Who Belongs in the (Situation) Room
Meditations on what’s lost when women are excluded from the halls of power
The Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote a terrific column last month pondering how Kamala Harris might fare as commander in chief. He offers readers a series of behind-the-scenes vignettes of her behavior during key national security moments, sketching out what he calls the “hidden Harris.” In his telling, she is competent, exacting and unafraid to make tough decisions.
Sure, a column like this might not have been written at all if Harris were a man, although it does grapple with the murkiness of the vice presidency, so 🤷♀️. It also tackles a question that frustratingly still lingers in the minds of many voters: When the stakes are as high as they come, can a woman leader make the hard call?
Doubting women’s ability to make difficult decisions (or any non-domestic decisions at all) has been a common theme in the long fight for gender equity. Anti-suffragists fretted that women would choose the same candidates as their husbands or fathers, so why bother giving them the vote at all? In 1984, voters worried about the role hormones might play in vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro’s approach to national security. And, in the two years since the fall of Roe v. Wade, women’s reproductive choices have been steamrolled by judges, politicians and even health care providers.
We’re talking more explicitly this election cycle about these types of gender dynamics, but there’s a long, and perhaps somewhat forgotten, history of journalists grappling with women’s capacity to lead. A good example is a series of essays the Boston Globe published in the middle of the last century. They were written by Frances Stone Burns, the Globe’s inaugural medical editor who, as a prolific and well-connected journalist, also sometimes pitched in on the political beat.
Burns began working at the Globe in 1942 and remained on the staff until her death in 1961. It was the second act in a journalism career she’d left behind decades before. Burns grew up the in the Pacific Northwest, coming of age during the final years of the suffrage movement and dropping out of college to take a job with the Tacoma Tribune. She became a well-known newspaperwoman in the area, covering local government, mining disasters and the occasional murder. In 1920, the same year the 19th Amendment was ratified, Burns followed her new husband east so he could take an engineering job in Boston. They settled in the suburb of Wellesley where they raised two sons and spent their free time gardening, volunteering at the local Episcopal church and socializing with their neighbors.
When World War II opened new professional opportunities for women, Burns decided to revive her journalism career, walking into the Globe newsroom one December afternoon and asking for a job. Her tenacity and previous experience impressed her soon-to-be bosses. (It probably didn’t hurt that she was close friends with the wife of a top Globe editor.) By the end of the 1940s, Burns had established herself as a leader at the Globe newsroom and beyond with a national reputation for her work in the nascent field of medical journalism.
Burns was a feminist in a pragmatic, between-the-major-movements kind of way and sometimes used her position to encourage other women to get involved in civic life. Although she was writing a full decade before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Burns’s political columns reflect her own version of “the problem that has no name,” one centered around the devaluing of women’s skills and intellect.
“No one,” Burns wrote in 1949, “who has seen a gentle mother really roused over a neglected schoolyard or watched a sheltered grandmother organize a church rummage sale … and make hundreds (of dollars) can doubt that there is a terrible amount of latent political and business ability going to waste in society.”
In another column, Burns encouraged women readers to get involved in politics: “She has had the vote everywhere in the country for 30 years, in some states much longer. Even the most ardent anti-feminist is reconciled to it. Yet she has stayed … away from higher office. Are we so satisfied with the way things are going in this Time of Trouble that we don’t want to have a direct hand at trying to improve them?”
(Burns makes plenty of good points, but there are gaps in her argument, especially when viewed through a modern lens. A big one is the lack of affordable childcare that prevents many capable women from running for office at all levels. For more, see this essay by my friend Chelsea Conaboy.)
Perhaps her sharpest column — and the one I thought of as I read Ignatius’s piece on Harris — ran in the Globe in March 1953. The Eisenhower administration was in its second month, and Burns was disappointed that more women had not been hired to fill roles in the administration.
Women, she argued, had played a key role in getting out the vote, leading what she called an enthusiastic “crusade” to win the White House for Ike, but were sidelined soon after Election Day. “It is not necessary,” she wrote, “to be a feminist of either sex to detect in the masculine attitude toward women in public affairs a certain toleration or condescension.” Such thinking, she added, meant that while the GOP feted women volunteers with tea and cookies “the first serious problems of the new Administration were being considered and fought out and solved elsewhere — by men.”
Writing seven decades later, Ignatius gives us a glimpse at what happens when women do have access to the places where some of the world’s biggest problems are addressed. In one example, he recounts how Harris pushed back against gender bias in an intelligence briefing. This led to an internal review, improved training standards for analysts and a stepped up focus by the intelligence community on sexual violence worldwide.
Women can, indeed, lead with authority and make tough decisions, but they will not — and should not — act exactly like men. Their choices and priorities will be influenced by their lived experiences. And that’s a boon to us all.
Speaking of women in politics…
My favorite local newspaper, The Concord (NH) Monitor, published a fantastic story a few weeks back about the progress women have made in New Hampshire politics over the last few decades. As reporter Michaela Towfighi explains, there’s a long history of barrier breakers behind the (many) women running for office this year in the Granite State.
P.S. Thanks for your patience while I finished this essay. That bigger-than-it-used-to-be day job I mentioned in the first issue of Viable has been extra large these last few weeks. We’re a month away from Election Day, and I promise to publish two or three more of these before then. If you have topics to suggest, let me know. I’d also be open to hosting a Zoom Q&A later this month with Viable subscribers who want to discuss gender/politics/power. Thoughts?