Written by Madeiline May Kunin, Pearls, Politics, and Power: How Women Can Win and Lead, sounds very interesting. I heard her on WNYC today and am now inspired to run for office. Just kidding. But read this quote:
We have been bystanders to history for too long. We have no more excuses; we are educated, we care, and we are ready to enter the arena. Times have changed since I was first elected governor of Vermont in 1985. When nine-year-old Melissa Campbell visited the Vermont State House in 2006 and saw my portrait, she exclaimed, “Finally, a woman, it’s about time!”
It is about time. We have seen two women serve as secretary of state, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice; one woman as U.S. attorney general, Janet Reno; and two women justices in the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. For the first time in our history, we have a serious, qualified woman candidate for president—Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. On January 23, 2007, we saw the portrait of political leadership change in the Congress with the election of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. During the State of the Union Speech, when the camera focused on the triumvirate of the president, the vice president and the speaker, it was as if someone had torn down the scrawled sign nailed to the tree fort that read “Girls Keep Out,” and replaced it with “Women Are Welcome.”
We see more strands of pearls, flower-printed scarves, and red jackets in the Congress and in corporate boardrooms, but the lineups remain predominantly muted in black and gray. We can no longer wait for incremental change; it has been too slow. Parity will not be achieved by patience. To arrive at equal representation, we must mobilize both our anger and our optimism: anger at what is wrong in America and optimism that it can be changed for the better.
And we have to take risks—risks that we don’t have all the answers and risks that we may be rejected. The risk that we can no longer afford to take is the risk of continuing to accept things as they are—a country divided, governed by people who do not reflect the face of America. Bella Abzug made the case for women’s participation in public life in 1977: “We can no longer accept a condition in which men rule the Nation and the world, excluding half the human race from effective economic and political power. Not when the world is in such bad shape
Here’s the unusual dilemma of this election campaign, though: while it is true that what we need in our leadership now is more “feminine” energy and sensibilities, that does not automatically come with female anatomy. The ironic reality of the two Democratic candidates running for our highest office this year is that Senator Clinton manifests the oversized ego, obsessive ambition and need-to-won-at-all-costs attitude so typical of the misguided male leaders we’ve had, while Senator Obama proclaims a spirit of cooperation and oneness, diplomacy and collaboration over aggression more often associated with female leaders. We need the right spirit in the White House in these troubled times, and to have that, we must vote with our hearts and minds, not our genitals.