5 Questions on the Election of President Hillary Clinton

Alice Kessler-Harris, a scholar of women’s and labor history, has witnessed a number of firsts in her career. She came of age as a historian in the late 1960s as the field of women’s history was being created. At the time, there were virtually no women studying with her in graduate school, and she had only one woman for a professor. Even her dissertation on labor organizing had no women in it “because few historians thought about women as appropriate or interesting subjects,” she says.

That began to change dramatically within a few years. “It was enormously scintillating to be in the middle of real debates about real things,” recalls Kessler-Harris, the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor Emerita of American History in Honor of Dwight D. Eisenhower. “Women’s history linked the past with the politics we were living ...At the same time, of course, we were also changing the institutions in which we lived.”

Now, as another barrier breaks, Kessler-Harris discusses how she views the election of Hillary Clinton as America’s first female president.

Q. Where do you put this milestone in historical context?

A. In the last 40 years, there has been what you can only call a revolution in terms of the roles women play in the world, and the expectations of women in the workforce and the economy and the family. We’ve moved from what used to be called a male breadwinner family to the two-income family. Before the 1960s there were only one or two women in Congress at any one time; they often replaced husbands who died while in office. Since then there’s been a dramatic expansion of women in politics, although in Congress women still make up only about 20 percent of the seats.

Q. How many of these changes were inevitable versus a function of a changing economy?

A. Nothing, I believe, was inevitable. Changes in the economy and in family life have drawn women from largely poorly paid, secondary jobs to economically independent and self-supporting lives. Their political imaginations have changed accordingly, and women, as the current election shows, now fully recognize the need for political representation. There’s an irony in the fact that, when Hillary's husband was running for president in 1992, she was attacked for not wanting to stay home and bake cookies. Now look where she is.

Q. Does this reset gender roles in any significant way?

A. In much the same way people have begun to acknowledge race as a crucial factor in our identities and our political stances, they now think about men’s and women’s roles in family and community as politically important. Issues of equal pay, paid parental leave, childcare and sexual harassment can no longer be avoided, making gender an important electoral variable. Just as words like equality and democracy have taken on different meanings in light of movements for racial justice, so they introduce new energy into women’s struggles for fuller places in American society. Partly because she began her career by focusing on issues of race and poverty as they affected children, Hillary Clinton bridged gender and race, helping to reset gender roles from her initial entry into politics.

Q. Some still view feminism as a threat, how can that be addressed?

A. ​If by feminism, we mean the search for human equality, then it will continue to threaten different people in different ways. But the goal of fair and equal treatment can’t be abandoned just because it threatens those with privilege. Issues of reproductive rights, child care, equal pay, work and motherhood affect almost everyone at some stage of their lives. But because resolving them challenges traditional notions of family life, they produce tremendous conflict. A feminist politics has to reconcile the new tensions of women’s working lives with the caring tasks to which women have routinely been assigned. But that won’t be an easy task.

Q. So she’s been elected—now what?

A. A Hillary Clinton presidency will put issues of equality at the forefront of discussion: Black Lives Matter, the $15 minimum wage, trade union representation, and inequality will all become part of the agenda. That’s not to say that she will succeed, but assuming she doesn’t turn out to be a Margaret Thatcher, she should be able to change the level of the discussion around domestic issues. At the same time, Republicans are already threatening to do to her what they did to Obama and refuse to pass any legislation, or to consider a Supreme Court nomination. The very issues that we feminists, we women, are delighted that Hillary has brought to the forefront of her campaign are the issues that will be very difficult to move forward on once she takes office. At least Hillary, helped by [Vermont Senator Bernie] Sanders and [Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth] Warren, gives us a platform from which to move forward.