Open the White House Watch newsletter for free.
Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
The author is a professor of history at Princeton University.
Autopsy results have flooded in. The Democrats’ hopes of retaining the US presidency were dashed, so the assessment is what the party failed to do, and what it chose to do. It failed to separate itself sufficiently from a bumbling incumbent, and failed to drive home a solid message about the economy and migration. At the same time, it is claimed, Kamala Harris and her advisors relied too readily on the primacy of class, race, and gender. Yet these identities proved to be unstable supports, most notably gender.
Yes, 53 percent of women voted for Harris. But it was less than Biden in 2020. While the majority of white women were in favor of Trump. Gender issues are much broader than that. Since the 1960s, women have occasionally run for president. None succeeded. Worldwide, the number of elected women heads of state has increased significantly since 2000. An American broadcaster has declared that the White House’s glass ceiling remains “almost uniquely an American problem”. It is not.
Historically, it has hardly ever happened that a major power has chosen a woman as its head. Unless, of course, the lady in question has been royal or is related by blood to a former leader who was male.
This is not due to any proven inability of women to rule large and powerful territories. In the 1700s, Maria Theresa ruled the Austrian Empire for 40 years. While the even larger Russian Empire had four female rulers in this century. But these were royal women. Their birth and status served to define their gender. A woman coming to power in a megapolity has proven to be a different matter and infinitely more difficult.
There are no apparent exceptions to this rule, say Indira Gandhi, twice elected Prime Minister of India, or Margaret Thatcher. The former was Nehru’s daughter and married to a man who was not related by blood to Mahatma Gandhi, but had the same patriotic name. As for Thatcher, she certainly won three general elections and 11 years as Prime Minister. But the Britain he presided over was already very low politics. In contrast, when Winston Churchill was growing up in the late 19th century, Britain was a great power, which is one of the reasons why he generally opposed women’s suffrage at the time. He insisted that the British Empire around the world needed to ensure that it would be ruled by men.
Churchill’s stance is not unlike one of Donald Trump’s many taunts against Kamala Harris. “Foreign enemies”, he told American voters, “will walk all over it”. As a world superpower, America needed a big man to lead it, not just a woman. That the woman in question was black made Trump’s language all the more effective. But it was the gendered assumptions and habits that made it truly powerful. Often seen as a principled rule-breaker, Trump successfully played on the most traditional styles and appeals in this regard: the ruler as savior and warrior, the strongman indispensable to the well-being of a strong nation. is
This is not the only reason Trump won, but it helps account for the nature and scale of his success. Some observers, for example, continue to puzzle over why the president-elect’s famously predatory behavior toward women has not done him much political damage. But for some American voters (and not just men), reports of such behavior were easily dismissed as further evidence that Trump was a strong man. That this case underscores the persistence of double standards and, once again, the different norms often applied to royal women. Crowned female rulers (think Catherine the Great) can avoid sex scandals. But Angela Merkel says how long the current and uncrowned female leaders will last in high office if they fall into the same haste as Trump, and that has become public knowledge.
There are many lessons to be learned. Europeans can rightly be proud of the increasing number of women they are electing to high political office. But they want to consider how far this trend goes from acknowledging that European states are no longer major world powers. The lessons for Americans are still greater. India has not elected a woman Prime Minister since Mrs. Gandhi. Both Russia and China had female empresses but never elected female leaders. Will the United States finally break away from the pattern of superpowers led only by men? We should not trust it.
