The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women's Quest for the American Presidency

Abstract

Tuesday, July 28, 2016, Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first woman to be nominated by a major party for the U.S. presidency. Ellen Fitzpatrick has written a lively history of three women who ran for president: Victoria Claflin Woodhull, Margaret Chase Smith, and Shirley Chisholm. I would add the book is really about four women, as Clinton's two presidential campaigns begin and conclude the book. Fitzpatrick chooses women who seized historical moments of great change that were pregnant with possibilities. Each presidential aspirant faced similar challenges based upon gender, class, and race. Even in defeat, all three imagined that someday a woman would be elected president. Woodhull is without a doubt the most colorful and fascinating of the three. Thrice married, spiritualist, freethinker, suffragist, translator of Karl Marx, she ran for the presidency in 1872. Her public and shocking espousal of free love led Woodhull to expose the scandalous love affair between the prominent Protestant minister Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton, which ultimately led to Woodhull's downfall. The first woman to run for the U.S. presidency spent Election Day in prison. Smith was the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress, from 1940 to 1973. A popular and principled Maine Republican, she rose to national prominence when she became the only Republican who challenged the virulent anticommunism of Senator Joseph McCarthy. She declared for the U.S. presidency in 1963 to a torrent of sexist ridicule from her own party and the national press. Chisholm, the daughter of working-class Caribbean immigrants, spent her formative years living in Barbados and then Brooklyn, New York. She was the first African American woman elected to Congress in 1968. When Chisholm announced her presidential run in 1972 she was supported by grassroots, women's liberation and black liberation activists, and she was opposed by much of the Democratic party and the entire Congressional Black Caucus. Chisholm had her name placed in nomination at the 1972 convention.