Four years from now, in 2020, we will celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the vote. A backward glance might have saved us the steep disappointment of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss. African-American men won the vote in 1870; we had our first black male President a hundred and thirty-eight years later. By that logic, we’ll have to wait until 2060 for a woman to shatter what Clinton has repeatedly called the “highest and hardest” glass ceiling.
As the lag between the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and Barack Obama’s election suggests, attaining the vote and winning the office are two separate struggles. Clinton is best seen not as the heir to America’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century suffragists but to an earlier American feminist, Margaret Fuller, who argued, more than a century before Betty Friedan’s best-selling “The Feminine Mystique” made a similar case, that woman’s route to liberation must come through entry into traditionally masculine professions. “We would have every arbitrary barrier laid down,” Fuller, the first woman permitted to conduct research in Harvard’s library, who would go on to become America’s first woman foreign correspondent, wrote in her internationally popular “Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” published in 1845. “We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man.” She went on, “If you ask me what offices they may fill, I reply—any. . . . Let them be sea-captains, if you will.”
“Let them be Presidents,” she would surely have said today.
Fuller, who drowned in a sailing ship helmed by a grievously inexperienced male sea captain, at the age of forty, had another message that may resonate with younger Americans, who voted overwhelmingly for Clinton and who, after Trump has served his term, will have their chance to steer the country. “Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism,” Fuller wrote. But that duality is false: “In fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. . . . There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” Fuller argued that if each human being were permitted to achieve “fullness of being,” if our unique combination of male and female qualities were allowed free play, then finally there would be an end to the “discordant collision” that she saw as the inevitable result of the polarization of the sexes.
Clinton lost the election to an opponent whose only certifiable qualification—and, often, the one he was proudest to display—seemed to be his masculinity. She was, in the process, attacked for being too weak, too ill, too detail-oriented, and, when she dared poke fun at her accuser, too nasty. Let’s hope the next Presidential election with a female candidate won’t hark back to a battle of the sexes but, instead, will feature reasoned debate between candidates whose gender identities matter little to the electorate, and to the outcome. For that, we cannot afford to wait until 2060.
