Birthright Challenge: Can a Woman be President?

Published in Centre Daily Times, State College, PA (May 22, 2004)

This past February, my daughter came to me with an urgent question, “Amma, can a girl be President?” I wondered what had precipitated this doubt.

It turned out that one of the boys in her kindergarten class had declared that “girls cannot be presidents.” The girls in the class had disagreed and asked the teacher, who told them that a girl could indeed be president. Now my daughter wanted my verdict.

I told her that a girl could be anything she chose to be, and that included being president. My daughter was happy with my answer, declared she did not want to be president anyway, and moved on to something else.

But I could not move on. I did not want five year old girls or boys to believe that there were limits to the possibilities of girls’ lives.

I thought about my kindergarten years in India. I never had to hear such statements because India had a female Prime Minister during that time, Indira Gandhi. She was the democratically elected Prime Minister of India from 1966-1977 and then again from 1980-1984. During my kindergarten years, there was another female leader in the Asian subcontinent: Srimavo Bandaranaike, the elected Prime Minister of India’s neighbor, Sri Lanka, who held the post from 1960-65, 1970-77 and 1994-2000.

Considering my childhood experiences, I found it ironic that in 2004, in the USA, little children were still not sure about whether “girls could be presidents.”

Since there were no female US presidents that I could summon up, I went to the Internet in my quest for answers. I did a search on Google for female Heads of State and chose to visit www.guide2womenleaders.com developed by Martin Christensen, a Danish journalist. The categories beckoned to me tantalizingly: women leaders currently in office, heads of government, ministers, chairs of parliament, party and local leaders by country, and by time period.

The accompanying photographs were inspiring by their very existence. My daughter and I savored the variety of faces, the colors, the biographies, and we enjoyed pronouncing the names of female leaders from all continents. When I was finally ready to move on, my daughter was not. She visited every subheading, as if the next biography or photograph would give her convincing proof that women indeed could be elected presidents and prime ministers.

Thanks to her excitement, I learned and shared some interesting facts with her. That there have been female rulers since antiquity.

That Prime Minister Srimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka was the first democratically elected female Head of State in the modern world (1960) and Vigdis Finnbogadottir of Iceland was the modern world’s first democratically elected female President (1980).

That, in 1997, when Mary McAleese was elected President of Ireland, five of the six presidential candidates in that race were female.

That, Victoria Chaflin Woodhull, the first female candidate for US president, ran not once, but twice, in 1872 and 1892 and that Belva Ann Bennet McNall Lockwood ran in 1884 and 1881.

That several women have run since then, mostly as outsiders on minor party tickets, and a few as candidates in primary races for the two major party tickets.

A few days after my Internet search for female leaders, I read a letter from a 13-year-old American girl to “Dear Abby.” Her ambitions to be president were laughed at by her male teacher, and one of her male classmates declared that “girls aren’t allowed to be president.”

These situations in our classrooms suggest that the many female presidential candidates since 1874, and the numerous female heads of state from all over the world are not part of our education or our consciousness.

Our schools need to teach our kids that competency has nothing to do with gender or race or ethnicity, that girls can be presidents, that many other countries have elected female leaders, that we did have women leaders of Native American tribes, and that we have several female state governors. And perhaps our kids will then ask us why we have not had a female president yet.

These days, my daughter asks to visit the “female leaders website” almost as often as she asks to visit the PBS Kids website. She recently declared that if she or any other girl becomes president, somebody would write their biographies.

This leads me to imagine an election year where women would run for president, their gender being considered nothing more than an accident of birth. I

imagine a president’s biography, which states her story, notes her successes and failures, and attributes none of them to the fact that she is female. I picture children reading the story, and I imagine a time, when it would be an ordinary day, not an extraordinary one, when several boys and girls decide that they would someday run for president.

Calls to quit are not part of American or Global values

Originally Posted on the Common Threads Blog
Centre Daily Times, May 20, 2008

Last week, I was at my fourth grade daughter’s first intramural track meet.

As the children competed in running, relay, long jump, and wheelbarrow races, the audience of moms, dads, sisters, brothers, grandparents and teachers wildly cheered them on.

We cheered the winners, those in between, and those who came in last.

Our cheers hopefully taught them to stay in their races and do their best, and to never quit on themselves, no matter what race they were in, and no matter how good or bad they were at it.

We hope that they will remember this lesson, in other projects they are involved with, in future years, and well into their adult lives.

If any of them run for political office, in the future, I hope the lessons from their track meet would tell them to stay in the race and never give up on themselves.

And if any of us are watching those political races, I hope that we would emulate the cheering hordes at these elementary intramurals and encourage those now grown up kids to do their very best.

And cheer them on for staying in and fighting the good fight, and for not giving up.

I think we can be assured of this future scenario, because most Americans feel this way even today.

A Gallup Poll released on May 6, 2008 indicates that 60% of Democrats think that both candidates for their party’s nomination should stay in the race, and that neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama should quit the race midway.

And a Pew Research Poll found that 73% of Americans do not want the media to be declaring Barack Obama the winner of the race for the Democratic nomination, at this stage in the race.

Looks like we Americans like to have our contestants compete all the way through, and to declare the winner only at the end of the race.

We Americans are also not in favor of anyone calling on someone to give up.

Perhaps, we as a nation - voters, politicians, pundits and journalists are all at our best, when we emulate the cheering parents in the elementary intramural track stands.

Parents who cheer on everyone’s best efforts, and remind their kids that enjoying their day in the sun, learning to run with the wind in their face, and doing their very best is far more important than winning.

That staying in their respective races and giving it their best is the honorable way all over the world, compared to quitting or giving up.

And the cheering parents also teach us that no spectator should ever do the dishonorable thing of asking anyone to quit a race.

Comments : Finishing the race
Submitted by Eye on Eisenhow... on Tue, 2008-05-20 10:59.
What an apt and intelligent perspective.
Thanks for sharing.

How Unbiased are our Judgements?

Originally Posted on the Common Threads Blog,
Centre Daily Times, Feb 27, 2008

The first two months of 2008 have brought us reports about the divisive riots in Kenya, the sectarian rivalries in Iraq, the tensions in Serbia and Kosovo, and the divisiveness of our own election primaries.

As a writer who focuses on the common threads that link us all, it has been depressing to try and figure out why the links between people break down, and why nations fracture along religious, ethnic and tribal lines, and even along gender, age, race, and class lines.

How do we lose the common bonds we share as human beings? When do certain aspects of our identity, be it religion, gender, ethnicity, political ideology become more important than our common humanity? When do our differences begin to matter more than our commonalities?

I don’t know the answers, but know that we lose a lot when we begin to divide up into groups.

I have often seen little kids, separating out into groups of “boys” and “girls” at elementary school. And now, a friend who lives in a major metropolitan area tells me that in the very diverse elementary school her child attends, there are many kids from different racial and ethnic groups, and kids in elementary school play at recess in groups formed along racial and ethnic lines.

Are these groups inevitable, I wonder?

I turn to Blink, the wonderful book by Malcolm Gladwell, in an attempt to understand how we are arriving at these groups - how do we judge who to hang out with? Is it similar to how we judge on who to vote for? Who to hire for a job?

Gladwell uses scientific research to demonstrate how we make “judgments” in the first two seconds of any interaction, via an “unconscious” mechanism. Many a time, these snap judgments, which we may call our instinctive reactions, may be right on the dot.

But they are not always infallible. Many of our prejudices and dislikes towards others can stem from these snap judgments. So that we can pronounce that someone looks a leader, or that someone looks like a terrorist, just on the basis of a snap judgment.

In the last chapter of his book, Gladwell writes about how the number of women in orchestras in the US went up by five times, once the rules for auditions were changed three decades ago, to have musicians auditioning from behind a screen. Once the screen hid the gender of the musician from the selection committee, more women were hired, thus proving the previous existence of bias on the basis of gender.

Perhaps a similar process to select our presidential candidates will help – analyze their records, without giving them any face time with us – in order to make sure we simply vote for the most competent person. Would such “screens” have given us presidential candidates who are more diverse – including more women and more people from all races? And filtered out irrelevant parameters like gender, race, age, religion and so forth?

The data from the classical music world showed us that women were being excluded when no screens were used. And it is not a stretch to say that this has happened, and is happening in other areas too.

After all, women were the last group to get the right to vote, are playing catch up in getting to positions of power, including the presidency, and are judged differently by our society, which includes the media.

I wish there was a way to use such “screens” in the world of politics, like in the world of classical music auditions - "screens" which would help us judge, based only on the records of the candidates, and not based on any other irrelevant factors which can cloud our perceptions.

Indian President Pratibha Patil

Originally Posted at Common Threads Blog
Centre Daily Times, July 25, 2007

On July 21, 2007, I read Gavin Rabinowitz’s news report entitled “India names its first female president.” My family and I were amused that he focussed more on gender discrimination in India, than about the new president of the largest democracy in the world.

Rabinowitz reduced Pratibha Patil to one aspect of her whole self, the female aspect, in this article written for the Associated Press. This reduction is similar to the labeling of politicians as “female” or “black” or “Mormon” or “Hispanic” or “Muslim” or “Hindu” or “some other one thing we use to define them.”

Once we label them, we wonder what they will do for their special “Religious,” “Racial” or “Gender” constituencies. Consider Rabinowitz’s comment “Still, it's not clear how much 72-year-old Pratibha Patil - a lawyer, congresswoman and former governor of the northern state of Rajasthan - can or will do in the mostly ceremonial post to improve the lives of her countrywomen.”

All I hope is that Pratibha Patil, in her past jobs, improved the lives of all her constituents who shared or did not share some parts of the multiple aspects of her identity - of gender, religion, language, or her identities as mother, lawyer, woman, wife and so on.

Pratibha Patil is a lawyer by training, and has been in politics for four decades - as a legislator at the state and national levels, as a minister at the state level, and finally as a governor of a state. And she has done all this by wearing what she chooses to wear, and looking how she chooses to look.

On Wednesday, July 25, 2007, she added one more thing to her resume - she was sworn in as India’s 13th president after winning 66% of the votes cast by national and state legislators. And just like other presidents who governed in spite of being male, she will govern in spite of being female.

I am happy that her election to the Presidency has done one thing – it has given us another picture of possibility of how a president can look, and who can aspire to be president – it can be a person who happens to be a woman from Maharashtra, who wears saris, who covers her head, who is a lawyer, a former legislator, and a governor, a mother, a wife, and so much more.

And that for me is the expanding opportunity of this historic moment.

Addressing a Women's History Month Assembly

Originally posted in Common Threads Blog,
Centre Daily Times, March 21, 2007

The Women’s History Month Assembly at my daughter’s school was coincidentally scheduled for March 8, which was also International Women's Day. Another parent and I were asked to address an assembly of Kindergarten to 5th grade students. We both followed a group of fifth graders, who celebrated the contributions of some very eminent women.

I was asked to bring an international perspective to the presentations, and I did that by sharing a bit of the personal and the political.

I shared some of my defining experiences - of growing up in Bombay, India, now called Mumbai, where my sister and I had our dreams nurtured by supportive parents, who strongly believed in education. We went to a girls’ school, where the female teachers, principal and student leaders nurtured our ability and potential– we were given every opportunity and encouragement. My sister went on to become an architect, and I a chemical engineer, and both of us came to the United States to attend graduate school.

I shared with the kids the one constant of my childhood – Indira Gandhi, the first woman Prime Minister of India, who held elected office from 1966–1977, and then again from 1980. Her presence made it possible for us to imagine female leaders, much like for the kids of Iceland, who saw a female President, Vigdis Finnbogadottir from 1980–2000, and the kids of about fifty other countries that have had female leaders.

I also shared with them some of the other facts about the world we all share..
That New Zealand was the first country to grant women the right to vote in 1893, and that women in most countries have had the right to vote since the 1950s.

That, today, Brunei and the U.A.E. do not give men or women the right to vote.

That today, Saudi Arabia is the only country where women cannot vote at all and that in Lebanon, women can only vote if they have at least an elementary education.

That the country which elected the first female head of state, in modern times, was Sri Lanka – they elected Sirimavo Bandaranaike as Prime Minister in 1960 - her photo is the one appearing above.

That of the 192 countries in the world, approximately 50 have already had female heads of state – and these include countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Dominica, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Yugoslavia.

That only two conditions are needed for anyone running for president in the United States – that they are natural born US citizens, and that are more than 35 years of age.

I of course hope that all the kids at that assembly realized that women can become president today, and little girls can aspire to it, if they so wish.

I also recommend to all adults and kids, two wonderful creations, that I came across during this journey – they might reshape our ideas of how a leader would look.

www.guide2womenleaders.com, a site by a Danish journalist, which allows you to take in images of leaders from around the world, and “Madam President,” a picture book by Catherine Thimmesh, which details the “Extraordinary, True (and Evolving) Story of Women in Politics” in the United States.