Presence Without Imagination: Women in the Presidency
“Let us set up our Camera, and let the sun paint the people.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why write a book on women in the presidency now? I live in a country that has never had a woman president. Certainly, it is not for a want of trying. What to make of this American riddle? We need such books, writes Franz Kafka, that examines who and what we are: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” WOMEN & THE PRESIDENCY is an axe that moves readers to reflect on the frozen areas of women’s leadership, clearing and refreshing the way for its growth and development.
Finally, I prefer to write a book about the idea and image of a woman president that is evolving in the hearts and minds of the American public. This (idea and image) is alive in all the debates about women holding the decision-making leadership role of the presidency. I want to show that, and I am prepared to accomplish my goal using a skill set of description I acquired from my studies in classical rhetoric.
Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith announced she was running for president in January 1964. I was in seventh grade. Then, I was more apt to listen to the Beatles “I Want to Hold Your Hand” than a nightly newscast, yet Smith’s story caught my attention one evening right before supper. Homework was the likely culprit. Somehow Smith had wedged herself between my worlds of AM radio and school.
Smith’s announcement stayed with me in a way I couldn’t explain to anyone including myself. I listened to grown-ups talk worriedly about the next generation. Music, hair, clothing, pierced ears, and slang words were frequent topics of my mother and grandmother at the kitchen table. Sometimes I listened to them while I helped with folding clothes. Mostly, I tuned out their grumbles. When the subject of women and the presidency came up, I was galled by their reactions to Smith’s belief that she could be president. I couldn’t tune out their prejudices. I loved my grandmother and mother, but I thought they were fuddy-duddies. “A woman will be president in my lifetime, you watch,” I imagined myself saying to them, but they would have laughed and told me: “Just wait, young lady. Someday you will change your mind when you meet the right man.”
Three days after Smith made history, my Current Events teacher, Mr. “Chrome Dome” Walter, brought his radio to class so we could hear the launch of Ranger 6. As I listened to the broadcast and heard everything about Ranger 6’s mission to take pictures of the moon’s surface and transmit them to Earth before purposefully crashing, my thoughts started to drift back to the idea of a woman president. I suddenly realized that Ranger 6 was all the proof I needed to thwart the claims of my mother and grandmother. If the U.S. could launch a spacecraft to the moon, then anything and everything was possible. I didn’t want to be president. I just wanted the idea to have a homecoming. I wanted to share my vision of women holding the decision-making leadership role of the presidency with others. If only I had a camera-like device.
Due to a failure of the camera system on Ranger 6, no images were returned. Many years later, I watched Senator Hillary Clinton deliver her presidential campaign suspension speech. On June 7, 2008, she said, “As we gather here today in this historic, magnificent building [the National Building Museum], the 50th woman to leave this Earth is orbiting overhead. If we can blast 50 women into space, we will someday launch a woman into the White House.” In a flash, her spaceship metaphor transferred me to the past and my mind was on Ranger 6. Clinton did not get the Democratic nomination. She had repeated the historic trajectory of Smith, and the idea of women in the presidency had gone no farther in public space than it had since I was in seventh grade. I never forgot my desire to bring the idea of women in the presidency in all its pictorial glory home.
Eight years passed and Hillary Clinton became the first woman to be nominated to the presidency by a major party. In 2016, she made it to a place where no woman in American history has ever been. Using her metaphor of a space launch, the mission to the presidency failed for her and all women. No one could bring it home. Once again, my thoughts drifted back to Ranger 6. Clinton’s campaign, like all the others, had been able to take off and run for the presidency, but, like Ranger 6, she had not been able to transmit the idea of a woman president from the past to the present for us to see.
The idea of a woman president has not been realized. The problem of not seeing and realizing women holding the decision-making leadership role of the presidency is not about Hillary Clinton. It is not about Margaret Chase Smith, and it is not about any one of the more than forty women who have tried to be president since 1870 when for the first time a woman declared she was running for president. When it comes to envisioning the idea of women in the presidency, the flaw is not for want of opportunity. The fault lies in America’s camera, to extend the metaphor of the space launch, to capture its awareness of putting a woman in the White House. In other words, we have no full resolution on the idea of women acting in the job of the presidency.
I want a book that surveys, studies, explores, examines, and discovers the idea and image of women in the presidency situated in the American political landscape conceived as a debate terrain. What do people say about the idea? Why? How has the idea changed the landscape over time, and how has the landscape affected its growth and development?
2016 was a letdown for me: It meant we were, like Ranger 6, still in a state of being without imagination. At that point, 146 years stood between the first declaration and a major-party nomination. Therein lies the idea of women and there it has grown, changed, adapted, and failed in a political landscape built and worn by opinions, beliefs, and logic used in thinking and acting. All this time generations have organized and interpreted their experiences of the idea of women holding the decision-making leadership role in the presidency, and have imagined (or not) its homecoming.
Somewhere today, I imagine, a child is sitting in seventh grade. He or she is eager and full of anticipation for all sorts of reasons, but I envision their excitement is like the way I felt a long time ago. Unlike me, the idea of women in the presidency is not beyond the pale. Compared to my generation in 1964, today’s mixed generations consider the idea of a woman president as highly probable. After all, Hillary Clinton won her party’s nomination, and she won the popular vote. Plus, Kamala Harris was elected vice president in 2020.
The idea of women in the presidency remains one of the great, peculiar whys of American life. In 2016, I decided it was high time to examine our history—the equipment we use for remembering, coming to terms with what we want and think, and creating a fresh start. I wanted to capture the image of women in the presidency as it was talked about and portrayed in American society writ large. I wanted to pinpoint what happened to the vision over a long time and convey the story.
Therefore, I set up my Camera, and essay to let the sun paint the people’s rhetoric about women & the presidency. Then, when all is said and done ….
Now #youcanseeher.