The NEW Year of the Woman
Nancy F. Koehn, Historian at the Harvard Business School
It’s a now too-familiar refrain—men don’t listen when women speak. Previous American presidents have been accused of this, but, in the past, there was a veneer of civility to how chief executives referred to and addressed women, and, by some, a heartfelt attempt to make things better.
Enter Donald Trump. Not only has his personal and public behavior been laced with abusing, shaming and discrediting women, but his administration has also taken active steps to diminish the rights, and ignore the most important issues that affect women, including contraception, abortion, healthcare, a living wage, equal opportunity, gun control and climate change. It has not gone unnoticed by this country’s female majority that the Trump White House is stacking the lower courts with extreme right-wing judges who either oppose or willingly turn a blind eye to what is in women’s best interest.
So, women are fighting back. The resistance became visible with the Woman’s March on January 21, 2017, right after President Trump’s inauguration. It has gathered steam with the resurgence of the #MeToo movement and the blue wave of female candidates running for elected office at all levels of government. Perhaps the event bringing this amazing moment in our nation’s history into the sharpest focus is the battle over the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. What seems, at first glance, to be dramatic internecine warfare between conservative and progressive forces, each fighting for and against branding the highest court with a rightist stamp for at least a generation, is actually a piece of a greater, if more subtle, truth: A powerful battle is raging over the fundamental place of women in our country. It is an encounter about the basic civil, economic, political and social liberties accorded to all American women and their daughters. Do we live in a nation in which all men and women are created equal? Or are women to remain second-class citizens, entitled to some, but not all, of the basic rights that men enjoy?
Across demographic, geographical, political and socio-economic lines, women are well aware of the essence of this struggle, and in its wake, they are waking up to their power and the need to lead. As Deborah Walsh, director of the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University (CAWP) told The Hill, women have taken their outrage at Trump’s actions and turned it into political activism. They have come to realize, as Walsh said, that “[i]f they wanted to have elected officials who looked like them and sounded like them, they needed to be the candidate,” Walsh said.
The enormity of the collective response—from the large number of women running for office to the recent mass walkout to protest Kavanaugh’s nomination—is unprecedented, but it does have context in recent history. In 1992, spurred on by Anita Hill’s brave testimony against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, a record number of women ran for the U.S. Senate. At the time, there were only two sitting female senators: Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and Nancy Kassebaum (R-KS); Kassebaum was the first woman ever elected to a full Senate term without succeeding her husband. The shift seemed monumental and the media declared it to be the “Year of the Woman.”
The women who threw their hats into the ring that year were all Democrats: Patty Murray of Washington; Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer running from California; and Carol Moseley Braun, out of Illinois. All four won their elections, making Moseley Braun the first black woman elected to the U.S. Senate. A year later, in 1993, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, a Republican from Texas, brought the record number of women senators up to seven.
Our current election cycle has far exceeded that early progress. Today, 22 women are running for Senate seats—with six of the races being between two female candidates, which is also unparalleled in our history. More broadly, 3,260 women are running for elected office at all levels of government this year; this is a 67 percent increase over the 2,649 female candidates in 2016, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, From this 2018 group of women, 183 are running for the House (the record set in 1994 was 167) and 11 are running for governor (a small increase over the 10 who threw their hats in the ring in 1994). These women come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. Some are combat veterans, transgender, Native American, queer, Muslim, Asian-American, and Latina. Many are called to run because of the issues at stake, by their respective assessments of current leaders, and by a growing sense of their own potential agency and impact. As Xochitl Torres Small, who is the first woman to run for New Mexico’s Second District in the House since the district was created in 1969, told The New York Times, “I thought: Why isn’t my name on the list? What if the person who’s supposed to run is me?”
Among the many impressive women who asked that very question and embody this new dynamic is Stacey Abrams of Georgia. She is the first African-American woman ever to be nominated by a major party for the highest level of state leadership, and one of three African-American candidates running for governor this year—the highest number since the Reconstruction. Abrams is anything but a newcomer to breaking through older boundaries. The first African-American minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, she was also the first woman to lead the Georgia General Assembly.
U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Amy McGrath (retired) vaulted into the public imagination with her viral campaign video to announce her run for Kentucky’s Sixth District. The first woman Marine fighter pilot to fly an F-18, which she did for 89 combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. She is the also the daughter of a polio survivor, who was also one of the first women to graduate from the University of Kentucky Medical School. Her mother’s history has spurred McGrath to make affordable, accessible health care for all one of her main platforms.
Sharice Davids may become the first Native American woman elected to the U.S. House for Kansas’ Third District. The daughter of a single mother who spent more than 20 years in the Army, Davids was a professional mixed martial arts fighter before she graduated from Cornell Law School and became a White House Fellow. As an openly gay candidate, one of her many positions is for full legal rights for LGBTQI people.
This year is shaping up to be much, much bigger than 1992’s Year of the Women, as important as this moment was. We may just be looking at an entirely new paradigm (and a new slate of empowered leaders), as ordinary women take on extraordinary roles to be the change they want to see in the world, and to take their seats at the table of governance around the country. Such change doesn’t come easily, nor do the powerful retire without a struggle, but history will surely mark this as the critical turning point.
About the Author: Nancy F. Koehn is a historian at the Harvard Business School where she holds the James E. Robison chair of Business Administration. Koehn's research focuses on effective leadership and how leaders, past and present, craft lives of purpose, worth, and impact. Her book, Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times spotlights how five of history's greatest leaders managed crises and what we can each learn from their experience. She consults with many companies and speaks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival, and the World Business Forum. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University, Koehn earned a Master of Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government before taking her MA and Ph.D. in History from Harvard.
