Hillary Clinton speaks more softly than either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, yet she was accused throughout her presidential campaign of shouting. As Secretary of State, Clinton’s popularity ratings were high. They dropped as soon as she confirmed her run for the White House.8
This response wasn’t confined to male voters. Women are products of the same sets of social messaging, programmed in varying degrees to defer, to support, and that’s only the start of the problem. The harder we try to slough off patriarchal programming and determine for ourselves what it means to be female, to be a woman, the more our synapses begin to fry. Where does biological sex end and constructed gender begin? What are intrinsically female qualities?
We know that it is an insult to be called ‘nice’ in the political context, yet in that same context, as feminists, many of us would go to the barricades to assert our niceness. We assume it is the superpower the new breed of 50-foot women could bring to bear. We imagine Equalia would be a nice place because a gender-balanced society would enable men to relax and discover their own niceness in a gentler, feminised culture.
The ease with which the steering committee achieved consensus at its earliest meetings seemed to bear out this notion. Then came an argument. We tussled over the future shape of the organisation, and afterwards everyone around the table looked stricken. In raising our voices to defend beliefs, we had inadvertently challenged one of the unspoken shared beliefs that brought us together. True, the disagreement led to better decisions, but maybe the sexes weren’t so different after all.
Did we, as women, really bring something unique to the table? The next chapter looks at what happens if those tables are not kitchen tables but Cabinet tables.
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.1 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.’2
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 racism that flamed so fiercely throughout Obama’s two terms of office sometimes tried to mask itself during his 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