Is This Country Ready to Elect Its First Woman President in 2000?

The next U.S. presidential election could someday be remembered as a stunning reversal of fortune and roles for the Dole family.

In 1996, former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole was almost president and his wife, Elizabeth Dole, almost first lady. Four short years later, however, Elizabeth could conceivably become the first woman president, while her husband could become the first “first gentleman.”

With the election about 20 months away, Elizabeth Dole, a former Cabinet officer and retired head of the Red Cross, joins the head of a pack of hopefuls bidding for the Republican nomination, according to a recent Los Angeles Times Poll. Dole commanded 25% support and was eclipsed in the poll only by Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the son of the former president.

Neither candidate has officially declared his or her candidacy yet, but both are positioning themselves to do so. Bush took the necessary first step Sunday of forming an exploratory committee to seek the presidency, and Dole is expected to do the same Wednesday.

Dole’s surprisingly strong numbers raise, once again, a long-standing question of American politics: Will the world’s most powerful democracy elect a woman president any time soon?

A definitive answer may finally be coming. If not Dole in 2000, then another woman will become head of state, probably within a generation, many political analysts contend.

“It’s inevitable that a woman will be president,” said Ruth Mandel, a professor at Rutgers University who is recognized as a leading expert on women in politics. “The breakthrough will be historic.”

Though noting women are still underrepresented in politics, analysts point to the electorate’s growing acceptance of women as leaders. With 56, there are more women in Congress than at any other time, and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton may join the august group if she decides to run for the Senate seat from New York. And recent years have also seen the first women rise to U.S. attorney general and secretary of state posts.

“It’s a case of the extraordinary becoming the ordinary overnight,” adds Mandel, director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics in New Jersey. “It wasn’t so long ago that people thought it inconceivable that a woman be on the Supreme Court. Then, that happened. Then, they said the same thing about secretary of state, and then that happened.”

Nowhere was the rise in women leadership displayed more dramatically than at a January swearing-in ceremony in Arizona. The governor, secretary of state, attorney general, treasurer and schools chief were all women, which made Arizona the first state with an all-female line of succession.

But winning a state is one thing, winning the White House is another, analysts point out. Geraldine Ferraro is the closest any woman has come to being elected to the presidency--and that wasn’t very close. In 1984, the Democratic ticket of Mondale-Ferraro lost convincingly to the Republican ticket of Reagan-Bush.

After a 16-year absence, a woman may yet again appear on the Democratic ticket as a vice presidential candidate, analysts predict. Democratic strategists think the public will warmly receive a woman vice president, especially if Dole chooses not to run.

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Many Biases Against Women Still Exist

In any case, many analysts believe a woman will have to be elected to the vice presidency before the presidency. Without the vice presidency, the leap would be too great for the traditionally conservative American public to handle, some analysts say.

“There’s still a lot of old biases out there. Today, you’d still have to say being a woman in a presidential race is more of a liability than an asset,” said Michael Genovese, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount University. “But if we ever want to live up to our Fourth of July values, we’re going to have to elect a woman someday.”

Perhaps the most entrenched bias against a woman as president is the public’s inability to conceive of her as commander-in-chief of the most powerful military force in the world. For some Americans, the tension between the traditional views of women as soft, caring nurturers and the demands of the presidency, which may call for decisive military action, is too great.

But some analysts note that the military pressures upon the presidency have softened considerably with the conclusion of the Cold War. No longer does a president have to have had a distinguished military service record or one at all, apparently. In the first election after the Cold War, Bill Clinton became the first man elected president after World War II with no military service.

America’s reluctance to put a woman in charge appears all the more backward compared with the rest of the world’s democracies, critics say. More than 20 other democracies since World War II have made a woman their head of state. Those nations include Great Britain, Israel and India.

But political scientists say that those countries have parliamentary systems, in which it’s easier to rise to power than it is within the American system.

“In cases like England’s, I don’t see any great evidence that they’ve catapulted way beyond where U.S. women are,” Mandel says. “Structural issues played an important role for [Margaret] Thatcher.”

A good example of the difficulty of rising within the American political system may well be seen this election, analysts say. If Elizabeth Dole chooses to run, her toughest battle may be simply securing her party’s nomination, analysts say. Conservatives, who generally believe women should have a limited role in the workplace, wield great influence within the Republican Party and may be able to thwart Dole’s nomination.

A group called the White House Project has launched a nationwide campaign to fight these kinds of biases that prevent women from reaching the nation’s highest office. The nonpartisan organization’s main objective, as its name implies, is to see a woman elected president within 10 years.

“We want to hurry history,” said the group’s co-founder, Barbara Lee. “We want to move from the unimaginable to the impossible to the inevitable.”