Hillary Clinton’s nomination is widely hailed as the breaking of, in Eleanor Clift’s words, “America’s 240-year glass ceiling,” and there’s no denying that many people, and not just women, are thrilled by the prospect of the election of a woman president. Whether you share that feeling or not, it’s easy to understand, and easy to understand that many people feel that it’s long overdue.
In my view, American voters have been ready to elect a woman president for quite some time now, at least for the last 25 years. The right candidate has just not come around. Certainly there’s little reason to doubt that Hillary Clinton, if she had been nominated by the Democratic party, would have won the general election in the circumstances of 2008.
It’s also true that historically American voters in this country have been more willing to elect women to legislative than to executive positions. One of the titles of the president is commander in chief, state governors are commanders of the national guard and city mayors superintend their police forces. America’s first female governors were elected in 1924, one as successor to a deceased husband who had been governor, the other as a stand-in for a husband who had been disqualified for running for another term. Nellie Tayloe Ross was elected in Wyoming, which as a territory gave women the vote in 1869, in a special election after her husband, elected in 1922, died in office.
Miriam Ferguson’s husband James Ferguson was elected governor of Texas in 1914 and 1916 but was impeached and removed from office in 1917 and barred from running again. His wife Miriam — they were known as Pa and Ma Ferguson — was elected in 1924 and again in 1932, on the understanding that he would wield effective power. No other woman was elected or served as governor until 1966, when Alabamians elected Lurleen Wallace as a clear stand-in for her husband.
At one convention gathering I saw a button for that campaign that read “Lurleen Wallace for governor, George Wallace for president in 1968,” when in fact the male Wallace ran for president as a third-party candidate and won 13.5 percent of the popular vote. Gov. Lurleen Wallace died in May 1968.
The first woman governor elected in her own right was Ella Grasso, Democrat of Connecticut, in 1974, after serving two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and three terms as Connecticut secretary of state. At the time I was working for her pollster, Peter Hart. He wrote a questionnaire that delved into voters’ attitudes about female executives and which offices they thought could be appropriately filled by a woman. (As I recall, the office most considered unsuitable for a woman was FBI director, and we still haven’t had a female FBI director 44 years later.) Grasso’s admaker cut a spot showing her at the head of a conference table, leading a discussion with men around the table, calling on one and then speaking, all without audio. She was elected, in a Democratic year, by a solid margin and re-elected in 1978.
There were 50 years between 1924, when two women were elected governors in place of their husbands, and 1974, when a woman was elected governor in her own right. Since then, 33 women have served as state governors, three of them succeeding a predecessor who resigned and 29 elected in their own right. The glass ceiling for woman governors has long since been in shards.
That’s why I think that the glass ceiling Hillary Clinton fans have been talking about has been overdue for breaking for a quarter-century, and certainly since 2008; voters were simply waiting for a plausible candidate. I suspect that young voters today, whose political memories don’t go back before the 1990s, may not think the nomination and election of a woman president is so remarkable, or at least not as much as those of us whose political memories go back to 1974 or before.
And did I mention that the United Kingdom just got its second woman prime minister — a Conservative like the first — earlier this month?
