Free What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power by Marianne Schnall

sitting at the table doesn’t mean I can’t have additional chairs for other women. That’s another problem thatwe have sometimes as women: we don’t carry each other into the world, and also, when women are trying to impress the boss, they think about guys. Well, if I know John Kerry is available, Jesus Christ, you know who’s got comparable experience to John Kerry and has been serving on the Foreign Relations Committee for all these years—you should also reach out to her. The media piece is a very difficult beat. . . . It’s a tough business, even those Sunday shows. Do we watch them? Do we support them? Do we tweet about them? I mean, I try to tweet about Diane Sawyer. I try to tweet about Katie Couric. Of course I’ve written for Oprah’s magazine. We’ve got to be better supporters. That goes back to this whole notion of why there are not a lot of women, when we’re the majority of voters. We must ask that question of ourselves. What are we waiting for?
    MS : I know you have done so much advocacy in promoting voters’ rights and in getting young people to vote. Do you feel like that’s improving in terms of citizens, common citizens, just wanting to be a part of the process and speaking up when there’s something that they believe in?
    DB : I do believe that we need refresher courses from time to time on what it means to be a citizen in the United States of America in the twenty-first century. I think so many people lose sight of the fact that we have a system of a Republican form of government with self-representation. And not everybody needs to run for office. Some people need to be better advocates in their neighborhood. Some people need to be better advocates when it comes to fixing up schools and keeping the community thriving. Some people need to be better advocates in terms of the environment. So there are many ways to serve and many ways that we can fulfill our role as citizens of the United States of America. But we need to understand that we have the greatest power on the planet—as citizens of the United States of America—and when we fail to utilize that, that’s why we end up with the kind of governmentand the kind of dysfunction [we have], because we’re not actively engaged as citizens. That’s why, for me, voting is the lifeblood of our democracy.
    MS : In terms of where women are today, I feel hopeful on one side, because it seems like there are a lot of promising signs, and then on the other side of things, you see all this pushback on things that we thought we had already settled—on contraceptives and reproductive rights, as well as some of the misinformed rhetoric about rape that was going on in the last election. How do you view the moment that we’re in as it relates to the overall status of women in the United States and in the world?
    DB : There are always people who are going to lag behind. When you run a race, not everyone comes in first, and when you make social change or make progress, there will be those who say, “Not now, and not ever.” What you see today is a backlash—there’s no question there’s still a backlash. It’s cultural and it’s religious. Whenever there’s a dry moment in the forecast, some people use that as an opportunity to try to take us back to another, bygone era. But this is another reason why we have to remain ever vigilant. Let’s be honest: How many models do we have in the world to look toward? So we have to, as Gandhi often would say, “be the change that we wish to see in the world.” And as women, as leaders, we have to continue to fight for those priorities and champion those issues that will ultimately make our lives better and allow us to be coequal citizens on this planet.
    MS : Many people I spoke with made the point that we need to support Republican women candidates as much as we do Democrats. I want to make it clear that this is not a partisan issue.
    DB : There are so many Republican women. Because, look, I don’t