Hillary Clinton’s victory securing the Democratic nomination this week shattered a glass ceiling for women across the country. And with the endorsement of a popular Barack Obama newly in hand, she may be on track to shatter the greatest one of all come November.
It’s a sign of feminist progress, and it’s a sign that we’re thinking differently – not just about her, but about the intersection of women and leadership, and even about the sometimes invisible and often insidious ways that gender affects our perceptions of political power.
But Obama becoming the first black US president didn’t mean that racism ceased to be a problem in America. Far from it. And similarly, Clinton’s victory this week doesn’t mean that the work of feminism is done. The danger, as we celebrate this most recent milestone for American women and look ahead to the bigger prize of the general election, is that we’ll lose sight once again of just how far we are from gender equality in America.
Obama’s historic 2008 victory was progress considering America’s history of racism and slavery , but it also gave rise to the birther movement, that overtly racist pack of conspiracy theories around Obama’s citizenship that helped propel Donald Trump to political prominence. Trump has continued to tease out such strains of racism in America, flirting with the endorsement of a former KKK leader and comparing the only black candidate in the race to a child molester.
It’s not just Trump. On Obama’s watch we saw a crisis of racially biased police killings, and the attendant rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Obama encountered an intransigence from a reinvigorated conservative movement perceived by many on the left to be motivated by racial animosity.
Although the 114th Congress is more diverse than ever, only 35% of America’s black population has black representation in Congress, and that’s the highest of any minority group.
A look further back in time at the march of women’s rights provides still further evidence that Clinton’s historic step forward this week is likely to be followed by setbacks for women, both big and small, as well as maddeningly slow incremental progress for gender equity inside and outside of politics.
Let’s start with the fact that women in America didn’t win the right to vote until 144 years after the country was founded, and that when they finally did win it in 1920, after years of protracted struggle, it would be more than a decade until the first woman was elected to the Senate. That woman, Hattie Caraway, took office in 1932, and most of the women who followed in her wake were just filling in for dead husbands. The first woman ever elected to the House of Representatives was Jeannette Rankin of Montana; roughly a century later, she’s still the only woman ever elected to Congress from Montana.
There were zero women in the upper chamber of Congress for significant stretches of the 1940s and 1970s, a reality that helped spur the founding of Emily’s List in 1985. Still, very few women were elected to Congress in either chamber until 1992, the so-called Year of the Woman. Today women still make up less than 20% of Congress despite accounting for more than half the population.
And the barriers go far beyond representational democracy. The gender pay gap persists. Access to women’s healthcare continues to be imperiled. Being a woman in America still means you are less likely to get ahead in your career (women hold less than 5% of Fortune 500 CEO roles). And the disparities are not just apparent at the highest levels, either. We are more likely to live in poverty, for instance. And the quality of life for minority women, on the whole, is considerably worse.
I grew up being told that a woman could be president – that one day, maybe, Hillary Clinton could run and win. I’m 31 years old now, and she still hasn’t done it. Not for lack of effort, talent or competence, but because it turns out it’s hard to overcome 240 years of American history.
If she does go on to win not just the nomination but the presidency, it will mean the male-female ratio of American presidents is 43 to 1. That ratio still won’t represent minority women or queer women or women from disadvantaged backgrounds. It will, in short, be a start.
As Donna Edwards put it in her concession speech after she lost the Democratic nomination for the Senate in Maryland, “What I want to know from my Democratic party is, when will the voices of people of color, when will the voices of women, when will the voices of labor, when will the voices of black women, when will our voices be effective, legitimate equal leaders in a big-tent party?”
That verdict is nowhere near in.