The black limos were lined up bumper to bumper outside the Chinese restaurant
near Capitol Hill where Hillary Clinton was hosting a party last week.
Washington’s power elite had gathered to honour the senior senator for New
York, Charles Schumer, a master tactician who helped to win Congress for the
Democrats last autumn. But it was Clinton, the junior senator for New York,
who was the alpha politician in the room.
Wearing a light-grey trouser suit (a masculine touch) and a necklace with a
gold and ruby cross (don’t forget the religious vote), Clinton was at her
most playful and charming. “It was here that we had our first date,” she
said to Schumer with feminine coquetry.
If she fails to win the White House, it will not be for want of trying.
Clinton is covering all the bases in what has so far been a very astute
campaign for the Democratic nomination. She is acting as tough as Margaret
Thatcher on national security; as tender as a “mom” who cares about the kind
of village it takes to raise America’s children; and a teeny bit sexy.
“I think you look very nice,” a Gulf war veteran told her at a town hall
meeting in Iowa last weekend.
“Thank you!” she glowed.
If she continues to perform well in the polls, the sequel to Living History,
her memoir of life as first lady, could be Making History, the story of
America’s first woman president. Indeed, given her talent for forward
planning she probably titled her first book with its follow-up in mind.
Two other, very different, women are also making history.
Hillary — even her campaign team calls her that — is an international
superstar who draws crowds and the media wherever she goes. Angela Merkel,
the German chancellor, is less of a celebrity but has the undeniable
advantage of already being in power. With glamorous Ségolène Royal courting
the voters of France, a powerful triumvirate of women could soon be ruling
the West in partnership with a flummoxed Gordon Brown or an increasingly
feminised David Cameron.
At the Washington party last week, Clinton’s friend Elizabeth Bagley,
ambassador to Portugal in the mid-1990s, was thrilled by the prospect. “It’s
fabulous. They would be a wonderful team. They could end the isolation of
the Bush era. They are all strong women but they also know how to
compromise.”
It was, Bagley explained, because “women are multitaskers. We’re constantly
negotiating between our husbands, our jobs and our children”.
Is she right? There have been formidable “iron ladies” before, such as
Thatcher, Golda Meir in Israel and Indira Gandhi in India. They shone
brightly but were no more likely to pass on the torch to other women than
Elizabeth I, who decapitated Mary Queen of Scots, her rival for the throne.
One former aide to Lady T says he never heard her mention bringing on women:
“She surrounded herself with the brightest and the best of the time and they
were primarily men.”
Marilyn Davidson, a psychology professor at Manchester Business School who has
studied women’s ascent to power, said: “When Margaret Thatcher was elected
we thought, ‘Ah, this is the first of many.’ But it didn’t really happen.
She was a bit of a one-off. She had this queen bee syndrome. Although she
used her femininity and sexuality, she liked to be up there by herself.”
Thatcher, however, was the product of the same pre-war environment that had
shaped her bitterest male critic, Edward Heath. She beat the men on their
own terms. In contrast, the arrival of Angela, Ségo and Hillary in positions
of leadership marks the outcome of a decades-long process of post-war
empowerment that has seen girls overtake boys in school and leave them
behind. Women now make up 57% of university entrants and outnumber men in
every subject including maths and engineering.
“Enough women have gone through the pipepline by now and are ready to take on
these leadership positions,” says Christina Hoff Sommers, a fellow of the
conservative American Enterprise Institute and author of The War Against
Boys. “It’s exciting. But they will have to be fair minded and not get
carried away by feminist ideology.”
Clinton will largely keep mum about feminism and women’s rights on the stump.
They are still risky territory. For as women enter the highest levels of
politics and the boardroom some men are wondering: “What about us?” The game
is not over yet: women still have to pass a fearsome battery of tests with
voters of both sexes. From their foreign policy to their husbands and
hairstyle, everything is up for scrutiny.
If Clinton or Royal were to slip up, they could go into freefall. According to
Peter Kellner of YouGov, the polling company, women do not get many chances
in politics. “They are like a dog with one life rather than a cat with nine
lives,” he says. There is evidence to suggest that voters are still
resistant to women leaders. They have the best chance of winning when their
country is ready for a political sea-change, as Britain was in 1979.
Thatcher, Kellner notes, won an equal number of men’s and women’s votes
(45%) in that first election victory, but traditionally more women vote
Conservative than men. In 1974, when Heath lost an election after taking on
the trade unions, 7% more women than men remained loyal to the Tories.
In America the pollster Scott Ras-mussen recently asked whether voters were
ready to elect a woman president: 78% said they were. The picture changed
when he asked whether they believed their friends, families and coworkers
would do the same. Only 51% agreed. “My interpretation is that the truth
lies somewhere in between,” he says.
The Clinton camp believes it has the votes of women aged 18-32 in the bag, but
this demographic group tends to vote Democrat anyway. They will only make a
difference if Clinton can entice enough young women voters to the polls who
would have stayed at home.
Older women are a tougher sell, particularly in the Democratic primaries,
according to Elizabeth Bagley. “They’re the ones who are not sure that
Hillary can win. We are going to have to work on them.”
The first box Clinton, 59, has had to tick is defence and national security:
hence her early Senate vote to authorise the Iraq war, which she rues but
does not dare disown.
She has proved to be a delicious target for comedians. Saturday Night Live,
the satirical television programme, had a Hillary stand-in explain recently:
“I think most Democrats know me. They understand that my support for the war
was always insincere. Of course, knowing what we know now, that you could
vote against the war and still be elected president, I would never have
pretended to support it.”
Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, who is venerated by the left, has taken aim at
her postinvasion zigzag. Her new policy on Iraq, he quipped, was: “America,
let’s pull over and ask for directions.”
It was Ali G who posed the question: could you really trust a woman to stand
up to evil dictators because “the worse you treat ’em, the more they want
you”? Clinton herself got the biggest laugh in Iowa when she asked last
week: “And what in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men?”
She has since claimed unconvincingly that she didn’t really mean Bill.
In the days before she announced her presidential candidacy, she was in Iraq
and Afghanistan for the ump-teenth time, talking sagely to generals and
political leaders about military strategy and playing up her
tough-on-security “iron lady” side.
This did not impress Ann Coulter, the acerbic right-wing columnist, who wrote
last week that Thatcher and Clinton shared “the lack of a Y-chromosome and .
. . hmmm, you know, I think that’s it”.
WHEN 52-year-old Merkel made her bid to be Germany’s first woman chancellor in
2005 the electorate had a different goal: to be less macho and
confrontational with the United States, still its top ally despite their
disagreements over Iraq under Gerhard Schröder’s government. Merkel had a
comfortable opinion poll lead, but she only scraped through at the head of a
coalition government. Was there last-minute resistance to handing power to a
woman? Analysts think it had more to do with her plans to shake up the
German welfare state than her gender.
Merkel does not have children and dislikes kissing babies on the stump. When
she got married for the second time she was so unromantic and undaughterly
that she told her parents: “By the way, I got married yesterday.”
She has only grudgingly accepted that “the fact that I am a woman is
unavoidable”. Gerd Langguth, her biographer and a professor of politics at
Bonn University, says: “Merkel has never been interested in comparisons with
other women. She always says, ‘I’m me’, but Germans often compare her to Mrs
Thatcher. Like her, she was a scientist and an outsider in the early days of
her political career.”
She can also be ruthless. She was former chancellor Helmut Kohl’s “mädchen” —
the token “girl” in his government — but she later showed her mettle by
rounding on him in print when he was ensnared in a party funding scandal.
One woman commentator complained that “animal rights groups have a better
chance than women’s organisations at getting the chancellor’s ear”. But
Merkel can be “very charming” in the negotiations required by Germany’s
coalition government, says Langguth. “She is liked by men because she knows
what she wants and is very direct.”
President George W Bush welcomed Merkel’s election as an opportunity to forge
a new alliance with Europe after getting the brush-off from Schröder.
Without committing troops to Iraq she has successfully revived Germany’s
influence in Washington. Yet Bush crossed the line when he sneaked up on her
and gave her a playful Texan “one-sec-ond” back massage at the G8 summit in
Moscow last year. She looked appalled and threw her hands in the air. He
slunk off, embarrassed.
Ségolãne Royal would probably have flirted back. The French politician’s
sexiness is a powerful campaign tool in her bid to become France’s first
Madame la Présidente. When magazines printed pictures of her in an azure
bikini, one tabloid swooned: “To think that she is 53 years old!” When a
male voter told her, “You’re even better looking than they said”, she
responded seductively, “So are you”.
“She is a bit like Marianne, the ideal of the French republic,” says Rejane
Senac-Slawinski, a political scientist. “A strong politician, a good mother,
but also the kind of woman every man would like to marry.”
With four children — the youngest is a girl of 14 — Royal is also something of
a fertility goddess in a country that is obsessed with keeping up its birth
rate. Former prime minister Laurent Fabius, a rival for the Socialist
nomination, struck the wrong note with voters by sneering, “Who’ll take care
of the children?” when she announced her intention to run for president. In
a country that values motherhood, her ability to combine work with family is
considered an inspiration for women who might otherwise put their careers
and good looks ahead of having one or more offspring. IN common with Clinton
and Merkel, Royal looks far more attractive today than she did a decade ago,
when she wore sober-coloured skirts, drab blouses and velvet bows in her
hair.
Clinton’s hairstyle changes from neat Alice bands to curls were the subject of
a good deal of satire when she was at the White House in the Nineties, but
she has settled for the sensible attire of the professional working woman
instead of playing the pretend role of home-making, cookie-baking first lady.
Even Merkel has her own personal style guru now, although one wouldn’t
necessarily know it from some of her fashion faux pas, such as the gossamer
pink suit she wore to a Wagner concert in Bayreuth. When Langguth first met
her in 1990, she was a jeans-clad spokes-woman for the last government of
East Germany.. “She dressed like a student,” he recalled. “She wasn’t
interested in her looks, but she knows how important they are in politics.
She is a more modern dresser now.”
Just as Thatcher changed from a Seventies housewife to an Eighties power
dresser with pheromones that enticed presidents Ronald Rea-gan and François
Mitterrand, so Royal has undergone a top to toe makeover including getting
her teeth fixed.
She could be overdoing the sex appeal: internet websites have been spreading
rumours of an affair with a former head of Renault, which her camp has
denounced as a lying “dirty tricks” campaign. Her poll numbers have dipped
sharply in the past weeks from a two-point lead over Nicolas Sarkozy, her
wily conservative rival, to an eight-point gap in his favour last week (54%
to Royal’s 46%).
“Is Ségolãne Royal up to the job?” Libération, the left-wing newspaper, asked
woundingly last week.
Unlike Clinton, she has been embarrassingly gaffe-prone on foreign policy.
Royal was recently fooled into chatting on the phone with the supposed prime
minister of Quebec by a French radio prank-ster. She also thanked a
Hezbollah politician who accused Israel of Nazism for “being so frank” and
was obliged to complain later that she had misheard him.
In what could turn out to be a cautionary tale for Hillary another reason for
Ségo’s difficulties is her partner’s giant ego. François Hollande, the
father of her children and secretary-general of the French Socialist party,
clearly believes he should be the one in the Elysée.
“Kings always take back power. Queens only last a certain time,” he said
snarkily last month.
It is as well for Clinton that Bill is her biggest booster. Having served
eight years in the White House, Hillary is his only way back to the seat of
power that he loved. At least he can say: “It’s wonderful my wife is
president, but I got there first.”
Plans have already been laid to keep the Clintons apart on the campaign trail
in case he upstages her. But there is still the nagging worry: what if he
humiliates Hillary with another spot of extramarital sex? Aides insist he
has learnt his lesson, but he could upset her meticulously planned election
campaign. WITH France jaded by the cynical presidency of Jacques Chirac, and
America thoroughly sick of Bush and the war in Iraq, it is a timely moment
for Royal and Clinton to stake their presidential claims. So is the future
female?
Certainly politics is being femi-nised, and not only by women. David Cameron
has been talking about released prisoners needing love, and male politicians
are becoming more family friendly as issues such as the balance between
life, work and childcare come to the fore.
Male fears of a female takeover could be a little premature, however. Clinton
and Royal are not the only candidates of change appealing to the voters.
Sarkozy is running as the antithesis of the ossified Chirac, while Clinton
could face strong competition from Senator John McCain or Rudy Giuliani, the
former mayor of New York, both of them Republican party mavericks who appeal
to independents.
And even with women in power in America, France and Germany, what difference
would it really make? DeAnne Julius, one of the best-connected women in
Britain (she was on the Bank of England monetary policy committee and now
chairs Chatham House, the foreign policy think tank) says: “When you look at
who makes the decisions, there are very few women.”
The Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) last month released a report called
Sex and Power, which claimed that women were still being sidelined into the
“mummy career track” because they cannot combine long hours at the office
with raising a family. Women still represented just 10% of directors at FTSE
100 companies and 20% of MPs, the EOC noted. At the present rate it would
take 200 years for women to achieve parity in parliament.
But the EOC report underestimates the potential cultural revolution of having
a number of women in power simultaneously, with the ability to inspire and,
in some cases, give a leg up to others. Macho, Catholic Chile, for instance,
is now led by President Michelle Bachelet, a moderate socialist who
deliberately gave half the jobs in her cabinet to women.
“The symbolic importance of having women in power is more important than the
substance but it could motivate girls and women to raise their aspirations,”
Julius says.
She also agrees that the presence of Angela, Ségo and Hillary at the helm
could usher in a new era of international cooperation. “Women are not as
pompous, self-important and worried about their egos as men. They get down
to business,” she says.
Thatcher, Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi certainly got down to business. But
cooperative they were not: each took her country to war. They remain famous
for their gutsy conviction politics rather than their ability to compromise.
If the future is female, it will not be monochrome. Vive la différence!
International rise of the ruling women
Isabel Peron became the world’s first female president when she assumed office
in Argentina in 1974 following the death of her husband, President Juan
Domingo Peron. Unlike his second wife, Evita, who was almost deified by
Argentinians, she became unpopular and was overthrown.
Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka was the first female prime minister in
history. A tough socialist, described by a colleague as “the only man in the
cabinet”, she was in government three times between 1960 and 2000. Her
estranged daughter, Chandrika Kumaratunga, became president and clipped her
wings.
Golda Meir was one of the founders of the state of Israel and became prime
minister — aged 70 having survived cancer — in 1969. Another “only man in
the cabinet” and the first “iron lady”, she authorised the assassination of
Palestinian terrorist leaders and the annexation of conquered lands, and she
led Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war.
Indira Gandhi was prime minister of India twice. During her first premiership
(1966-77) she fought Pakistan and ultimately ruled by decree under a state
of emergency. Her arrest and trial triggered her political rebirth. She was
reelected in 1980 but assassinated in 1984.
Margaret Thatcher, the only women ever to have served as prime minister in the
UK, transformed Britain from “the sick man of Europe” into one of its most
successful economies during her 11 years in power. She was ousted in 1990 by
her male cabinet colleagues.
Jenny Shipley of the conservative National party, who became New Zealand’s
first female prime minister in 1997, fell out with the macho leader of her
coalition partners and lasted only two years. Her Labour successor, Helen
Clark, is better at whipping male ministers into line and is still there
after eight years.
Scandinavia has also had a crop of female leaders, one of them highly
controversial. The reliable Gro Harlem Brundtland was Norway’s prime
minister three times between 1981 and 1996. Tarja Halonen has been Finland’s
president since 2000. And in 2003 Finland also briefly had a woman prime
minister, Anneli Tuulikki Jaatteenmaki, who resigned after being questioned
by police. She was subsequently acquitted of aiding and abetting the
revelation of state secrets that had embarrassed her political opponents.
