we meet
in convention to nominate madam president.
O’NEILL: For the first time in the United States House of Representatives, the number
of women increased to fully 10 percent.
The 1992 election brought in 24 congresswomen and 4 female senators.
MIKULSKI: Some women spend their life looking out the window for Prince Charming. I’ve
been waiting six years for new women to come to the United States Senate.
MOSELEY-BRAUN: And I was telling the students at the time that eight women had been elected
to the United States Senate. And one little girl looked at me and said, ‘Is that all?’
Her universe, her world showed her the possibilities and that is the progress that we have achieved.
While women continued to make slow but steady gains in Congress, lack of money and party
support prevented female candidates from making credible bids at a presidential nomination.
DOLE: I think what we’ve done is pave the way for the person who will be the first woman
president.
MOSELEY-BRAUN: We are committed to opening up our democracy. We will get there one day.
So when Hillary Clinton entered the 2008 primaries as the presumptive front-runner, it was utterly
unprecedented.
COURIC: If it’s not you, how disappointed will you be?
CLINTON: Well, it will be me.
Like Congressional candidates in the 80s and 90s, Clinton’s strategy was to campaign
as any man would, emphasizing strength and minimizing gender.
O’NEILL: Her advisers were absolutely determined to downplay that.
CAMPAIGN AD: If we have the will, she has the strength. If we have the conviction, she
has the experience.
MALCOLM: It was a 1990s strategy, because certainly in the early days, that’s what
we had to do with candidates.
O’NEILL: I think it started changing at the end of the primaries in 2008.
CLINTON: But I am a woman and, like millions of women, I know there are still barriers
and biases out there, often unconscious.
Her attempt to run a genderless campaign didn’t keep sexism out of the election.
CARLSON: That is so perfect, because I have often said when she comes on television, I
involuntarily cross my legs.
CAFFERTY: She morphed into a scolding mother
BARNICLE: Looking like everyone’s first wife standing outside a probate court
by the time of her concession speech, Clinton seemed to recognize that her supporters didn’t
want to ignore gender.
O’NEILL: I had managed to somehow get on a platform so I could actually see her from
very far away. And what was really striking to me is I’m looking around and many, many,
many women in tears.
CLINTON: Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time,
thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it, and the light is shining through like
never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will
be a little easier next time.
Eight years later, Clinton’s openly campaigned on her experiences as a woman.
CLINTON: Look, I’m not asking people to vote for me because I’m a woman. But I think
if you vote for somebody on the merits, one of my merits is I’m a woman and I think
that makes a big difference in this world.
Oddly, the first woman to come close to the presidency faced an openly sexist opponent.
TRUMP: You know, you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of
her...wherever.
CNN: “Look at that face,” he cries, “Would anybody vote for that? Can you imagine that?
The face of our next president? I mean she’s a woman. I’m not supposed to say bad things
but really, folks, come on, are we serious?”
HOLT: Earlier this month you said she doesn’t have, quote, a presidential look. She’s
standing here right now. What did you mean by that?
TRUMP: She doesn’t have the look. She doesn't have the stamina.
But women have never voted as a unified block.
MSNBC: The exit polls, sir, shows that Trump did better with women than expected. For example,
white women ages 45-64. Trump won by 19 points there.
So how much longer will it be? That depends on how many women are in the pipeline.
LAWLESS: We just don’t have that many women in the Senate or in governors’ mansions
and those are the two most likely paths to the presidency.
The focus on the presidential race can obscure the fact that women who run for Congress and
governor are just as likely as men to win. The problem is fewer women are running.
LAWLESS: We identified a national sample of lawyers, business leaders, educators and political
activists. And across the board there was about a 16 point gender gap in political ambition.
They’ve done this survey twice and the gap didn’t shrink between 2001 and 2011.
When asked to assess their qualifications for public office, the women rated themselves
lower than men.
HALEY: We second-guess ourselves. We always try to say well what if this happens or what
if I’m not ready or what if I don’t know enough. And that’s where women hold themselves
back.
The confidence gap between men and women is a broad societal problem, but there’s one
easy way to continue working toward gender parity in politics.
LAWLESS: Women are less likely than men to be recruited or encouraged to run for office.
And when women and men get that encouragement, get that boost, they’re far more likely
to throw their hats into the ring.
MALCOLM: There’s a lot of ways we can find support for you, but we need your leadership
and your intelligence and your hard work to make this democracy work. So think about it.
Maybe you should be running for office.
NATIVIDAD: All the rights that we have are tenuous. It depends on administration, it
depends on current politicians. It depends on memory. So be vigilant. Be the voice for
change. Don’t just be a recipient of it.
CLINTON: You will have successes and setbacks, too. This loss hurts. But please, never stop
believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it.