IN 2008, A young Labour Party activist from London travelled to Raleigh, North Carolina, to help Barack Obama win the White House. Hannah Peaker believed in descriptive representation – that it isn’t enough to elect lawmakers to advocate for us; at least some of our representatives must also share characteristics and perspectives with us if legislation is to be properly attuned to our needs. The Democratic primaries posed a quandary in this respect. Did the United States more urgently require a black President or a female one? Both firsts seemed long overdue, and the debate had quickly descended into rancour.
‘Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life,’ wrote Gloria Steinem in a piece arguing for Hillary Clinton. This sentiment from one of the most prominent leaders of second-wave feminism kicked off a self-mutilating game of Who’s More Oppressed Than Whom. After it rumbled on for nearly a month, Kimberlé Crenshaw co-authored a riposte with the author of The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler, pointing out the false polarity. ‘We believe that feminism can be expressed by a broader range of choices than this ‘either/or’ proposition entails ... For many of us, feminism is not separate from the struggle against violence, war, racism and economic injustice.’
Hannah did not believe that misogyny trounced racism or that getting any woman elected would inevitably help women. Her view was that descriptive representation creates better democracies by more closely reflecting the complexity of the voting populations. However, she had already witnessed in British left-wing politics the magical queuing system that keeps gender from ever reaching the head of the line. She had also seen women held to higher standards than men – and judged more harshly than men – because of their rarity. She wasn’t enthused by Hillary Clinton, but she didn’t think Clinton deserved the venom spat in her direction. In choosing to help Obama, Hannah hoped to support a politician who seemed as if he might, in Crenshaw and Ensler’s terms, ‘work to abolish the old paradigm of power’. Patriarchy lies at the core of that paradigm.
By the time Hannah headed to the States, Obama had defeated Clinton and teamed up with Joe Biden. They were rising in the polls against the Republican Party’s John McCain and his surprise choice as a running mate, Sarah Palin. Obama’s ground campaign looked impressive. Hannah arrived in North Carolina with just a change of clothes and an address on a piece of paper. Within 24 hours, she had digs in a house loaned to Obama’s local team by supporters, a bellyful of barbecued meat from a fundraising cookout, boxes of Obama t-shirts, hats, stickers and leaflets, and an itinerary. She would be working in Raleigh campaign headquarters but her new colleagues wanted her to meet the voters first.
‘They sent me out canvassing because they thought this whole thing was hilarious: this British girl knocking on people’s doors,’ says Hannah. ‘People just couldn’t understand what on earth I was doing there. Why had I come to campaign for their President? There’s very little travel outside of the state much less the US.’ Door-knocking in North Carolina held dangers she had never encountered on the other side of the Atlantic. After a brace of gun-toting Republicans bared their teeth and set their dogs on her, she approached the task with circumspection.
When yet another red-faced man answered the door with a shotgun in the crook of his arm and dogs circling his legs, Hannah instinctively began backing away. Still she delivered her opening line. ‘Hey, sorry to disturb you. Are you going to be voting for Obama?’
‘He’s like “What?”’
‘Are you going to be voting in this election, sir?’ Hannah mimics herself, the question starting softly and tapering to a near-whisper. ‘He’s like “You with Obama?” I’m like “Yeah”.’ She mimes cowering. ‘I was wearing an Obama jumper and baseball cap.’
She had started to calculate the time it would take to sprint from his porch to the gate when he spoke again. ‘So me and my boys, we’ve voted Republican our whole lives. But Sarah Palin is on the ticket. I said to them, “Would you want your wife to be President?” And they said “Hell no. So we’re going to be voting for Obama.”’
‘OK,’ Hannah replied, simultaneously relieved and horrified. ‘Have a badge. Welcome on board.’
This attitude wasn’t isolated. The endemic racism that smouldered and sparked throughout Obama’s two terms of office, and that Donald Trump so assiduously fans to conflagration, sometimes tried to mask itself during Obama’s initial run at the presidency, even in North Carolina, a state that between 1873 and 1957 operated 23 so-called Jim Crow laws enforcing racial segregation. On the doorsteps, people avoided talking directly about race, although they regurgitated racist conspiracy theories that Obama might be a secret Muslim or lack a US birth certificate. They made no effort to cloak their hostility towards women in politics. ‘The gender stuff you could be explicit about. You could just be anti-women,’ Hannah says.
She stayed in Raleigh until the election and watched the count in a funeral parlour hired as campaign headquarters by the Democrats ‘because it was the cheapest thing on the block. The night of the election I passed out on the floor of the embalming room with a bottle of scotch. It was the absolute best feeling in the world.’ Back in the UK, she wanted to recapture that feeling and, more than that, find a way to open up politics to women. She successfully applied for a Kennedy scholarship, and spent a year at Harvard researching the topic she had pitched: the feasibility of a women’s equality party.
Five years later, back living in London and working for the Cabinet Office after stints helping the Labour Party to get more female candidates elected, she went with friends to the Women of the World Festival at the Southbank Centre, but all the events that interested her were sold out. ‘So we drank lots of wine and had this massive discussion. “WOW is great but this has to move into the political space. How do we do that and should we act on that?” It didn’t go anywhere and a couple of weeks later someone said to me, “This party’s been set up.”’ Hannah laughs at the memory. ‘I was really cross and sulked.’
Her partner persuaded her to send an email offering to help out. She started volunteering, writing a strategy paper, and in October 2015 joined the Women’s Equality Party as Chief of Staff. ‘It was my dream job. The rest is history.’ She pauses. ‘Or not. In fact, it’s absolutely not history. It’s not even near to being history yet,’ she says. This chapter addresses a flurry of questions about women in politics – and about history. The United States rejected its first serious female candidate for the Presidency. What does this mean? Clinton had seemed poised to lead the charge of the 50-foot women. Instead history did that repeating-itself thing for which it’s renowned. Women have often made strides only to fall back. One lesson could not be more clear or more urgent: We must fight not only to extend gender equality but to retain those rights and protections we have.
The causes of her defeat bear more detailed unpicking. Clinton appeared part of the establishment, and in some ways she was. She had already occupied the White House, though never in her own right or on her own terms. Her story illustrates the limits of privilege-by-association and the sting in its tale. She earned her stripes, and some valid criticisms, during a career in politics spanning stints in the Senate and as Secretary of State, yet never escaped the accusation that she got where she did because of her husband. Her achievements were her own and so were her mistakes, but she was only ever permitted to own the latter. Her use of a private email server for government business was a bad misstep but in no way equivalent to the cascade of scandals and allegations surrounding Donald Trump.
During the Democratic primaries and in the main campaign, she accepted the mantle of the continuity candidate, the safe choice, the likely choice, enabling two white men, first Bernie Sanders, then Trump – the very definition of a fat cat – to present themselves as insurgents. This wasn’t just a tactical error on Clinton’s part. It reflected a profound misreading of the American people and of her own situation. Voters didn’t want continuity; they wanted change. She could have embodied that change. Certainly as a woman she was (excluding third-party candidates) the only real outsider in the race, for reasons already raised and explored here in greater detail.
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