At this year’s Democratic National Convention, Hillary Clinton expressed her hope that Kamala Harris would break this nation’s “highest, hardest glass ceiling” by becoming the first woman president. Clinton was one of the few at the convention to emphasize Harris’s gender. Most other speakers, including Harris herself, chose instead to focus on the vice president’s record and her political goals. Even while telling her personal story, being a woman was not a central feature and rated little explicit attention.
Eight years ago, gender was center stage. When Donald Trump accused Clinton of “playing the woman card” simply to gain the support of female voters, she famously replied, “If fighting for women’s health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the ‘woman card,’ then deal me in.” Throughout her career, Clinton’s rhetoric emphasized women’s exceptionalism. As Secretary of State in 1995, for example, she told the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Society: “Women know things about their daily lives that are important for people trying to hammer out the end of conflicts and peace agreements.”
This emphasis contains vestiges of the fight for women’s suffrage a century ago, a campaign that often eschewed feminist arguments of equality (deemed too threatening) in favor of presenting women’s political credentials as grounded in their domesticity. According to a pro-suffrage handbill in 1915, “Women are by nature and training, housekeepers. Let them have a hand in the city’s housekeeping even if they introduce an occasional house-cleaning.”
After achieving the vote, women reformers’ maternalist arguments helped them gain entry into mainstream politics. In 1933, Frances Perkins became the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet. Franklin Roosevelt named this champion of children and special protections for women workers Secretary of Labor, a position she held for 12 years. Director of the U.S. Children’s Bureau Grace Abbot helped draft the Social Security Act of 1935, including provisions specifically for women and children. In the late 1970s, homemaker Lois Gibbs used maternalist rhetoric to bring international attention to the toxic environmental conditions in Love Canal, New York, culminating in a successful crusade for accountability from the government and big business. But the dearth of maternalism in the current campaign signals a final relinquishing of maternalism (and its many limitations) in favor of the recognition of gender equality.
Significantly, there have been few attacks on Harris’s candidacy based openly on gender, although Representative Harriet Hageman (R-Wyoming) called Harris “a DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] hire.” But even fellow Republicans publicly disavowed this assertion and acknowledged Harris’s qualifications to run.
Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski called the comments inappropriate, asking “What, are they just going to say if you’re not a white male, it’s a DEI candidate?” Similarly, Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis said that Republicans needed to take Harris seriously, “And I think part of taking her seriously is disregarding issues of race and sex and just going at policy.”
Trump has reposted some lewd social media about Harris, but in the presidential debate, neither candidate made Harris’s sex an issue.
So what has changed in the last eight years? Clinton’s loss to Trump helped propel women to seek office, and a record number of women were elected to federal and state office in the 2022 midterm elections. Although women make up only 27.9 percent of the 118th Congress, that’s the highest percentage ever and an increase of almost 60 percent from a decade ago. As women of both parties increasingly serve as governors, judges, representatives, senators, and presidential candidates, they are no longer oddities, and the old assertions that they are ill-suited to hold political positions unless qualified by maternalism, are being disproven. Although Trump may yet insist that Harris’s sex renders her unfit for the presidency, so far women’s political progress is effectively muting such attacks, and Harris sees no advantage to playing the woman card.