Activist’s Goal: Our Chief Being Addressed as Mrs. President

Barbie for president?

Why not? She’s been a surgeon. An astronaut. A professional basketball player. Can’t you envision her as commander in chief?

Marie C. Wilson can.

What’s more, she’s determined to make it happen.

A feminist activist with a flair for reaching the masses, Wilson has launched a $3-million education initiative to prepare us to elect a female president. She doesn’t have a particular candidate in mind, you understand. Hers is a generic campaign to warm us to the idea.

That’s why Wilson is pressuring Mattel to make a President Barbie. (With or without First Husband Ken.)

Anything to get people thinking her way. “I’m a missionary,” she says.

Intense and informal, Wilson, a 58-year-old mother of five, has not grabbed much attention outside her small community of activists. Her agenda, however, has.

About 15 million Americans participate each year in Take Our Daughters to Work Day. Wilson created it. Her campaign for a female president, dubbed the White House Project, recently made the cover of Parade magazine--circulation 37 million. And a mock election last fall to showcase female leaders drew 100,000 voters. Again, the idea was Wilson’s.

And she’s just getting started.

This Is Not About Elizabeth Dole

Projecting a 10-year White House campaign, Wilson talks of holding town hall forums on women’s leadership, of conducting another mock election, of sending teams to Iowa and New Hampshire to plug potential female candidates at every turn.

This isn’t about Elizabeth Hanford Dole in 2000. It’s about promoting women as leaders, then promoting them some more, until several women are making serious runs in every presidential election.

“Feminism,” Wilson says, “is about changing the world.”

The White House Project has drawn praise from several prominent women. Former vice presidential candidate Geraldine A. Ferraro, for one, calls it “a great project,” vital to pushing more women into power. Critics, however, suspect the project’s millions could be better spent helping women in crisis or electing lawmakers with abortion rights agendas. “If I had those resources . . . “ one feminist activist muses. “Maybe I just don’t get it.”

Wilson fends off such critiques by taking the long view. If the White House Project succeeds, she reasons, we’ll soon have our pick of female candidates. We can worry then about electing the one who will do best by women. For now, however, she insists that the project remain nonpartisan. She wants women in the ring, no matter their views.

“You wouldn’t say ‘Vote for X because he’s a man,’ ” counters Patricia Schroeder, the former congresswoman who considered a run for the White House in 1988. “It looks silly.”

If she had money for a public education campaign, Schroeder says, she would focus on female military leaders to prove a woman could excel as commander in chief. “To me,” she says, “that makes a whole lot more change than a [President Barbie would].”

Wilson doesn’t talk much about the military. Instead, she argues--and this theme, too, makes some feminists queasy--that our country is ripe for female leadership because “women’s issues,” such as health care and education, top our national agenda.

“So what if we get stereotyped?” she asks. “We’ve been leading on these issues, so why not claim them proudly?” (That’s all well and good, retorts feminist leader Eleanor Smeal, who supports the White House Project, but let’s not forget that Secretary of State “Madeleine Albright has shown we can do damn good in foreign policy, too.”)

Issues aside, Wilson takes comfort from a recent poll that found 76% of Americans willing to support a female president--up from 4% in the 1960s. But consider the flip side of that statistic. Lynn Martin, a Cabinet secretary in the Bush administration who once considered her own White House bid, put it this way: “If, before you even get to party issues, more than 20% won’t support you, that’s a hard block to overcome.”

Wilson feels sure women will soon surmount such obstacles.

Her supporters feel equally certain that if anyone can help smooth the path, she can.

“She has the most incredible combination of vision and pragmatism I’ve ever seen,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake says. A 90-year-old friend, Louise Noun, adds: “She thinks of these things that seem pie in the sky and before you know it, they’ve taken hold.”

Wilson’s resume reflects her idealism and her love of hands-on work. A civil rights activist from her youth in Georgia, she has taught preschool, served on the Des Moines City Council and established a university office in Iowa to help stay-at-home moms join the work force. For the last 15 years, she has led the Ms. Foundation for Women, distributing $2.5 million in grants each year to groups that help women and girls.

Her most visible triumph has been Take Our Daughters to Work Day. Designed to help girls stay upbeat about life’s possibilities as they enter adolescence, the event has bloomed into a national phenomenon. Wilson clearly cherishes the success.

The White House Project’s unofficial mascot, in fact, is a 9-year-old sparkplug named Alexandra, who visited the Capitol with her mother on Daughters Day, and was amazed to learn no woman had ever been president. She figured she might as well be the first. “Every day in school I work hard to become president,” Alexandra wrote Wilson not long ago. “When I get sworn in, if my grandpa isn’t alive, I want you to hold the Bible.”

Seeking support for the White House Project at a recent fund-raising party, Wilson read that letter aloud, grinning. Then she turned serious, urging women to remember their own girlhood dreams--and to consider how gender bias had crimped them. “What are the songs we have stopped singing?” she asked.

The pitch seems to work. The White House Project has raised most of the $3 million budgeted for the next two years, including $500,000 from Boston philanthropist Barbara Lee, who founded the campaign along with Wilson and Harvard scholar Laura Liswood.

It’s Time to ‘Hurry History’

So far, their most splashy initiative has been the mock election. A panel of scholars chose 20 female super-achievers from diverse fields. Wilson’s group then circulated their biographies in “ballots” posted on the Internet and printed in magazines. Voters were asked to choose five women with “the potential to lead our nation.”

Four of the winners were well-known: First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Dole, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman. But the other top vote-getters were relative no-names: Gen. Claudia Kennedy, the Army’s first three-star female general; Ann Fudge, the president of Maxwell House; and Dr. Mae C. Jemison, an astronaut, physician and engineer.

Dole may be the only one on the ballot to aim at the presidency. Still, Wilson thinks touting other accomplished women will help voters embrace the idea of Madam President. After all, if Steve Forbes can be taken seriously, why not Ann Fudge?

“Nice, but naive,” political analyst Stephen Hess responds. “What puts a woman in the White House,” he says, “is getting her elected to the Senate or a governor’s mansion.”

Wilson supports this more traditional approach. She just thinks it’s taking way too long. Only 20% of elected officials nationwide are women. Just three states have female governors. There are but nine female senators. It’s time, she says, to “hurry history.”

So she plans to keep pushing for that President Barbie.

“We’re trying to infiltrate all of pop culture with images of women in leadership,” Wilson says. “If you can get to 8-year-olds as they’re molding their systems of belief, in 10 years, they’ll be ready to vote.”