The superpower glass ceiling

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The author is a professor of history at Princeton University

The autopsy results have been flooding in. Democrats’ hopes of retaining the US presidency perished, so the diagnosis goes, due to what the party didn’t do, and since of what it selected to do. It didn’t detach itself sufficiently from a fading incumbent, and to hammer home a cogent message on the economy and migration. Concurrently, it’s claimed, Kamala Harris and her advisers relied too easily on the foundational importance of sophistication, race, and gender. Yet these identities proved unstable supports, gender most of all.

Yes, 53 per cent of girls voted for Harris. But this was lower than Biden secured in 2020; while, amongst white women, a majority went for Trump. Gender troubles loom wider than this. There have been occasional female contenders for the presidency for the reason that Nineteen Sixties. None has succeeded. Across the globe, the number of girls elected heads of state has risen markedly since 2000. That the glass ceiling of the White House stays intact, one US broadcaster has declared, is “almost uniquely an American problem”. It isn’t.

Historically, it has infrequently been the case that a fantastic power has chosen to be led by a female. Unless, that’s, the lady in query has been royal or possessed of a blood relationship with a former leader who was male.

This has not been due to any proven female incapacity to rule over big and powerful territories. Within the 1700s, Maria Theresa ruled over the Austrian empire for 40 years; while the even greater Russian empire had 4 female rulers that century. But these were royal women. Their birth and standing worked to trump their gender. For a girl to be voted into power over a megapolity has proved a unique thing entirely and infinitely harder. 

The seeming exceptions to this rule, Indira Gandhi, who was twice elected prime minister of India, or Margaret Thatcher, say, are nothing of the kind. The previous was Nehru’s daughter and married to a person with no blood relationship to Mahatma Gandhi, but the identical patriotic surname. As for Thatcher, she definitely won three general elections and 11 years as prime minister. However the UK she presided over was already a much-reduced polity. In contrast, when Winston Churchill was growing up within the late nineteenth century, the UK was a fantastic power, which was one reason why he generally opposed female suffrage at the moment. A worldwide British empire, he insisted, needed to make sure it could be governed by men.

This Churchillian stance isn’t that different from considered one of the numerous jibes Donald Trump levelled against Kamala Harris. “Foreign enemies”, he told US voters, would “walk throughout her”. As a worldwide hegemon, the US needed a giant man to guide it, not a mere woman. That the lady in query was Black can have rendered such Trumpian language simpler. But it surely was assumptions and habits to do with gender that actually made it powerful. Often viewed as quintessentially a rule breaker, Trump on this regard played successfully on highly traditional archetypes and appeals: the ruler as saviour and warrior, the strong man indispensable for the welfare of a robust country. 

This isn’t the one reason why Trump won, nevertheless it helps to account for the character and scale of his success. Some commentators remain perplexed, as an illustration, as to why the president-elect’s reputedly predatory behaviour towards women didn’t do him more political damage. But for some American voters (and not only males) reports of such conduct were easily brushed away as further proof that Trump was the true thing, a robust man. That this was the case underlines each the persistence of double standards and, again, different rules that usually applied to royal women. Crowned female rulers (think Catherine the Great) could survive sexual scandal. But how long would newer and uncrowned female leaders, an Angela Merkel say, have retained high office had they indulged themselves as rashly as Trump, and this had turn out to be known? 

There are starker lessons to be drawn. Europeans can rightly pride themselves on the rising number of girls they’re electing to high political office. But they could wish to think about how far this trend stems from a tacit recognition that European states aren’t any longer major powers on this planet. For Americans, the teachings are starker still. India has not elected a lady prime minister since Mrs Gandhi. Russia and China each had female empresses but have never elected female leaders. Will the US finally break with this pattern of superpowers only selecting to be led by men? We must always not count on it.