American Women Presidents

By Mosemarie Boyd

Women presidents, prime ministers and heads of state have commanded powerful nations throughout history, however, women have yet to serve as commander-in-chief of the United States--our esteemed representative democracy. The campaign to elect women presidents of the United States began over 130 years ago and now it's time to finish the job!

Women presidents, prime ministers and heads of state have commanded powerful nations throughout history. Great historical leaders include Cleopatra VII of Egypt, Queen Isabel I of Spain, Queen Elizabeth I of Great Britain, Catherine the Great of Russia, and Empress Dowager Tz'u-his of China and others. The 20th Century alone saw over 40 women serve as top national leaders, including Margaret Thatcher of Britain, Kim Campbell of Canada, Edith Cresson of France, Mary Robinson of Ireland, Golda Mier of Israel, Tansu Ciller of Turkey, Indira Gandhi of India, Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, Corazon Aquino of the Philippines, Eva Duarte Peron of Argentina, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela of South Africa, Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway, and Vigdis Finnbogadottir of Iceland and many others (http://www.guide2womenleaders.com). Currently, the Council of Women World Leaders, a network of present and former women presidents and primer ministers, claims 25 members (http://www.womenworldleaders.org). However, women have yet to serve as commander-in-chief of the United States--our esteemed representative democracy.

The campaign to elect women presidents of the United States began over 130 years ago when Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838-1927) announced her 1872 presidential campaign in The New York Herald on April 2, 1870. A self-made, wealthy and prominent editor of her own newspaper, Woodhull was the first woman to trade stock on the New York Stock Exchange and the first woman to address the United States Congress on behalf of women's voting rights. Woodhull invested all of her personal wealth in her presidential campaign. Her audacious political leadership won her the nomination for president of the United States from the new Equal Rights Party (a coalition, which she founded, of women's suffragists, industrial labor organizers, and members of the 19th Century Spiritualists movement) in New York City on May 10, 1872. Her heated presidential campaign and complex personality won media coverage and great public interest nationwide. In the end, however, "She couldn't organize the petitions or pay the legal expenses and filing fees required to get her name on state ballots," which is especially challenging for third party candidates. By Election Day--Tuesday, November 5, 1872, Woodhull was deeply in debt, having difficulty paying rent for unassuming accommodations, and plagued by legal difficulties indirectly related to her presidential campaign. Whether Woodhull received any significant portion of the electorate's votes or any votes at all is difficult to ascertain, but she undoubtedly set the precedent for American women to run for the U.S. presidency.

Several years later Belva Lockwood (1830-1917), an active supporter of the women's rights movement who had split with several prominent women's suffrage leaders to support Woodhull's 1872 presidential campaign, ran for the U.S. presidency herself as the Equal Rights Party nominee in 1884 and again in 1888. One of the early American women to gain her law degree (after petitioning President Ulysses Grant to award her the degree she had rightfully earned from a law school for which he served as honorary president), Lockwood was nationally known and respected as the first woman to plead a case before the U.S. Supreme Court and a successful attorney who helped women become attorneys-at-law throughout the country. Although Lockwood's presidential campaign received far less publicity than Woodhull's had, Lockwood "received 4149 votes from the all-male electorate" as a candidate on several state presidential primary ballots in the 1884 election. While she received less support in the 1888 election, Lockwood set the precedent for woman presidential candidates to get on state presidential primary election ballots and win votes.

The first woman to run for the presidential nomination of a major political party, U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. Also the first woman to serve in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, Smith was nationally known and respected on both sides of the political aisle for her involvement in shaping national military policy during World War II and for publicly opposing McCarthyism. Smith refused to accept financial contributions to her presidential campaign, returned contributions sent by supporters, and championed campaign finance reform as a central theme of her presidential campaign--which may have obscured an otherwise limited financial showing. Nonetheless, Smith succeeded in getting her name on five out of the 17 Republican primaries held in 1964 and won 224,970 votes or 3.8 percent of the total votes cast for Republican candidates. Smith campaigned heavily in the early states where she knew she could win the most votes and largely ignored the other states due to her campaign's financial limitations and her refusal to miss Senate votes in Washington, DC to be on the campaign trail. She finished fifth out of seven candidates in the first primary in New Hampshire (with 2,120 votes or 2.3 percent), skipped the second primary in Wisconsin, and finished second among eight candidates in the third primary in Illinois (with 209,521 votes or 25.3 percent), where she waged her most serious campaign efforts. Thereafter, she won votes in Massachusetts, Texas, and Oregon; however, no votes were recorded for Smith in the Republican primaries in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, District of Columbia, Indiana, Ohio, Nebraska, Maryland, Florida, California, or South Dakota. As these results illustrate, Smith put herself--and women presidential candidates generally--on the major party presidential primary map.

Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm of New York was the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 (the 100-year anniversary of Woodhull's historic campaign). With a degree in sociology from Brooklyn College and a master's degree in education from Columbia University, Chisholm was well-known to TV viewers throughout the county as the first African-American candidate for a major party presidential nomination, the first African-American woman elected to Congress, a strong Vietnam War opponent and a supporter of increasingly popular social programs. Starting with $44,000, Chisholm worked actively to raise money to support her presidential campaign, but "donations were small and not nearly enough for a full-scale campaign." Nonetheless, she waged a competitive campaign relying heavily on volunteers, including African-American supporters, women's rights advocates and other liberal voters. Chisholm competed in 14 out of the 21 Democratic state presidential primaries in 1972, winning 430,703 votes or 2.7 percent of the vote total. Like Smith, she focused her efforts in states where she thought she had the best chance of winning votes. She skipped the New Hampshire primary altogether and focused heavily in states with large populations of African-Americans and liberal voters, including Florida, Massachusetts, Minnesota, California, Michigan, and North Carolina. Her strategy paid off exquisitely when she won the New Jersey Democratic primary with 51,433 votes or 66.9 percent of the total votes cast. In addition, Chisholm finished third among five candidates in North Carolina (with 61,723 votes or 7.5 percent), fourth among nine candidates in California (with 157,435 votes or 4.4 percent), fourth among eleven candidates in Tennessee (with 18,809 votes or 3.8 percent), fifth among 12 candidates in Massachusetts (with 22,398 votes or 3.6 percent) and seventh among 10 candidates in Florida (with 43,989 votes or 3.4 percent). She won 9,198 votes in Wisconsin without even making one campaign stop in the state and won additional votes in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Maryland, Michigan, Oregon, and New Mexico; however, no votes were recorded for Chisholm in New Hampshire, District of Columbia, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Rhode Island, or South Dakota. Chisholm's presidential primary campaign showing proved strong enough to win her 152 delegate votes (approximately five percent) at the 1972 Democratic National Convention --an unprecedented historic victory for women presidential candidates on the 100th anniversary of the campaign to elect women presidents.

Democratic Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder of Colorado ran for the presidency briefly in 1988. With a Harvard law degree and her historic position as the first Congresswoman to serve on the U.S. House of Representatives' Armed Services Committee, Schroeder was thrust forward as a potential presidential candidate when Democratic U.S. Sen. Gary Hart's presidential campaign collapsed in scandal. Schroeder had served as Hart's presidential campaign manager and the national media instantly revealed her exploratory presidential campaign activities. An excited nation was temporarily transfixed by the possibility of another Democratic woman presidential candidate following in Chisholm's enormous footsteps. However, Schroeder knew exactly what was involved in electing a presidential candidate--in terms of money, supporters, and so on--and she knew she didn't have the political support structure to wage a winning campaign. Since seven other Democratic candidates had a big head start on her potential campaign, Schroeder withdrew from the race--with a few infamous tears over her inability to wage a more successful campaign in the midst of so much evident demand for a successful woman presidential candidate.

Well-known nationally from her efforts to promote her husband's 1996 presidential campaign, Republican Elizabeth Dole also ran for the presidency briefly in 2000. Having earned a master's degree in education and a law degree from Harvard and studied at Oxford, Elizabeth Dole served as a presidential cabinet secretary for both the U.S. departments of transportation and labor. With her outstanding credentials and insider knowledge of presidential campaigning, she began fundraising early, campaigned aggressively on important national defense issues, generated an enormous amount of media coverage, and won the hearts of Republicans and Democrats alike nationwide--men and women who want to see a woman president of the United States. Yet Dole, like Schroeder, dropped out of the race before the state presidential primary elections began presumably due to her campaign's inability to raise enough money and build a large enough political support network to get on the state presidential primary ballots and wage a competitive campaign in all 50 states. Nonetheless, Dole was the first woman to pose a considerable challenge for a major political party's presidential nomination and her campaign inspired confidence in a generation of Americans ready for women's presidential campaigns to end in victory.

The successful efforts of these outstanding American women and their presidential campaigns shattered our nation's political glass ceilings--as the growing number of women in high political office illustrates. These women helped shape our nation's expectations about women in presidential politics. American voters are now more interested in the chances of a woman presidential candidate winning than in whether a woman is running for the U.S. presidency. Moreover, a 1999 Gallop poll found that over 90 percent of Americans said they would vote for a qualified American woman president and over 61 percent of Americans said they expect to see a woman president in their lifetime according to a 1999 Roper Starch Worldwide survey. For the historic transformation of expectations about women presidents we owe a great debt to the early women presidential candidates for their prescience, tenacity, and hard work. These women began the campaign to elect women presidents. They pushed the goal forward one step at a time from the 19th Century through the 20th Century. Now--at the dawn of the 21st Century--it is time for our generation to finish the task they started over 130 years ago.

While Woodhull, Lockwood, Smith, Chisholm, Schroeder, and Dole doubtlessly had some weaknesses as presidential candidates--for example, they were all more liberal than the constituencies they sought to represent, they were all outstanding candidates in their own right. Nonetheless, the difficulty of starting a presidential campaign from the very beginning, without the advantages enjoyed by major political party favorites, rendered their presidential campaigns largely symbolic. These women stepped forward to run for the presidency, each one, without the support of a major political party's leaders. Each campaign started from scratch. Each candidate struggled to build the basic political support networks necessary to wage a national campaign. In each case, even collecting the petition signatures required and raising the filing fees necessary to get on the state presidential primary election ballots proved challenging. Without the benefit of a national political organization dedicated specifically to supporting the outstanding women who step forward to run for the presidency, the political nuts and bolts of presidential campaigning proved disappointingly elusive.

American voters will elect women presidents and vice presidents the same way we have always elected presidents and vice presidents: we will elect the best candidates--with charismatic appeal, strong executive leadership abilities, vision, commander-in-chief credibility, convincing economic credentials, proven law and order experience, sensitivity to family and social issues, outstanding fundraising prowess, a friendly media rapport, enthusiastic campaign stamina, and all the rest. Therefore, we need women who have prepared themselves to be the best presidential and vice presidential candidates, as many, many American women have either done or are in the process of doing. However, part of being the best candidate is having the most powerful nationwide political support structure to help organize petition drives to get on the state presidential election primary ballots, raise money to pay candidate filing fees and ensure the campaign's message gets out, contact state and local media outlets, and build a strong campaign nationwide.

Founded as a political organization, American Women Presidents is dedicated to building a nationwide network of men and women--trained in the technical procedures and best practices of presidential campaigning--to support the outstanding American women who step forward and put their careers, lives, and reputations on the line to run for the U.S. presidency and vice presidency. We're building a network of supporters who understand how presidential campaigns work. We want representatives in all 50 states who can contact their state and local elections offices, figure out how the presidential primary election processes work, and build local networks of women and women committed supporting future women presidential candidates in their states. Our goal is to build an organization that can assist prospective women presidential candidates with local fundraising, media contacts and getting on the state presidential primary election ballots in all 50 states so that qualified candidates are guaranteed a successful campaign.

American Women Presidents is committed to campaigning continuously until we have seen not only one but a progression of women presidents and vice presidents of the United States. Building on the momentum of Elizabeth Dole's 2000 presidential campaign, American Women Presidents conducted The 2000 Campaign For Women Vice Presidential Nominees. We kicked off the campaign on Mother's Day at the Million Mom March in Washington, DC with a petition drive asking then Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush to select women vice presidential nominees from among America's many highly qualified women. On the Fourth of July, we endorsed former Republican presidential hopeful Elizabeth Dole and Democratic U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein as VP nominees at a morning press conference outside the Los Angeles Convention Center (site of the 2000 Democratic National Convention) and on CNN's Inside Politics that afternoon.

In August 2000 after presidential candidates Bush and Gore selected male VP running mates, American Women Presidents conducted The VP Protest to inform political party leaders that we were disappointed that neither Bush nor Gore chose a woman VP. The VP Protest generated national and international media coverage of our mission to elect women presidents and marked the first time in U.S. history that substantial political muscle was flexed as a direct response to the major parties' failure to run women vice presidential candidates. The VP Protest garnered over 500 TV stories nationwide; went out over international newswire services in English, French and Spanish; reached media markets in the U.S., Canada, England, France, Spain, Australia, and parts of Asia (and perhaps other areas as well); found its way to the pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Washington Times as well as many other newspapers; and made internet news headlines on CNN.com, Yahoo.com, and FoxNews.com. As a successful political protest, it afforded our shoestring campaign an opportunity to let people know we were disappointed that another generation of American girls would grow up without a role model in The White House--and put American Women Presidents on the nation's political radar screen.

At the same time, American Women Presidents issued The Declaration of Participation. In celebration of the 80th anniversary of American women's guaranteed right to vote (August 26, 1920-August 26, 2000), The Declaration of Participation calls on American women to assume their patriotic duty to run for political office at every level to such an extent that women candidates and elected officials are as commonplace as women voters--now the majority of voters in presidential elections. Recent studies show that when women run for office, they win as often as men do. Moreover, we know that women are elected more often in states where voters are already represented by women, as we've seen in the three states with two women U.S. Senators, California, Maine, and Washington State--which also has the highest percentage of women state legislators (38.8 percent); and in Arizona, which elected women to its top five executive positions in 1998. We believe that increasing the number of women candidates and elected officials at every level will contribute directly to facilitating the election of women presidents and vice presidents. More women candidates and officeholders at every level will put more women into the political pipelines to the presidency and vice presidency--typically governorships, U.S. Senate seats, and Congressional seats. In addition, more women candidates and officeholders at every level will build more political networks to support future women presidential and vice presidential candidates. Therefore, we want to see a whole lot more women running for political office--even when women candidates lose they gain invaluable political experience and help build political networks to support future women candidates!

Following The Declaration of Participation, in a continuing effort to put more women into the political pipeline to the presidency and to build stronger political networks to support future women presidential candidates, American Women Presidents endorsed and made financial contributions to all 11 Democratic and Republican women gubernatorial candidates and U.S. Senate candidates in the 2000 elections. We also urged women to run for governorships in all 50 states in 2002 and advised potential women gubernatorial candidates to make use of Keys To The Governor's Office, an excellent new guide for women gubernatorial candidates available from The Barbara Lee Family Foundation (21 Sears Road, Brookline, MA 02445, (617) 731-1005, electwomengovs@aol.com).

On President's Day, 2001, we sent presidential candidate recruitment letters to over 100 women leaders, including women governors, U.S. Senators, Congresswomen, and Fortune's 50 most powerful businesswomen. Shortly thereafter, on Fox News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor, we urged Democratic U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton and Republican U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison to run for the presidency in 2004. While Sen. Clinton has subsequently stated she does not intend to run for the presidency, many of our constituents are strongly behind her as a potential presidential candidate and speculation over her political future continues. Although Sen. Hutchison publicly stated her intention to run for the presidency in the future during the 2000 presidential campaign, her ambitions appear to be on hold indefinitely now that President George W. Bush, a fellow Texan, has taken office. Neither Clinton nor Hutchison now appears a likely candidate for the presidency in 2004, however, we look forward to the possibility of supporting their campaigns in the future.

Currently, we're working to recruit other Republican and Democratic women to run for the presidency in 2004 and to put women presidential candidates on the first 10 state presidential primary ballots in 2004. We support both Democratic and Republican women presidential candidates. We want to see several women presidential candidates run simultaneously because we know that when three or more women enter a race, it becomes a substantive race about issues rather than gender. By putting Democratic and Republican women on the first 10 state presidential primary ballots in 2004 (and on an increasing number of ballots every presidential election thereafter), our goal is to build a growing political network of men and women nationwide who are committed to doing whatever it takes to promote the election of the outstanding American women who step forward to run as presidential and vice presidential candidates--until we have seen not just one but a progression of women presidents and vice presidents of the United States.