More than a century after women’s suffrage, no woman has sat in the Oval Office
The presidential elections on November 5 represent the second great opportunity to break the last great glass ceiling that remains for women in the front line of US politics. The current vice president, Kamala Harris, who already made history as the ‘number two’ in the Administration four years ago, now aspires to the position that her colleague Hillary Clinton could not reach eight years ago.
The United States is a story of short steps for gender equality in politics that began in 1866, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton became the first woman to run for the House of Representatives, although technically she could not be elected. She ran as an independent in the state of New York and received 24 votes out of 12,000.
Eleven years later, Susanna Salter became the country’s first female mayor when she was elected in Argonia, Arkansas, and it was not until 1916 that a woman, Jeannette Rankin, won a seat in Congress. She served in the House of Representatives for two years and returned in the 1940s, becoming the only person to vote against the United States’ entry into both world wars.
These steps had been taken at a time when women did not even have the right to vote, as this did not come until 1920 with the coming into force of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” the text reads.
Two years later, in 1922, the Senate was opened for the first time to a woman, Rebecca Latimer Felton, although she only served one day as a congresswoman, and in 1925 Nellie Tayloe Ross achieved an unprecedented position as governor of Wyoming, succeeding her late husband. Frances Perkins, for her part, has gone down in history as the first woman to form part of the Government when she obtained the Labor portfolio from Franklin D. Roosevelt.
THE DEFINITIVE LEAP WAS LONG IN COMING
In the following decades, women gained presence in the political sphere of the United States, historically dominated by white men. The front line opened up little by little, but it was not until 2007 when a woman was elected as speaker of the House of Representatives, the third most powerful position in the United States — only behind the Presidency and Vice Presidency.
Democrat Nancy Pelosi, who had already achieved a milestone five years earlier by becoming head of her parliamentary group, stepped forward as Speaker of the House. She held the post for four years, until January 2011, although she was able to return again between January 2019 and January 2023.
The 2008 election campaign marked another symbolic turning point in terms of equality, as for the first time a woman, Hillary Clinton, won a primary vote. Republican Sarah Palin was ultimately chosen as the Republican Party’s vice-presidential candidate, so that in the presidential elections of that year there was a woman on the main ticket of one of the two major parties.
However, neither Clinton was the final candidate of the Democrats nor Palin was able to become Vice President. It took another eight years, until 2016, for a woman, again Clinton, to become a candidate for the White House, while in 2021 Kamala Harris was able to become Vice President as ‘number two’ to the still president, Joe Biden.
REAL EQUALITY STILL FAR AWAY
Equality is far from total, as evidenced by the fact that in the current legislature only 28.3 percent of the seats in the federal Congress are occupied by women – the figure falls to 25 percent in the case of the Senate. This is in any case a record, as is the fact that there are twelve women governors, according to the Center for Women and Politics of the United States (CAWP, for its acronym in English).
From UN Women, Julie Ballington, an expert in political participation and leadership, recalls that in presidential systems such as that of the United States, the election of a woman as head of state is “more difficult”, since they tend to “exacerbate the barriers” more than in parliamentary systems. Thus, in statements to Europa Press, she focuses on issues such as “structural bias” or “lack of support from the electorate”.
Today, 28 countries have a woman as head of state or government, a “modest” advance compared to the 18 a decade ago, in her opinion. Among the 20 most populated countries, four are led by a woman at the presidential or governmental level, including Mexico, recently added to this list by Claudia Sheinbaum.
Ballington also warns that women in politics must face other forms of “harassment and discrimination” for reasons of gender that ultimately seek to “dissuade their participation” at different levels of administration, regardless of the country. Pressure, she points out, that now extends to the digital sphere, through discriminatory publications or images generated by artificial intelligence.
