On her afternoon talk show some years ago, Oprah Winfrey shared a list of eight powerful women she thought we should all know— as if we might encounter any of them at the grocery store or on the bus. I remember one of them got my attention—Anna Deavere Smith, perhaps better known to some of you as Nancy McNally from the The West Wing, or as Gloria in Nurse Jackie. She told Oprah that woman should be bolder; that we should argue as much as our male counterparts, and that we shouldn’t try so hard to avoid conflict. We should speak up and out, she said. Boldly.
We should, and we do. At least two of us—the only two women ever nominated to be president by a major party—ran for President of the United States by doing so. They lost. Of course they lost. As post-election analyses continue to dissect the results with historians and pundits presenting their conclusions about why America overwhelmingly chose to elect Trump again, the fact remains that the United States is still bedeviled by misogyny. If you don’t want to go that far, you’ll maybe look up and see that there’s only one crack in the ultimate glass ceiling.
Gender has always played a role in presidential politics, and the 2024 campaign was no exception. During the last one hundred odd days of it, we heard many of the same old story lines from the same old playbook that, according to Kristina Wilfore, co-founder #shepersisted “undermine voter behavior toward women,”
Gendered disinformation is the spread of deceptive or inaccurate information and images against women political leaders, journalists, and female public figures. Following story lines that draw on misogyny, and gendered stereotypes, the goal of these attacks is to frame female politicians and government officials as inherently untrustworthy, unintelligent, unlikable, or uncontrollable – too emotional to hold office or participate in democratic politics.
Vice President Harris chose to downplay her gender, her eyes fixed on a new era where it would be irrelevant in America. She rarely spoke about it or the historic nature of her candidacy as potentially the first Black woman to be elected president. Instead, she talked about the cost of groceries and prescription drugs and issues that should have galvanized the Democratic party—affordable housing, protecting reproductive rights, bringing an end to gun violence, and strengthening the middle class. But it didn’t work, and too many Democrats chose to stay home on November 5th. Meanwhile, Trump and his allies chose to talk a whole lot about the Vice President’s gender, to exploit it, with some of his allies branding her a “DEI candidate,” “a childless cat lady,” “crazy,” “dumb as a rock.” One of them even likened her to a prostitute at a Madison Square Rally in the final stretch of the campaign.
She rose above it all. Was that a mistake? Maybe. Maybe she should have confronted him directly about his misogynistic remarks. Maybe during her one debate with him, she should have challenged him passionately on his overt sexism and his plans to put women back in their place, where he will protect us “whether we like it or not.” Maybe the more apathetic voters in those all-important swing states would have been more motivated to vote if they had seen Harris campaign harder on breaking the glass ceiling. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered.
Sure. Women turned out for Harris. She won a higher share of white women with college degrees, but her opponent won an even wider margin with women who did not go to college. And, in 2024 there were more of them who voted. Add his gains with men in every age group, there was just no way for Harris to make up that ground, no path to victory. In a nutshell, Trump won the working and middle classes, and Kamala Harris won over college-educated people who are financially better-off. Why? Maybe the prospect of electing a woman to the Oval Office is too much for the United States.
Maybe not. Maybe misogyny wasn’t the deciding factor in Trump’s victory, but for many women it certainly feels like the “same old tired playbook” helped him win. It will take some time to retire that particular playbook. The fight will take time, as Kamala Harris reminded us in her concession speech, but “That doesn’t mean we won’t win.”
It will take outrageous acts—lots of them.
An Outrageous Act
The week before Barack Obama won his second term, I met Gloria Steinem in Phoenix. Following her remarks at a YWCA luncheon, she described a deal she has been making for years at the end of organizing events. To sustain momentum, she promised organizers that if, in the next 24 hours, they would do just one outrageous thing in the name of simple justice, that she would do the same. She told us it could be anything. Anything we wanted it to be. She also said that only we would know what it should be—pick it up yourself, run for office, suggest that everyone in the office say out loud how much they make thereby allowing everyone to know who is being discriminated against.
In return, Steinem guaranteed two outcomes. First, she guaranteed that after just one day, the world would be a better place, and secondly that we would have a good time. Never again would we wake up wondering if we would do an outrageous thing; rather, we would wake up and consider which outrageous thing we might do today, tomorrow, and the next day.
I’m not sure I did anything that even felt remotely bold or outrageous until I was in my forties. The principal of a small high school in Phoenix at the time, I was struggling to turn it around while dealing with the devastating impact of a new Arizona law, Proposition 300. It required me to inform 38 of my bright immigrant students that they would no longer be able to take state-funded college courses, because they were in the country without documentation. They had been brought to the US as infants by parents in pursuit of a better life for them, but without Social Security Numbers or visas, the American Dream would remain achingly elusive.
The irony wasn’t lost on me as an immigrant from Northern Ireland, being asked to segregate children at school—school which should be the sacred space in any country – placing those who could prove citizenship in college classes and denying those who could not prove residency and could certainly not afford to pay their own way. Over 90% of my students lived below the American poverty level. The law was unfair. It felt un-American and anti-immigrant. To be specific, it felt anti-Mexican immigrant. My white Northern European skin seemed much more acceptable. Who isn’t Irish on St. Patrick’s Day? Because nobody told me what to do or what not to do about my students, I decided to reach out to the local media and anyone who would listen. By my own standards, this was outrageous. Bold, I even asked for money. The kindness of strangers helped raised over $100,000 to pay for tuition. The world was a little better, the way Gloria Steinem would one day tell me it would be, and the story made it to the New York Times, “A Principal Sees Injustice and Picks a Fight with It.”
Of all people, Anna Deavere Smith read the New York Times on a morning in March 2008 during a trip to Phoenix. Later that day, during Spring parent-teacher conferences, Nancy from the West Wing arrived at my office. Initially star-struck, I wasn’t sure what to say to one of Oprah’s phenomenal women. But as she explained what she was doing in Phoenix, we fell into an easy conversation that covered a lot of ground—from Northern Ireland to Arizona. She was in town to interview, along with me, an array of politicians, community activists, lawyers, and incarcerated women, for her one-woman play, “The Arizona Project,” commissioned to honor the 2006 naming of Arizona State University’s law school for retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor—the first U.S. law school to be named for a woman. We talked about our respective childhoods, and Anna recalled that when she was a girl, her grandfather had told her that
. . . if you say a word enough, it becomes you.
Walking in Other People’s Words
Inspired, Anna Deavere Smith traveled around the United States, interviewing people touched by some of our most harrowing social and racial tensions, recording her conversations with them, and shaping them into collections of monologues which she presents, verbatim, on stage. Using the real words of real people, Anna Deavere Smith breathes in – and out – America. It was surreal, sitting in my office talking to an acclaimed actress. She had “people” who set up the camera in my office and left us to chat about justice and education and my beloved Seamus Heaney.
A fan of Heaney, she admired the picture of him hanging on my office wall. I made a copy of it for her, and now that he’s gone, I like knowing his picture hangs in our respective living rooms.
Worlds apart but connected all the same.
When our conversation ended, and the camera and tape recorder packed away, Anna Deavere Smith told her assistant to be sure to get a picture of the shoes. My shoes. They weren’t my favorites. They were uncomfortable. Beige, high-heeled and professional, chosen that morning I suppose in an effort to look a bit bolder at work, to be perceived as strong— a part of my armor.
It wasn’t until the night after President Obama was elected to his first term, when my students and I went to see Anna perform her one-woman show at the Herberger Theater that I understood the shoes.
Changing shoes between each of her monologues, Anna Deavere Smith walked for miles in our words, in our world. Boldly, she crisscrossed Arizona and America and showed us ourselves—how interconnected we are—prison system employees, incarcerated women, female lawyers, immigration activists and others including Justice O’Connor who was in the audience, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the Mayor of Phoenix, and the principal I was at the time. We were looking in the mirror, and much of what we saw was bleak. At the same time, with a brand new President elected the night before, there was hope in the air.
It’s time to get back at it, to look in the mirror, to take a walk in the shoes of other people—people with whom we vehemently disagree, people who appear to want something very different from the same place all Americans call home. This is not the time to retreat or to recriminate. It’s a time for boldness, and I can think of no better voice to remind us than that of Seamus Heaney:
… make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.
