10.6092/issn.2611-2752/12416
In January 2021, A Black, South Asian woman, Kamala Harris, has risen to the position of U.S. vice president at the same moment as the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment. The article considers the changes that have occurred during the last 100 years in order to question the narrative which describes the conquest of suffrage as a political experience based essentially on white and middle-class women. Emphasizing the intertwining of race and gender involves striking a bare nerve in the history of the U.S. women’s suffrage movement and the battle for political representation.
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From 2020 to 1920 and Back: One Hundred Years from the 19th Amendment
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Raffaella Baritono
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From 2020 to 1920 and Back: One Hundred Years from the 19th Amendment
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https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/12416                                                            ISSN 2611-2752




From 2020 to 1920 and Back: One Hundred Years from the 19th
                                               Amendment

                                               Raffaella Baritono

                                               Published: March 4, 2021



                                                      Abstract

       In January 2021, A Black, South Asian woman, Kamala Harris, has risen to the position of U.S. vice
       president at the same moment as the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment.
       The article considers the changes that have occurred during the last 100 years in order to question
       the narrative which describes the conquest of suffrage as a political experience based essentially on
       white and middle-class women. Emphasizing the intertwining of race and gender involves striking
       a bare nerve in the history of the U.S. women’s suffrage movement and the battle for political rep-
       resentation.
       Keywords: Women’s Suffrage Movement; United States; 19th Amendment; Voting Rights Act.




Raffaella Baritono: University of Bologna (Italy)
 raffaella.baritono@unibo.it;  https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/raffaella.baritono
Raffaella Baritono is full professor of History of the United States at the University of Bologna, Department of
Political and Social Sciences.



Copyright © 2021 Raffaella Baritono                                                                          Art. #12416
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons BY License.                                                       p. B. 1
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One Hundred Years from the 19th Amendment                                                               USAbroad. Vol. 4 (2021)




    Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election will be remembered as a turning
point in the history of the political representation of women in the United States. For the first time,
a Black, South Asian woman, Kamala Harris, has risen to the position of vice president of the United
States in the year celebrating the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment granting
American women the right to vote, and the 55th anniversary of the approval of the Voting Rights
Act that dismantled the barriers that had prevented African-Americans from voting, especially in the
southern states. We cannot speak of the definitive breaking of the glass ceiling yet, although the lesion
that has been produced appears to be quite definitive; and the marble complex located in the U.S.
Capitol Rotunda—with the statues depicting the founding mothers of U.S. suffragism and a rough
block—will still have to wait to be completed with the statue of the first female president. However,
the event was rightly celebrated in comments from the press and the symbolic importance of the
victory was highlighted by Kamala Harris’s speech, delivered in the aftermath of when the fateful 270
electoral votes were achieved. Harris, dressed in white—the symbolic color of suffragist struggles—
described her victory as the result of a path of struggle and of the activism of black, Asian, white,
Native American, Latin women “who paved the way for this moment tonight. Women who fought
and sacrificed so much for equality, liberty and justice for all, including the Black women, who are too
often overlooked, but so often prove that they are the backbone of our democracy.” Consequently, she
continued, “Tonight, I reflect on their struggle, their determination and the strength of their vision—to
see what can be unburdened by what has been—I stand on their shoulders.”
    Harris wanted to pick up the baton from the past generations while, at the same time, she stressed
the need to look towards the future: “while I may be the first woman in this office, I won’t be the last.”1
    Despite the inevitable rhetoric, Harris’ speech presents aspects that deserve to be emphasized be-
cause they go beyond a “neutral” celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment. First
of all because this anniversary is connected to that of the Voting Rights Act, thus introducing the close
intertwining of gender citizenship and racial citizenship as a problematic element in the construction
of the American democratic sphere. During the election campaign, and especially after Biden’s de-
cision to propose her candidacy for vice president, Harris constantly claimed to be a “black” woman,
linking herself to figures such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, up to the most recent, Barbara
Jordan and Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman to participate in the primaries for
the presidential nomination in 1972. A claim that in the 2020 election was rooted in the need to recog-
nize the central role that African-American activists such as Stacey Abrams, Cori Bush, a Black Lives
Matter activist, had in the mobilization of voting for the Democratic Party and, above all, against the
presidency of Donald Trump. In an article published in the African-American magazine Essence, Ka-
mala Harris wrote: “Black women hold the power in this election. […] That’s why generations of Black
women marched and organized and fought to give us this right. Many never got to vote themselves.
But they pressed on knowing that, one day, Black women would be a force in our democracy. That,
when it mattered most, we would be the ones to mobilize our communities and vote for what’s right:
honesty and integrity, decency and dignity, equality and justice.”2
    Emphasizing the intertwining of race and gender involves striking a bare nerve in the history of the
U.S. women’s suffrage movement and the battle for political representation. That is, it questions that
narrative which draws a straight line from the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, a political myth in the
American suffragist movement,3 to suffrage that is based essentially on the experience of white and
middle-class women, obscuring the fact that after 1920, “the experiences of millions of women that
remained excluded from the franchise even after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.”4 Further-
more, it does not sufficiently focus on the tensions and contradictions that have historically involved


1.   Kamala Harris, Transcript of victory speech, The Associated Press, November 7, 2020.

2.   Quoted in Taryn Finley, “Kamala Harris Elected As First Black, Asian American Vice President,” Huffington Post, November
     7, 2020.

3.   Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls. Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University
     of North Carolina Press, 2014).

4.   Celeste Montoya, “From Seneca to Shelby. Intersectionality and Women’s Voting Rights,” in 100 Years of the Nineteenth
     Amendment. An Appraisal of Women’s Political Activism, eds. Holly J. McCammon and Lee Ann Banaszak (New York: Oxford
     University Press, 2018), 107.



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women’s suffragism and activism, which are far from being free from the more or less explicit accep-
tance of ethnic and racial stereotypes. Even in 1892, Anna Julia Cooper, in A Voice from the South: By a
Black Woman of the South, highlighted the peculiarity of the condition of black women, the double op-
pression they experienced as black and as women. In the same year, Ida B. Wells Barnett denounced
in Southern Horrors the hypocrisy of a white supremacist ideology that legitimized itself by defend-
ing the honor of white women, removing the burden of violence and oppression that black women
experienced.5
     A shadow that continues to make its effects felt even today. As has been pointed out by promi-
nent Black leaders by contesting the choice of the governor of California on his appointment of Alex
Padilla, a Mexican American, instead of appointing a black woman to take Vice President Kamala Har-
ris’ Senate seat, (there have been only two black women in the Senate so far, Carol Moseley Braun,
elected in 1993, and Kamala Harris). “To be a Black woman in the United States of America is to exist
in a state of constant dualities. Progress and setback, triumph and defeat, celebration and disappoint-
ment. […] That’s because we exist in a system that oppresses us through both racism and sexism.”6 On
the eve of the vote, African-American political scientist Niambi Carter of Howard University said in
an interview with The Washington Post: “I think a lot of times when we talk about women, we’re talking
about white women. […] I think a lot of times when we’re talking about Blacks, we’re talking about
Black men.’ Instead, for the first time, the victory of a ‘women of color’ was appearing, she observed,
which would have a seismic impact on the trajectory of history.”7
     So, it seemed that Kamala Harris’ victory would be able to overcome the trauma of Hillary Clinton’s
defeat in 2016, even if the election campaign was not free from obstacles and limits. It continued
to envision the strength of the stereotypes that had dominated in 2016 and even more during the
electoral campaign of the first woman candidate for vice-presidency, the Democrat, Geraldine Ferraro
in 1984. It happened again in 2008 when the Republican, John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running
mate.
     In 1984, Walter Mondale’s choice to nominate Geraldine Ferraro was the result of the mobilization
and pressure from women. In 1983, a group of activists from the Democratic Party in Washington, the
so-called “Team A,” was convinced that the conditions were in place for pressure to be exerted on the
party to nominate a woman for the vice presidency. However, the modification of the internal party
rules, following the work of the McGovern-Fraser commission in 1972, allowed a greater presence
of women among the delegates at the convention, as well as representatives of minorities and young
people. At the time, however, there were no female senators or women serving as governor—functions
that were considered necessary in order to aspire to a position on the presidential ticket. The choice
was addressed to Geraldine Ferraro, a congresswoman, a lawyer, a new woman who seemed to be the
symbol for women’s ability to be able to combine family, work and political ambitions. When she
was nominated for vice president, she recalled Joanna Howes, one of the women on “Team A,” “the
crowds came out, parents bringing daughters, it was a phenomenon. […] In my mind, that lead us to
figuring out how much energy there really was to do better with women in politics.”8 In reality, on
one hand, the electoral campaign highlighted the strength of gender stereotypes, which led journalists
to question the ability and authority of Geraldine Ferraro.9 On the other hand, as Shirley Chisholm
recalled when retracing her unfortunate presidential candidacy in 1972, “of my two handicaps, being



5.   Christine Stansell, The Feminist Promise. 1792 to the Present (New York: The Modern Library, 2010), 125 et seq. See also
     Elisabetta Vezzosi, “The International Strategy of African American Women at the Columbian Exposition and Its Legacy:
     Pan-Africanism, Decolonization and the Human Rights,” in Moving Bodies, Displaying Nations. National Cultures, Race and
     Gender in World Expositions Nineteenth to Twenty-first Century, ed. Guido Abbattista (Trieste: EUT, 2014), 67-88.

6.   Chauncey K. Robinson, “Newsome’s pick in Alex Padilla is historic. But why does it have to come at the expense of Black
     women?,” The Lily-Washington Post, December 23, 2020.

7.   Chelsea Janes, “Kamala Harris could be quickly on the Brink of a Historic Leap,” The Washington Post, November 2, 2020.

8.   Quoted in ibid.

9.   Raffaella Baritono, “Un paese latecomer? Donne e rappresentanza politica negli Stati Uniti contemporanei,” in Elette ed
     eletti. Rappresentanza e rappresentazioni di genere nell’Italia Repubblicana, ed. Patrizia Gabrielli (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino,
     2020), 71-88.



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female put many more obstacles in my path than being black.”10
    Despite the “trauma” of the 2016 election campaign, (and in some ways also of the 2008 Demo-
cratic primary), through the use of sexist stereotypes regarding Hillary Clinton,11 even Kamala Harris,
as previously mentioned, was not exempt from sexist and racist attacks by Donald Trump and his
supporters. Zignal Labs, a company that deals with media analytics, had, after Biden’s announcement
of his choice of Harris as vice presidential running mate, recorded more than 1 million cases of mis-
information, a delegitimization campaign with the aim of questioning his eligibility, insinuating that
his professional career was favored by romantic relationships (for example with the hashtag #Heel-
sUpHarris). Also integral to these strategies was the distortion of her name, Trump’s definition of a
“monster,” the appearance of memes that superimposed Harris’s face on images of sex workers, the
use of sexist expressions, the stigmatization of her facial expressions or body language in order to fit
her into the stereotype of an “angry black woman.”12 Trump stated, “That’s no way for a woman to
become the first president, that’s for sure. […] And if a woman is going to become the first president of
the United States, it can’t be her. […] This is not what people want, as then she comes in through the
backdoor. This would not be what people want, especially because it’s her.”13 “Her,” because according
to Trump’s delegitimization strategy, Kamala Harris did not even deserve to be mentioned and when
he did, he called her a radical, a socialist, or rather a “female socialist.”
    Women candidates must constantly deal with the so-called “double bind” in order to avoid the use
of gender stereotypes, that is, on one hand, they must demonstrate a certain aggressiveness in order
not to be considered weak; on the other hand, their behavior must not be too decisive in order to not
be judged as too aggressive.14
    However, if the analysis of women’s electoral campaigns shows elements of continuity, it is also
necessary to consider the changes that have occurred not only in the last 100 years after the 19th
amendment, but especially during the 1980s. Unlike 1984, Harris’s candidacy comes at a time when
the presence of women in legislative and political bodies is increasingly numerous, even if the United
States continues to not be one of the most advanced countries from the point of view of gender rep-
resentation. In fact, according to the latest data from the Inter-Parliament Union, the United States
ranks 87th in world rankings with 23.4% of women in the House and 25% in the Senate.15
    In 1974, Jeane Kirkpatrick, one of the founders of the Center for American Women and Politics,
denounced that 50 years after the federal amendment was passed, not only had there been no can-
didates for presidency or vice-presidency, but there were no women on the Supreme Court, in the
Senate, or in the Presidential Cabinet, “no woman serving as governor of a major state, no woman
mayor of a major city.”16 In 1974, women made up 4% of the members of Congress and 6% of mem-
bers of state legislatures. The 1970s, however, in the wake of the great feminist mobilizations, shook
up the stagnant picture of female representation. In 1968 the first African-American representative,
Shirley Chisholm, was elected and was the only one present in Congress until 1972 and who, as men-
tioned, advanced her candidacy for the 1972 presidential election. In 1974, Ellen Grasso was elected
Governor of Connecticut, and in 1976, Dixy Lee Ray of Washington State. In other words, a new gen-



10. Quoted in K.A. Hamlin, “Madame President: A History of the Women Who Ran Before Hillary,” Origins, 9 (2016): 7; Ellen
    Fitzpatrick, The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women’s Quest for the American Presidency (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
    2016), 214.

11.   See the book on Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

12. “Kamala Harris Targeted with More Misinformation Than Mike Pence, Data Shows,” Los Angeles Times, October 30, 2020.

13. Matthew Choi, “Trump says a Harris vice-presidency is ‘no way for a woman’ to become president,” Politico.com, September
    17, 2020.

14. Donatella Campus, “Gli stereotipi di genere e le donne in politica,” in L’immagine della donna leader, ed. Donatella Campus
    (Bologna: Bononia University Press 2010), 32.

15. See the updated data on the site of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, https://data.ipu.org/women-ranking?month=10&year=
    2020/. At present, the available data have been updated to October 2020.

16. Cited in Christina Wolbrecht, “Introduction: What We Saw at the Revolution. Women in American Politics and Political
    Science,” in Political Women and American Democracy, eds. Christina Wolbrecht, Karen Beckwith, and Lisa Baldez (New York:
    Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1.



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eration of women was beginning to emerge, (often in the past the women present in Congress were
the “widows” of deputies who had died during their term of office).
    The growing political polarization, which was the result of a conservative hegemony sanctioned by
the presidency of Ronald Reagan, from the ultimate failure of the battle for the Equal Rights Amend-
ment and what Susan Faludi called a counterattack,17 in the 1980s led to NOW’s decision to abandon
the nonpartisan position to support the Democratic Party. In 1985, EMILY’s List was founded to fi-
nancially support women’s candidacy as long as they were pro-choice. Finally, in 1987, the Fund for
Feminist Majority was created with the aim of promoting women’s equality and re-addressing national
policy priorities from a gender perspective.
    All this favored a turning point that led to the definition of 1992 as the “Year of Women.” In fact,
with the opening of Congress in 1993, the number of women went from four to seven in the Senate
(5 Democrats and 2 Republicans), and from 28 to 47 women in the House (35 Democrats and 12 Re-
publicans). The women present in Congress increased from 32 to 54, beginning a path of progressive
increase without the stop and go of the past.
    The mobilization favored the Democratic Party in particular, even if the victory was only partial.
Two years later, in 1994, the mid-term elections saw a further, albeit limited, increase in the presence
of women (3 components), but this time primarily thanks to the Republican Party since some of the
Democrats were not re-elected.
    What were the factors behind this increase besides the profound changes in an American society
following the impact of the clashes of the 1960s and 1970s? First of all, there was an exceptional pres-
ence of “open” seats in which there was no incumbent running for re-election, which was particularly
significant in a context in which the re-election rate of deputies and senators was higher than 90%
in some cases. Therefore, it was necessary to add two other elements. On one hand, the conserva-
tive hegemony that had characterized the Reagan era and, in particular, the presence of a religious
right that questioned reproductive rights, civil liberties, social policies and welfare. On the other hand,
there was an echo of the controversy raised by the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill case. In 1991, Clarence
Thomas, the first African American judge appointed by George Bush Sr. to the Supreme Court, was
charged with sexual harassment by Anita Hill, a collaborator of his, also an African American. The
issue was at the center of the debate that opened in the Senate for the ratification of the judge’s ap-
pointment and which saw Hill’s transformation from the victim to the accused. The hearing in which a
black woman faced a committee composed of only male senators, instilled in the women’s movement
an awareness of the urgency to enter the smoking rooms of American politics.
    The mobilization of women had shown its strength when a large March for Women’s Lives was or-
ganized in April 1992 in defense of freedom of choice, in which 750,000 women and men participated
in Washington, D.C.
    In 1992, women’s mobilization rewarded Bill Clinton as the winner with 45% of the female vote
against 41% of the male vote; a difference that widened, in 1996, when 54% of women voted for Clinton
compared to 43% by men.
    The Clinton presidency seemed to pick up on this new wave of women’s activism that rewarded
the Democratic Party. His administration stood out not only due to the presence of women (which
made up 39% of the White House staff), but also due to the “quality” of the appointments themselves,
such as Janet Reno in 1993 as Minister of Justice and Madeleine Albright in 1997 as Secretary of State,
who were the first two women present in the president’s “inner Cabinet.” The attention to female
constituency ended up influencing the political choices of the administration which promoted the
approval of laws, such as the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993 and especially the Violence Against
Women Act of 1994 which strengthened the laws for rape cases and that earmarked funds to combat
domestic violence.
    The 1992 elections also made the gender gap structural. From 1980, actually, the quantity of
women voters are more numerous than that of men and, as a whole, they vote more for the Demo-
cratic Party than for the Republican Party. These trends were also confirmed by the 2020 elections.
According to provisional data published on the website of the Center for American Women and Poli-
tics, the differential between the women’s vote in favor of Biden and the men’s vote varies from 11 to

17.   Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (New York: Vintage, 1993).



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16 points. The 2020 elections, even more than those relating to previous elections, have highlighted
the strong internal differentiations in the women’s vote, which was far from a monolithic bloc, ac-
cording to criteria of ethnicity, race, age, and social condition. The vote of white women favored
Trump with percentages ranging from 46% to 55% depending on the polling institutions considered,
while 90% of African American women and 69% of Hispanic women voted for Biden. Likewise, the
youngest women—those from 18 to 29 years—voted for the Democratic candidate. Finally, only 28%
of evangelical Christian women voted for Biden and the rate dropped to 17% for those not having a
college education.18
    The theme of diversity, also from the point of view of elected representatives, then, characterized
the results of the 2018 mid-term elections, when the number of women in Congress reached 126
thanks above all to the mobilization of democratic women. There were many “first times” with a
strong symbolic content that characterized congressional geography, such as, for the first time Native
American, Muslim or openly lesbian women were elected. For the first time, Tennessee and Arizona
elected a woman to represent their states in the Senate.
    Some of these have stood out for their more radical positions, so much so that they have been
defined as “the squad”—Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ihlan Omar, Rachida Tlaib—to
which, in 2020, activists who had distinguished themselves in the movement Black Lives Matter were
added, such as Jamaal Bowman (New York), Cori Bush (St. Louis) and Maria Newman (Chicago).
    A success due, as stated by Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, not so much to the party, but to grassroots
mobilization and to clear and progressive issues.
    The mobilization of African-American women, in particular, of activists of the Black Lives Mat-
ter movement and those who over the years have become experienced in grass-roots movements—
including Occupy Wall Street—to movements that fight for the issues on social reproduction, for
health, for the defense of Roe vs. Wade on access to abortion, and for social justice policies, seem
in recent years to confirm Joan W. Scott’s statement, according to which “gender constructs politics.”19
Above all, the conditions seem to be in place for a link between two areas of women’s political activism
that have historically proceeded in parallel, but which have not always succeeded in acting, intertwin-
ing and supporting each other against the obstacles and fractures posed by a political and party system
that has not always been in favour of the demands of women’s movements. Specifically, on one hand,
this is an activism that has been structured, above all, within the public sphere, interacting with the
administrative structures of the state—as in the case of women’s clubs starting from the Progressive
Era, or with interactions with the federal Women’s Bureau—and which has traditionally been nonpar-
tisan, even in the aftermath of 1920. On the other hand, it is an activism within political parties that
has always clashed with mechanisms of power and distrust towards women. Although the individual
biographies show how there has been an interpenetration of the two spheres, the peculiar construc-
tion in the United States, of a public sphere divided by gender lines, structured from the beginning
of American democracy, with the political centrality of political parties from one side and the cre-
ation of a real benevolent empire that is traditionally female on the other, and then from the vast and
branched network of civic associations (some having a transnational nature), has caused the two areas
to be structured using different methods and languages and strongly marked by gender differences.20
    Not entirely paradoxically, the dialectic between grassroots action and party presence has histor-
ically concerned the experience of conservative women as well.21 The contribution of female grass-
roots activism has been particularly relevant in the rise of the conservative movement and in the
process of leading the Republican Party into increasingly traditionalist and conservative positions. In
the 1950s, figures such as Vivian Kellems played a key role in the mobilization policy against fiscal poli-
cies that were considered to be the expression of an oppressive state. In 1964, Phyllis Schlafly, with her

18. https://cawp.rutgers.edu/presidential-poll-tracking-2020/

19. Joan Scott, “Unanswered Questions,” AHR Forum, The American Historical Review, 113 (2008).

20. Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics,” American Historical Review, 3 (1984). I refer to my “Ripensare il ‘politico’: genere e
    sfera pubblica nella storia politica statunitense,” in Vingt-cinq ans après. Les femmes au rendez-vous de l’histoire. Actes du colloque
    de Rome, eds. E. Asquer, A. Bellavitis, G. Calvi, et al. (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 2019).

21. Catherine E. Rymph, Republican Women. Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill,
    NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006).



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hugely successful pamphlet, A Choice, not an Echo, contributed to the nomination of Barry Goldwater
and later, with her organization, Stop ERA, she emerged as one of the leaders of the conservative move-
ment. Conservative women who, especially in recent decades, have also made a selective reading of
the tradition of suffragist and feminist activism. One of the more conservative women’s organizations
took on the name of the mother of U.S. suffragism, Susan B. Anthony; in 2008 Sarah Palin was not
only a darling of conservative rightists like William Kristol, but she was also part of a group called
Feminists for Life. The success of Republican women in the 2020 elections, (women will increase from
22 to 36, so much so that Donald Trump spoke of the Year of Republican Women), is due to activists
who formed groups and Political Action Committees to promote female Republican candidates, with
names like VIEW (Value in Electing Women), SheShouldRun or SheThePeople, which “sound” feminist.
    In 1928, Eleanor Roosevelt, a leading figure within the Democratic Party of New York, wrote:

       Women have been voting for ten years. But have they achieved actual political equality
       with men? No. They go through the gesture of going to the polls; their votes are solicited
       by politicians; and they possess the external aspect of equal rights. But it is mostly a
       gesture without real power. With some outstanding exceptions, women who have gone
       into politics are refused serious consideration by the men leaders. Generally they are
       treated most courteously, to be sure, but what they want, what they have to say, is regarded
       as of little weight. In fact, they have no actual influence or say at all in the consequential
       councils of their parties. In small things they are listened to; but when it comes to asking
       for important things they generally find they are up against a blank wall.22

    According to Eleanor, women should have organized themselves “like women,” within parties,
through the constitution of real female political machines capable of imposing women’s candidacies
at the highest levels; above all, it was necessary to “learn to speak the language of men,” understand
the devices of the machine and take possession of its mechanisms to turn them in favor of women.
    Eleanor Roosevelt thus encouraged to overcome the divisions between female activism which,
from the 19th century, used the language of the separate spheres and maternalism, as well as the
language within the party. She acted as a bridge between the two areas, also by using the first ladyship
as a sort of bully pulpit to favor the presence and representation of women in legislative, executive
and administrative contexts.
    In some ways, this is what Alexandra Ocasio Cortez or Stacey Abrams urged women to do when
they emphasized the need to focus on organization and on the work of mobilizing and aggregating
consent.
    One hundred years after the adoption of the 19th amendment, the position of women in politics
has certainly advanced. It has also progressed since 1984 and 1992. Political scientists have pointed
out that women have the same ability to attract financing as men, and when the race is open they
have the same chance to win: “when women run, women win.” As in 1928, the crucial problem seems
to rest on the relationship with party apparatuses and with distrust of the party leadership towards
female candidates. Women are not recognized as having a “political” vocation or the legitimacy of a
professional path and by virtue of this “weak vocational status” they do not have the same support as
men from parties and interest groups.23
    From this point of view, if the presence of the first black woman vice president represents a
turning point, as mentioned above, and adds to the growing presence of women within presidential
administrations—from the appointment of Madeleine Albright as Secretary of State in 1997—the ques-
tion arises as to whether, in the United States, the presence of women in places of political decision
is more highly favored by co-optation processes rather than by traditional mechanisms of political
representation.


22. Eleanor Roosevelt, “Women Must Learn to Play the Game as Men Do,” Red Book Magazine, 50 (April 1928): 78-9, 141-42,
    https://erpapers.columbian.gwu.edu/women-must-learn-play-game-men-do.

23. Kira Sanbonmatsu, Where Women Run: Gender and Party in the American States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
    2006); Jo Freeman, We Will Be Heard. Women’s Struggles for Political Power in the United States (New York: Rowman and
    Littlefield, 2008).



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/12416                                                                         B. 7
One Hundred Years from the 19th Amendment                                             USAbroad. Vol. 4 (2021)




    From 1992, as mentioned above, women’s access to top positions in the U.S. political system, at
the federal level, has appeared to be more due to the result of presidential choices. After 1920, in fact,
the aspirations of women to compete for the presidential office, starting with that of Margaret Chase
Smith in 1964 and continuing with Shirley Chisholm in 1972, as well as that of Elizabeth Dole in 1999
to reach the 2016 election with the presence of Hillary Clinton, the first candidate of one of the two
major parties (the others had withdrawn into the campaign for the primary), were faced with obstacles
and barriers. From 1992, however, presidents have appointed women to key departmental positions,
such as that of Justice (the first was Janet Reno in 1993), or as Secretaries of State (Madeleine Albright
in 1997, Condoleeza Rice in 2005, Hillary Clinton in 2009), or appointed as National Security Advisor
(Condoleeza Rice, 2001), or as head of the CIA (Gina Haspel, 2018). A trend that seems to be amplified
by the choices made by the Biden Administration under the banner of diversity that testifies to the
presence of African-American and minority women in key administration roles.
    However, the history of the political representation of women in the United States leaves a ques-
tion open, namely, the possibility for a woman to reach certain political levels at the federal level (the
state context is different) seems to have been guaranteed more by the process of distribution of polit-
ical resources than from the “normal” electoral process. This is a dynamic which is also not entirely
exempt from the presence of gender stereotypes as important as those found in the election campaign,
in that women are considered preferable because they are considered factors of stability, of civility,
of competence, being good administrators, and disinterested.
    It is not right to say that this may necessarily be perceived as an evil. At the beginning of the 1900s,
many American reformers were convinced that at the end of the struggle for the vote they could get
by without it. The vote, they said, had not freed men, so it would not have freed women. Better to act
as a lobby, to participate in decision-making processes by being part of administrative commissions
in order to speak with the executive.
    So, there remains a feeling that the “trauma” of Hillary Clinton’s defeat has not been surpassed
and that the transition from the vice presidency to the presidency is anything but natural.




https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/12416                                                             B. 8
