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Page Not FoundWe need to be united in the fight against fascism and repression.
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Page Not FoundWe need to be united in the fight against fascism and repression.
In These Times is committed to remaining fiercely independent, but we need your help. Donate now to make sure we can continue providing the original reporting, deep investigation, and strategic analysis needed in this moment. We're proud to be in this together.
The Official Word
Tammy Baldwin, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Linda Chavez-Thompson, Janet Cowell, Amy Dean, April Fairfield, Barbara Lee, Laura Miller, and Lynn Woolsey on leadership.
Teaching Women To Win
Europe Crawls Ahead
The Scandinavians are doing great, but as for the rest ...
Defying Expectations
Having a woman leader isn't always enough.
Editorial
No Questions Asked.
Back Talk
Ain't nothing like the real feminism.
Homeland insecurity.
Appall-o-Meter
Before the Dawn
Will political reform finally come to Burma?
Jury awards $4.4 million to a pair of Earth First! activists.
Hundreds of 9/11 detainees remain behind bars, shrouded in secrecy.
A Man of Peace
In Person: Dave Dellinger
Never Again—and Again and Again
BOOKS: Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell.
FILM: John Woo's Windtalkers.
MUSIC: DJ Shadow's The Private Press.
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June 21, 2002
It's Not Just Having the Job—
It's What You Do With It
 n September 15, Rep. Barbara Lee made “herstory” when she cast the lone vote against President Bush’s resolution to bomb Afghanistan into oblivion. Incredibly, she was the only member of Congress to defy Bush’s call to use “all necessary and appropriate force.”
Speaking from the floor of the House, she said, “I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States.” Subsequent events have confirmed her caution. Afghanistan is a disaster area. Osama bin Laden and most of his brain trust remain at large, and the threat of terror here and abroad is, if anything, growing. Of course, her courageous stand was rewarded with accusations of being unpatriotic, even death threats. It should come as no surprise that it took a woman to make that stand, that it was a woman who had the progressive vision. But why did she stand alone? Where were the other Congresswomen? They were certainly in the congressional chambers that day, thanks to 1992, the so-called Year of the Woman, when another American heroine, Anita Hill, stood up to the Senate and testified against the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas. The movement that emerged from the Senate’s defiance and disrespect of Hill led to record-breaking gains for women in elective office across the nation. A decade later, 63 of 535 members of Congress are women. But on one of the most transforming leadership decisions of our lifetime, the September vote, 62 women were silent. Privately, her colleagues say they admired Lee for her vote of conscience. But real leadership is about more than whispering “go, girl” in the corridors. Women should be different. Lee’s vote, and the silence that followed it, demonstrates why we must redefine what it means to be a leader in the women’s movement. It is no longer sufficient to aim to achieve the status of the old boys and play by their rules. We have to do more than just get there. Of course, we must hold elected and appointed office and move into controlling roles in corporations, academia and other influential institutions. And we have. More women than ever are serving as elected officials, heads of colleges and universities, civic leaders and CEOs than at any time in history. But Lee is not a leader simply because she is in a position of power, as an elected representative from an influential state. In this, a new century, real leadership should be defined not by access to power, but by how we choose to use it. We have to look beyond leadership as defined by title. Titles are about entitlement, and can become nothing more than a one-way ticket to complacency. Women in traditional authority positions too often got there by playing by the old boys’ rules—rules that limit them to the values and rules of a male-defined and male-dominated world.
That was no coincidence, wrote Hill, now a professor at Brandeis University. She reminds us that Rowley, the high-ranking FBI agent, exposed the bureau’s chronic missteps in a 13-page memo before the September 11 attack. And last August, Watkins tried in vain to warn the top brass at Enron that the company was about to sink under the weight of accounting and management misdeeds. “Ms. Rowley and Ms. Watkins are two women who rose through the ranks of male-dominated institutions to become insiders,” she noted. “Yet perhaps their experiences as women in traditionally male workplaces heightened their awareness of resistance to much needed change and deepened their commitment to making it happen.” It’s not just having the job. It’s what you do with it.
Women need to know, as African-Americans have already painfully learned, that they can opt out of the no-win game in which the media and other outsiders try to limit and define their leaders. Blacks don’t have to, and don’t, accept high-profile activists like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan as the race’s “true and only” leaders. Women can find leadership right on the ground, in racially and economically diverse neighborhoods. These are the women who are bearing the brunt of this country’s infinite list of unaddressed ills: educational inequality, poverty, substandard and unaffordable housing, a crippled health care system, crime and violence. After more than a century, the women’s movement still has not learned to capitalize on all of its assets. Since the ’60s, the feminist movement has been out of sync with those on the margins, from the civil rights movement to the battle over welfare reform. Women of color, and the poor and working poor, are still not consulted as equal partners, and relatively few are in leadership positions. The think tanks, civic groups, associations and other institutions that claim to represent women raise money from them and call them to the rallies, but don’t consult them on meaningful policy issues. The crossing guards, union reps, school board members, lower-level bureaucrats, and soccer and basketball moms are not at the table. And, as in most segments of society, the voices of youth are valued for their commercial appeal, but not for participation. Research by the White House Project shows that 75 percent of young American women believe that having more women in office will improve the state of the nation. But the group also identified a “circular holding pattern: Young women think other young women should be in politics, but do not themselves want to join.” Thousands of young women in their twenties and thirties are already staffing and leading our nonprofit, community-based and social service organizations. The movement must make a priority of getting these younger women into the pipelines of influence.
Critics said she was trying to deflect heat from the scandal over her husband’s recent admission to an extramarital affair with an aide, a liaison that produced an out-of-wedlock child. But by stepping out, she helped to aid black-Latino relations and draw worldwide attention to the bombardment of American citizens. And if she never marches again, Jackson’s stand in Vieques will encourage other women at home, just as Rosa Parks became a heroine for oppressed black workers across the nation by simply sitting down on that Montgomery, Alabama, bus 46 years ago. New leadership also defies the old assumptions. Washington is still agog over the announcement in April that Karen Hughes, the most senior woman aide ever to an American president, was resigning her post to return to Texas with her husband and teen-age son. Whatever her politics, the departure of this high-profile advisor is a loss for women. And it may be the first time a Washington heavy uttered that old saw about leaving a plum job to “spend more time with the family”—in truth. When the men in high positions say it, it means they really either got fired or pushed out in a power play. Then they promptly depart for the golf course, where they wait for the next post, courtesy of the old-boy network. But Hughes’ decision appears to be the real thing, and it validates the working women who choose taking care of family over taking care of the boss, and don’t want to apologize for it. That new leadership must arm itself, in as many ways as it can, against those long-neglected and life-and-death issues for women and families: the environment, the perils of the child welfare and criminal justice systems, the future of welfare reform, and access to affordable housing and health care.
And next time, that new leadership won’t leave Barbara Lee standing alone. Laura S. Washington is a contributing columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and founding editor and publisher of the Chicago Reporter. She can be reached at Lauraswashington@aol.com. Return to top of the page. |
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In These Times is committed to remaining fiercely independent, but we need your help. Donate now to make sure we can continue providing the original reporting, deep investigation, and strategic analysis needed in this moment. We're proud to be in this together.
onsider Coleen Rowley and Sherron Watkins. Just as it took a woman to stand up to the short-sighted call for revenge against Afghanistan, it took two women to blow the whistle on the incompetence and corruption at the FBI and Enron. This point was argued by—who else?—Anita Hill, in a June 6 op-ed in the New York Times.
ith less than 14 percent representation in Congress, can women really afford to limit the definition of leadership? They have to stretch beyond the Beltway and the City Council hearing room.
ew leadership can emerge from the unexpected, and can be defined by the moment. Last year, Jacqueline Lavinia Jackson, the wife of Jesse Jackson, was arrested in a peaceful protest against the Navy’s bombing exercises on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. She was strip-searched and held in solitary confinement for several days. Some of her own family were shocked at her decision to join the protesters. For decades she had stayed behind closed doors in her Chicago home, raising the children of her globe-trotting spouse, virtually invisible to the press and public.
