Women have been waiting a long time. Some women even threw their “hat in the ring” before they won the right to vote nationwide in 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment. When I went to Washington as a Congressional page, there were no women in the Senate, and the surest way for a woman to become a member of the House of Representatives was to have her husband die in a plane crash.
Now there are 20 women in the Senate and 78 women in the House of Representatives, as well as 5 women governors.
Since most presidents have used either the Senate or a governor’s mansion as their antechamber, this page is dedicated to the 21 plus 5. (The 4 Republican and 1 Democratic women governors are Jan Brewer (Ariz.), Nikki Haley (S.C.), Susana Martinez (N.M.), Mary Fallin (Okla.), and Maggie Hassan (N.H.).)
Hillary Clinton’s path to the presidency is similar to that of most women who have hit the pinnacles of their profession — she’s overqualified. Aside from being First Lady, Hillary Clinton has had not one but two jobs that have been the way station before becoming president — a Senator and a Secretary of State.**
Men who were elected president or chosen as a two-party nominee as well as being Secretary of State and a Senator include: John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Lewis Cass, William H. Seward, James G. Blaine, William Jennings Bryan, Charles Evans Hughes, and John Kerry. That’s only one in the century since Hughes, and no presidential winner since JQA, so if Hillary Clinton is elected President in 2016, she will be making history in more ways than one.
Professor Ruth O’Brien, who earned her Ph.D. in political science at UCLA, joined the Graduate Center’s doctoral faculty in 1997 and, in 2004, founded the “Writing Politics” specialization in political science. She also serves as an adjunct affiliated scholar with the Center for American Progress. In her research and books, she focuses on American politics, law, political theory without national borders, globalism, and American/global dichotomy. She edits the award-winning “Public Square” series for Princeton University Press, showcasing public intellectuals such as Jill Lepore, Jeff Madrick, Anne Norton, Martha Nussbaum, and Joan Scott. O’Brien is also launching “Heretical Thought,” an Oxford University Press political-theory series that is global in outlook. Her latest book, Out of Many One: Obama and the Third American Political Tradition (2013), with a foreword by journalist Thomas Byrnes Edsall, distinguished professor at Columbia’s School of Journalism, was honored with a 2013 “Author Meets Critic” American Political Science Association convention session. She also wrote Bodies in Revolt: Gender, Disability, and a Workplace Ethic of Care (2005), Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace (2001), which received an honorable mention from Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Human Rights and Bigotry (“Meyers Center”), and Workers’ Paradox: The Republican Origins of the New Deal Labor Policy, 1886–1935 (1998). “Writing Politics” emanated from two books she contributed to and edited: Telling Stories out of Court: Narratives about Women and Workplace Discrimination (2008) and Voices from the Edge: Narratives about the Americans with Disabilities Act (2004), which earned another honorable mention from the Meyers Center. O’Brien’s controversial blog led Rush Limbaugh to dub her a “professorette.”
