American History Hit - Kamala Harris: An Unprecedented Candidacy?

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

Cleopatra, Catherine the Great, Boudicca, Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel: what do these women have in common? They were all leaders of their nations, and they may - pending the choices of the electorate later this year - be joined in their ranks by an American.But what might Kamala Harris face if she wins the election? What is she already facing? Are there patterns in the way they are discussed? From Eve to Hillary Clinton, Don is joined by author Eleanor Herman to discuss the history of responses to women in leadership roles.Eleanor's book on this subject is 'Off With Her Head: Three Thousand Years of Demonizing Women in Power'.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AMERICANHISTORYYou can take part in our listener survey here.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. On this episode of American history hit, let's start by taking a gander at the U.S. Constitution. Here we are. Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5.

No person except a natural-born citizen or citizen in the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution shall be eligible to that office of president. Neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of 35 years and been 14 years a resident within the United States. That's it. Pretty straightforward, pretty simple. Not a lot of requirements. So why is it with such wide parameters? Our presidents have tended to have so much in common. Why is such a men's club? What's with that? Let's take a closer look. This is American History Hit and I'm your host, Don Wildman. Well, once again, we're here,

a presidential election in America. And as I speak, three months out facing an unusual circumstance we've seen once before. Eight years ago in 2016, when one of the two major parties ran as a candidate for presidency, Hillary Clinton, a woman. Shocking. That certainly wasn't the first time a woman had run for the office. Shirley Chisholm leaps to mind in 1968.

And there have been others over the years. The difference in 2016 and today is the major party nomination. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrat, will be running against former President Donald Trump, the Republican. And away we go. Right back to the old dynamics of politics in America, never mind around the world. Let's just say this, plainly and without bias. You must be joking. Every time this happens in politics at any level, but especially with the presidency, the screaming double standards fly. The fact that we are recording an episode on the subject of a woman running for the presidency is itself a double standard.

would we take an episode to discuss the implications of a man occupying the highest office in the land? No, that would be silly. So why is it otherwise for a woman? Especially when you consider so many of history's most consequential leaders have been women. From Cleopatra to Elizabeth I, First, to Catherine the Great, to Golda Mier, Ava Peron, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, never mind our own governors and Supreme Court justices and congressional leaders and mayors. and, well, you get the point.

What is so exceptional about a woman in the White House? The answer is nothing, and possibly everything. That we have waited so long to turn this corner has become a commentary of its own on America. What are we afraid of, opposed to? What could go so wrong? Just as the earth continued to revolve when a black man was elected president, twice, so will very likely be the result of a woman in the White House. But sarcasm aside, there has always been a sincere and palpable hope among many that a woman could bring a fresh perspective sorely needed.

If we were led by a woman, it could give us greater dimension, influence, and strength, and not less. The double standards, the misogyny, the patriarchy. All those old dynamics I mention are the focus of a book entitled Off With Her Head, 3,000 years of demonizing women in power, published in 2002, but very contemporary these days, by New York Times bestselling author and historian Eleanor Herman, who joins me today. Eleanor, welcome to the show. Thank you, Don. I'm so excited to be here and to talk about this important topic today.

This is really important and timely to have this conversation. As a woman is again front and center in the race for the American presidency. We are again afforded the chance to confront our bad habits of unfairly characterizing and caricaturizing women leaders. A phenomenon, as your book explains, it goes all the way back to ancient times. We're going to try to take this sort of backwards, if I may. Your book does such a good job of seeding this conversation in the historical context. But let's talk about Kamala Harris first, and then we'll move back towards that through Hillary Clinton and so forth. What are you seeing right now? I mean, as we speak, it's August of 2004. What do you see in the characterization of Kamala Harris that reminds you of what your book is all about? Well, it's a whole lot of sexism and misogyny. And in Kamala's case, there's also racism. So she's at the intersection of racism and sexism. So it's doubly hard. You know, in order to determine when a criticism of a political candidate is justified or not, you need to ask yourself, are these same kinds of comments being lobbed at men? Yeah. It's such a deeply psychological phenomenon, really. That's such a lens.

into what really builds a society over time. You have your personal feelings about your own life, and then you're expressing those into your political reality. When we're talking about women, maybe it's the relationship with one's mother. I have no idea, but it's really deep right away. You just can scratch the surface anywhere and get to that real important stuff down below. Yeah, agreed. In my book, I have several comments made about women, and I'd like to just switch the gender for a minute and read a couple to you because I think this is really clear as we go ahead in this campaign to try to figure out what's real political criticism. You don't like what she did at the border. You don't like her role as DA in California. Whatever, fine. But let's just look at

some of these other things. So these are statements that were made about women and I've switched them to being about men. So men who are sweet, cheery, and non-confrontational will be rewarded. Would you ever hear that about a man? He should show a little modesty. He's too bitchy humility is not one of his strong points. Unbelievable in the same week he wore the same suit twice. This is a good one. He doesn't have the right sort of body to be on TV.

He should smile a lot more. He launched his political career in the bedroom by sleeping with a powerful woman. Now, that sounds really weird when you have the male pronouns there. But if you put them back to their original form, female, it just sounds sort of normal, right? Yeah, exactly. There are a lot of these words that we need to watch out for that are misogynistic reserved for, you know, to insult women. They're shrill, unlikable, nasty, angry, often refers to female hormones that we can't,

a woman can't be president because if she's having a bad menstrual cycle, she might nuke the world. There are all of these, these words, unpresidential. What is unprecedented? you might say that Donald Trump was unpresidential, right? But they usually reserve that word for women. It's always struck me, you know, at a certain age that I am, that the leading lights of moving this line have been around the world instead of America. It's one of the anachronisms of America that's really weird. Like we have not led the way in this at all. You've got leaders all over the world, as I mentioned in the opener, Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, you can just go on and on. And today there's even more. Somehow America has fallen so far behind. Why do you think that is? Is it just because you have an infrequent elections cycle? I'm not exactly sure. I mean, here we were at the forefront of creating democracy in the world in 1776. And we have just fallen so far behind in terms of getting a female chief executive. I'm not exactly sure of the reason for that. I wonder if misogyny is more deeply rooted in our society than in other ones. I mean, you know, Canada.

has had female prime ministers, you know, Turkey, Israel, Pakistan, India, Australia, though Julia Gillard was faced with horrible misogynistic comments during her tenure from 2010 to 2016. But still, at least they had one. Well, and honestly, the jar lid has been loosened to such a degree that were this literally, we have a vice president who has a woman. So one step, one heartbeat away from the office. So we've gotten down this, line, but it's telling that at this moment we have such a controversy going on again. It's a stirred pot that really was part of Hillary's experience as well. The whole thing that happened with her, never mind Gretchen Whitmer and the attacks on her in Michigan. Let's talk about Hillary Clinton

for a bit because that was an extraordinary turn of events back then, as she turned from Secretary of State into a very, very reviled candidate for president. The misogyny really came out on that one. And Hillary Clinton, at the time, much as Julia Gillard in Australia did, thought that it would be best to sort of ignore it. You know, like she's just not sinking to their level. She's not really going to address it. And I will say that has changed, starting in the last presidential cycle in 2018. And it seems to me that, you know, Kamala and her team are really fighting back against the misogyny and the racism. Now, in 2018, There was a guide that came out for journalists to just take a careful look about how they're covering

female candidates. So, for instance, are you punishing women and celebrating men for doing the same thing? For instance, ambition. Men are praised for being ambitious politicians while women are berated and derided for that for something. Are you putting too much emphasis on appearance? So, you know, a woman's weight, her hair, her makeup, her clothing, are, or are all you've fodder there to be critiqued, but very rarely for men. Are you focusing on the tone of

her voice, shrill, bitter, angry, rather than the substance of her statements? Are you telling a candidate to smile? It only happens to women, right? Are you talking about whether she smiles? Now, of course, if she smiles too much, you might think that she's crazy, she's an airhead, she's a bimbo. Are you using words like unlikable or electable? Are you calling a black woman angry? So these guides are out there. And I would say that they did make some difference in 2018. And I'm going to be really curious to see what happens in this election cycle. It has evolved. You can feel it. Everyone is very sensitive to this at this point, or at least a greater amount of people are watching themselves on how they talk about it, such as myself. You know, I'm guilty of it as well.

We all have it to a certain extent. You know, I spent two years locked in a room researching the history of misogyny against women in power. And one day my husband came back from a medical appointment and said, oh, I have a new doctor. And I asked him, what did he say about you? Now, he looked at me, he said, Eleanor, it's a she. And I just slapped myself on the forehead. Like, you know, I have been working on misogyny for two years. Why did that come out of my mouth? So, you know, from a certain standpoint, we need to be, you know, a little kind to ourselves and just understand that this is a part of our societal and psychological makeup, but just to be aware of it, to try to do better.

I mentioned the opening, this goes all the way back. And if you want to go all the way back, we can go to Eve, you know, at least the metaphor of women corrupting mankind. It's really traceable all the way through thousands of years of civilization, isn't it? It really is. When you look at the two major creation myths in so-called Western civilization, one is Adam and Eve in the Bible, and the other is Pandora and her box in Greek mythology. They both have the primeval woman cursing mankind, ruining mankind, bringing pain and death and suffering,

acne and flat tires, everything you could think of into the world because of their disobedience. Now, Eve was not supposed to touch that fruit, which has sort of come down to us as an apple. when the snake suggested that she do so, she convinced Adam to eat the fruit. And then because of that myth in the Bible, well into the 1800s, women in many Christian religions were believed to have earned the pain of childbirth

because Eve's original sin, that they carry that sin with them. Now, you could ask yourself if we're going to treat everybody equally, does that mean that all men are bumbling idiots because Adam was too stupid to say, no, Eve, God told us not to do that, right? Then we go to the middle of Pandora where, you know, she's the first woman and she's beautiful, and there was a Greek guy named Epimetheus, and Zeus told him,

don't have anything to do with this woman, you know, she's trouble, and his lust got the better of him, and he married her, and she had this box, and she wasn't supposed to open it, and she did, and all of the pains of the world flew out. So here we are in the earliest mythology of our civilization, blaming everything on the woman. Now, when these were finally written down, you know, homo sapiens sapiens had been around for 30 or 40,000 years already. So I think this goes way further back than those early myths. I think it is rooted in biology, and I think tens of thousands of years ago, you know, women were the only ones who could bring forth life from their bodies. And tens of thousands of years ago, men saw this.

and felt that they were magic somehow. And often a woman's menstrual cycle is in tune with the phases of the moon. And I think this is where the idea of the witch came from, that we were magic. The ancient Romans and Greeks believed that we could rust iron by touching it if we were on our menstrual cycle, that we could create whirlwinds and floods. And I think there's a reason that up until the 1970s, the U.S. gave all of the hurricanes female names, right? because there was this exclusive magic female power in the eye of the hurricane.

A fascinating woman to talk about Cleopatra. How does that play out? Well, Cleopatra was the Pharaoh of Egypt, and she was a brilliant woman. She spoke nine or ten languages fluently. She was a very talented ruler in terms of international relations and local politics. And Rome, the Republic, had their eye on Egypt for a long time. time. You know, they were absorbing all of these other countries into their republic by one means or the other. And they had their eye on Egypt because it was the grain basket of the ancient Mediterranean world, you know, that rich Nile flood. And they wanted the grain to feed their troops so they could go out and conquer more. So she ended up having an affair with Julius Caesar

and had a couple of kids by him. And then after his assassination, Mark Antony. So and Mark Antony was from a very patrician Roman family. He was a general. He was like, you know, the poster boy for Roman patriarchy. And yet he wanted to be an emperor of, you know, the eastern part of the Mediterranean. So he thought if he, you know, tied his wagon to hers, that might just happen. Anyway, Rome, you know, was really adept with perhaps the first early successful PR machine. So they painted her as, you know, sexually depraved. She had, you know, she had different men and slaves. in her bed every day. She spent way too much money. She was frivolous, you know, sort of like a Maria Antoinette figure. I mean, they keep doing the same things again and again, right? She was just

morally off. And so, and the Romans got to write her story. Her story was gone. It was destroyed when Rome took over Egypt after her death. So she's come down, you know, as this sexual victim using her wiles to corrupt good Roman men. back with more American history after this short break. Anne Boleyn, another one, Henry the Eighth's, one of Henry the Aceh Wives. I mean, you could even call him psychopathic in a way, you know. And yet, Anne Boleyn is cast in this light of being the manipulator of the great Henry. Sometimes facts get in the way of a good story.

And it's a very appealing story that you have this sexy vixen who breaks up the marriage of the king and his highest sort of dumpy middle-aged wife, and she becomes queen, and she's so horrifying that she ends up with her head cut off. And the stories that have come down to us about Ambulin were written by two of her greatest enemies. One was the Spanish ambassador who hated her because the first queen was Spanish, Catherine of Aragon.

And the other one was about 50 years after her death, but it was a Catholic writer who hated her daughter, Elizabeth. So we hear the most names. stories about Anne, whereas there were other contemporary sources where, you know, she tried to, she tried to get away from Henry for a year. She was running from him and he was stalking her. Now, if she was that ambitious, why would she have done that? Her detractors at the time said, you know, absence makes the heart grow fonder. She ran away from him for a year so he would come chasing her, you know, with even greater lust in his heart. But I think that's a ridiculous

statement. There were other statements, for instance, when she heard that Catherine of Aragon had died in January of 1536, and she had been Catherine's lady in waiting years earlier, that she locked herself in her bedroom and cried. And there had been earlier statements that, you know, she didn't want to be stalked by Henry because she loved her mistress Catherine. There were all of these stories that haven't come out because, you know, we really like the story of the sexy vixen ruining the royal marriage. Sure. We also like the idea of Queen Elizabeth I first being a virgin, the virgin queen. In the end, they turn around and turn it into, oh, she loved England that much, which is kind of glorifying her. But on the other hand, sort of demeaning her at the same time. Well, there was a lot of, you know, sexism against Elizabeth. Sometimes I think the sexism is worse when a female ruler is really successful. Yes. Right. And Elizabeth was, I think, the most successful English monarch of all time. So, you know, the Spanish ambassador said that she, she never married because there was something wrong with her reproductive tract, and she menstruated out of her left foot into her shoe, so she walked around, I guess, with a bandage or something on it. Others said that

she was a man. Which sounds familiar, doesn't it? Yes. Others said that she couldn't contain her lust to just one man, a husband, that she had men in her bed every day. You know, it's all of all of this stuff, right? So she had to put up with that. That's what's so compelling about your narrative, is that there's so many historical examples of this kind of stuff that are so colorful because, of course, they've been made movies of Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor, etc., etc. These whole stereotypes have been reinforced over time with media for sure. Eleanor, one of the great examples of this, I mean, huge examples, and I was guilty of it for years, thinking it was true, is the mythology behind Catherine the Great of Russia, an extraordinary leader. Tell me how that whole story got told and why. So Catherine the Great, much as in the case of Elizabeth the first two centuries earlier,

was a wildly successful ruler. She expanded Russian territory. She calmed down all kinds of early efforts at Civil War. The men wanted to take this away from her. She greatly encouraged the arts and sciences. Anyway, and she did have lovers one at a time. It wasn't like she was engaging in orgies every day for several years. and then they were usually younger men, and they'd get married, and she'd find another one.

So when she died, she was in her 60s, she ruled for 30-some years. She died of a stroke, actually. She had gone to her chamber pot and just didn't come out. But the story that went around Europe was that she had been trying to have sex with a horse, and the horse was being hoisted on ropes down to position, and the ropes broke, and the horse crushed her. Now, this was a way to ruin her legacy, to ruin her reputation for all time. I have spoken to large groups where I say to the crowd, is there one story that anybody here

knows about Catherine the Great? And everyone says, the horse story. So this was very effective. People today who really don't know about her have heard of the horse story. Yeah. Meanwhile, she expanded, she ruled for 34 years. She expanded the borders of Russia by 200,000 square miles.

She was the creator of what is called the Russian Golden Age culturally politically. She's, Catherine, the great for a reason. But we just can't let that be. It's always the victors who write the stories. It's also people who are very jealous of those who are in power who write the stories.

And that was certainly the case with Catherine and her enemies. But they're also, these stories are the ones that grip popular imagination. You know, it's a great story to say, you know, she died with this horse, rather than she was sitting on the chamber pot and had a stroke. So the most successful stories to ruin a woman's reputation are like that. And many of these stories, let's be clear, as we mentioned before, guilt is on both sides. You know, there's both men and women who participate in this mythologizing of these female leaders, the demonizing of them, as you say. Let's talk about that in the American age and how that has happened, certainly in the 20th century.

An enormous amount of pushback, as I recall when I was a child, against the Equal Rights Amendment, all that period of time really exposed this. Yeah, you know, I explored that theme in the book. We women are raised in a certain time and place where we learn our place, right? Even in modern times, you know, there's just a certain historical place for. us. And I think there's pushback sometimes against that. Now, some of it could be fear. Now that so many opportunities are open to us, you know, am I as an individual? How am I going to compete against these other women? Do I have it in me to even do so? Jealousy, of course. And also, we're going

into new areas here with potentially our first female president in a few months. And change can be very frightening. So I think there's a lot of that. Ellen, one of the pithier examples of this double standardness is captured in a quote by Patricia Schroeder, the senator from Colorado, who served for several decades. And she said, women who sleep around in this city, meaning Washington, D.C., are called sluts. Men are called senators. Which about says it all, doesn't it? It does. Talk about the double standard, right? You know, and lately, you know, there's been some talk about Kamala Harris had an affair in the 90s, a brief relationship with a man, much older, who was powerful. And he had been separated from his wife for 12 or 13 years. The wife was Catholic, didn't want to get divorced. So they had, you know, he was allowed to date other, other people. And her opponents are bringing this out and saying, you know, she, she slept her way after she'd been elected several times, by the way, she had this relationship. Right. Well,

Hillary Clinton went through the same thing, where she was in reverse, criticized for not leaving her husband and keeping her marriage together as a result of his infidelities. And that was sort of the same thing, but in a sort of backwards way. You just can't win is the bottom line of it. You can't win. And this childish, this childless cat lady thing, those women who do have biological offspring, when they run for political office, they are then accused of being selfish by ignoring and neglecting their children. So you really can't win if you're a woman. running for public office with regards to the child's question. And if you do get the credit for being a good and strong leader, it's because you were an

iron lady like Maggie Thatcher. You know, there's some quality to you that separates you from normal, you know, feminine wiles, but it's really because you were just born to do this because you're just this kind of robot iron person. And that has to do with expressing emotion, which, you know, is frankly very refreshing to me to see honest emotion being expressed these days more. You know, a lot of this has to do with social media. We can't forget that we live in an entirely different media age.

We're seeing people differently in the media than we ever did before. Well, what interesting expression of emotion, as you just mentioned, is Kamala's laugh. Her opponents for many years now have called it a cackle. And, you know, chickens cackle, right? Whenever you, the words you use about someone, when they refer to animals or not, or non-human life, you really need to be careful about this. So I don't know that anyone has ever accused male politicians of cackling. A woman laughing is often portrayed as crazy, emotional, unreliable, unpresidential. You know, whoever accuses men of having a cackle or even of laughing

too much? Sure, yeah. I mean, Pat Schroeder's book, it's a 1998 autobiography that you cite several times through your book is really a good touchstone for this. I mean, she says about emotion. Now, crying is almost a ritual that male politicians must do to prove they are compassionate. Like, they've appropriated the crying part, but women are supposed to wear iron britches. Gosh, it's just endless. And part of the problem with this, if we may, you know, summarize here a bit, is that it's endless. I mean, you end up in a whirlpool of this stuff and you realize that you've been in this pool all your life and all of human history has been in this pool. So how do you pull out of it?

Like, how do you grab the side and pull yourself out of this current that has been in charge for so long? That seems to be where we're at in this election, at least the chance. So the first step is just increased awareness. And the media lately has been doing a bang-up job of just pointing out how ridiculous some of these comments are. You know, in 2016, not as much. 2018, a little, not as much.

So, you know, if we could just be aware of what's going out there on social media, in the press, and in our own minds, like myself with the doctor comment, like, wow, that was a really sexist statement, Eleanor, right? Awareness comes first. Awareness comes before action. But we're, again, here we are talking about it's our fault. Like, as a person, I have to make this change in myself, which is true. but it really is important as your book does, and the point of this podcast, is to identify the public

historical origins of this thing, this current that we've been carried along by. That's what's important right now. I mean, a lot of people looking at what's going on in the press and social media with these female candidates may think it's something that's fairly new, whereas my research indicates it goes back tens of thousands of years. I think that's important to know. I mean, I wonder if it's in our DNA. It's somehow imprinted on. on our brains after all these tens of thousands of years. So we are swimming at it. It's part of our psychological and social makeup.

So let's just start with awareness. Thank you so much, Eleanor Herman. The book we've been talking about is called Off with Her Head, 3,000 years of demonizing women in power. So interesting and compelling and current to what we're going through right now. She's also written Sex with Kings, Sex with the Queen, and several other works of popular history. Look out for her editorials in the press.

She has also been a guest on our sister podcast, but Twix the Sheets. You can find her there in past episodes. Eleanor, thank you so much. I hope we meet again. Thank you. I really enjoyed it, Don. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes, dropping Mondays and Thursdays,

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