Routine? Yes, except for one thing. All 18 appointees were women.

The appointments by Mayor Marina Khubesrian might have seemed like a small-town stroke for gender parity in representation. Before the appointments about one-third of all appointees on South Pasadena commissions had been women; after, slightly more than half of all commissioners were women, just like the population of the city itself.

But the move inspired critical media coverage and bizarre public grievance from a few men who cried discrimination because they lost appointments to commission jobs that offer headaches but no pay. The mayor later sought to de-escalate the situation by adding three men to her list of appointees.

I live in South Pasadena, and when this story first broke, I saw it as little more than local theater. But now I wonder if the directness of the South Pas approach to sex balance might hold a larger lesson for the Golden State. While California faces many hard-to-solve challenges, achieving true parity between women and men among our government representatives doesn’t have to be difficult.

It certainly shouldn’t require a dramatic gesture like the appointments of the mayor. In a state that prides itself on being progressive and democratic, such parity can and should be automatic, a legal requirement that is baked into our governing systems. And what better time than now—with the country about to celebrate the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in 2020—to make it so?

The approach would be simple for voluntary government boards or commissions: a 50-50 mandate. For paid gigs that make appointees public employees, it might require more extensive legal changes that make explicit that gender parity conforms with our state’s non-discrimination laws. Such mandates aren’t entirely new; they fit comfortably within California’s tradition of reserving certain seats on boards to serve certain constituencies, like the student representative on the University of California Board of Regents.

But gender parity shouldn’t stop merely with appointments. It should also apply to elected bodies. And here’s the good news: the changes necessary to guarantee a 50-50 male-female split among electeds would make California more democratic in ways that go well beyond gender balance.

In other democracies, there is a proven method for achieving equity in elected representation. It starts by adopting a common election system for modern democracies: proportional representation. In such systems, people vote not for a single person to represent a legislative district—the American style—but rather for party slates of candidates in districts with multiple elected representatives. Parties get a number of representatives roughly equal to their percentage of the vote.

The party slates make gender parity easily achievable. In countries that seek true balance, political parties are either legally required or heavily incentivized politically to offer slates with equal numbers of men and women. I personally saw this system at work in 2016 in the Basque Country, where Bakartxo Tejeria, the president of the Basque Parliament, explained how a mandate for male-female balance had broken her chamber’s male dominance and left the 75-member body with 40 women and 35 men.

Eight countries, most recently Greece and Ireland, have adopted such requirements for gender parity in party slates, and so have many local and regional governments. In another 15 European countries, parties have adopted gender quotas voluntarily. The results: huge increases in the number of women in office.

Proportional elections with party slates have other virtues that would benefit California because they eliminate the winner-take-all problem of our current system. When it comes to party affiliation, proportional elections produce more representative elected bodies, since a party’s share of representatives is directly tied to the actual number of votes each party receives. This also guarantees representation for political minorities. If such a system were established in California, Republicans in the Bay Area, for example, would have some small number of representatives in the state legislature, reflecting their percentage of the votes, rather than being shut out because the party loses every contest in the region’s current single-member districts.

Even better, party-based proportional representation elections could replace California’s non-partisan local elections, which attract scandalously low numbers of voters. Political scientists have shown that partisan elections inspire more media coverage and high voter turnout than non-partisan elections.

By this point, many readers may be screaming: You’re talking about quotas! Here are three answers to that objection.

First, our existing system, even with many private efforts to help women candidates, keeps producing male-dominated government bodies, including our legislature (70 percent men) and the Los Angeles City Council (where 13 out of 15 members are men).

Second, the arguments for gender parity are numerous and powerful: Women deserve to be represented in numbers equal to their percentage of the population, women bring different experiences and have different interests, and organizations with a critical mass of women decision-makers tend to perform better.

Third, gender quotas work in other fields in California. A 2018 state law requires every public company that is incorporated or based in California to have at least one woman board member by the end of this year. In 2021, the requirement will rise to three women board members. California is a leader in this; no other state has mandated female board representation.

Critics of that law, and of proposals like mine, often claim that such requirements violate the state constitution’s prohibitions against sex discrimination. Fine. Let the critics argue in court that policies of equal representation between men and women somehow violate principles of equality. And if they find judges foolish enough to agree with them, Californians could use the ballot initiative to change the constitution to permit gender parity measures.

Indeed, there would be gender justice in amending our famously long and dysfunctional constitution—or even rewriting it wholesale. After all, California’s governing document was framed in an 1879 convention that included 152 delegates, all men.

A modern convention, where at least half of the delegates are women, could surely do better.

The post Making the California Legislature 50 Percent Female Should Be Easy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But did either of these women, or a handful of other formidable females whose exploits were recorded by history, ever actually rule the world? That topic took center-stage before an overflow audience at a Zócalo/Getty panel discussion that roamed from pharaonic Egypt to the court of Queen Elizabeth I to the White House.

Moderated by Bettany Hughes, a historian and documentary filmmaker, the conversation drew on the expertise of UCLA archaeologist Kara Cooney, author of The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt, and University of Manchester Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley, author of Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt.

After confessing to her “enormous girl crush” on Cooney and Tyldesley for their exemplary scholarship, Hughes drove right into what she ironically called the “completely uncomplicated and uncontroversial question” of whether women, in fact, ever have ruled the world.

For feminists, the answer wasn’t encouraging.

“I don’t know,” Tyldesley replied. “It was always, I think, unusual for a woman to take a position of power.”

Cooney concurred definitively, “the answer is no.”

But even if there is “no mythical matriarchy to which we can return,” as one panelist put it, history offers some instructive examples of women who were able to take and hold power through a combination of brilliance, bravery, guile, beauty, gender-bending self-reinvention, and—perhaps most importantly—the ability to control and manipulate their own image.

In ancient times, as now, women seeking to rule had to contend with the constraints imposed by existing cultural traditions, political structures, patriarchal hierarchies, and male-driven religions. While earth-mother goddesses and fertility deities abounded in the ancient world, aspiring women rulers had to push back against spiritual systems dominated by male gods and male priestly castes. That may have been even truer under the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam than it was in pagan cultures. “Monotheism usually doesn’t do anybody any favors, particularly women,” Cooney observed.

Tyldesley cautioned that historians of the ancient world, like herself, must be very careful about making assumptions that often have to be based on fragmentary evidence and scraps of records.

But one powerful woman who history definitely shows to have been in charge was Hatshepsut, the fifth pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty of Egypt. This remarkable ruler helped establish trade networks and was a prolific builder of temples and other public works. An inscription on her tomb described her as “Mistress of Two Lands,” the type of homage that Egypt’s mightiest male potentates typically showered on themselves.

“In a way, it speaks to how the Egyptian culture allowed a female to take all those claims as her own and feminize them,” Cooney said.

Indeed, Tyldesley chimed in, the concept of “king” in ancient Egypt wasn’t necessarily gender-linked; it was quite possible for a woman to take on that role, although usually the title was bestowed on males. Over the course of her career and reign (circa 1478–1458 B.C.), Hatshepsut controlled her image in strategic ways that underscored the changing nature of her power.

To wit, early on, she was represented in a nubile, eroticized, traditionally feminine style. But as her reign progressed, she adopted a more masculine public persona and custom of dress. In one of her best-known images, a statue in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, she registers as an almost androgynous being; in other representations, she’s buff and muscled like a man.

Hatshepsut’s fluid style of self-representation was matched by her flexible style of power-wielding, Tyldesley suggested. Instead of subjugating conquered peoples to try to make them part of the Egyptian empire, she preferred to engage them through trade.

“I think if you’re a woman in the ancient world, Egypt is the place to be,” Tyldesley concluded.

Cooney agreed that it may have been easier for a woman to take power in Egypt, “an authoritarian, tightly controlled society” ruled by dynasty, as opposed to democratic Greece or republican Rome. Cooney drew a parallel to Hillary Clinton, speculating about whether we associate the former Secretary of State and one-time First Lady with dynastic power, rather than judging her on the basis of her own merits.

Taking up the point, Tyldesley noted that there are examples of ancient queens who temporarily filled in as rulers for husbands who had died or were away in battle. These women often ruled on behalf of their infant sons until their offspring were old enough to assume the throne, at which point their mothers stepped back from power.

Do women rule differently from men? It’s a question that haunts Cooney, who said that, although she wavers on an answer, “the older I get, the more I read, the more I live in Trump’s America, [I believe] that women do rule differently.”

Both today and throughout the centuries, powerful women often have aroused a deep ambivalence. Hughes noted that while a goddess like Venus is generally depicted as a creature of pure, unadulterated beauty and sensuality—fairly harmless, apart from her role in starting the Trojan War—some of Venus’s counterparts, like Isis, are represented in more complex ways. They’re fighters as well as lovers, “bringers of death as well as bringers of life.”

What’s more, Cooney said, there’s “a great disconnect” between the way that some societies worshipped man-eating, ferocious goddesses while remaining deeply sexist and segregated. “That fierceness, that PMS-ing b!$©h” quality is something that certain societies had to harness and tame, and put to use in more socially acceptable ways, like protecting the king.

Perhaps few rulers embody the contradictory demands placed on women more than Nefertiti, who appears to have followed a singular trajectory from queen to co-ruler to solo ruler. In the world’s imagination, she’s the glamorous woman immortalized in a famous bust that sits in a Berlin museum. But according to Tyldesley, “We don’t even know if she was beautiful. We have this one bust and from that, this whole mythology has developed.”

Similarly, much of what we think we know about Cleopatra—from her putative powers of seduction to the manner of her suicide—comes from the writings of Roman authors, filtered through the plays of Shakespeare. Another powerful woman whose name gets short shrift and whose remarkable deeds have been obscured by time is the 6th-century empress Theodora, a humble exotic dancer who became a powerful and revered ruler-reformer—a sort of Byzantine Eva Perón.

Although the evening was devoted to examining female rulers of the pre-Christian world, one audience member during the question period raised the example of Queen Elizabeth I. The panelists agreed that she should be on the list of the world’s 10 most powerful female rulers of all time. Another audience member proposed Margaret Thatcher, the long-serving British prime minister known as the “Iron Lady” for her take-no-prisoners economic policies and steely response to Argentina’s attempted takeover of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands in 1982.

Hughes replied that although Thatcher still divides Britain as deeply as Marmite, “she definitely taught me that women can be in power.”

“Whether you like her policies or not,” Tyldesley said that Mrs. T ensured that, “girls don’t grow up in England thinking, ‘I can’t be the prime minister.’”

But, in the end, it may not be possible to assess how much women like Thatcher, Clinton, and Angela Merkel owe to their ancient female political forebears.

“I think we’re missing a whole host of powerful women,” Tyldesley said, “simply because there wasn’t someone to write down what they do.”

The post Women Rocked the Ancient World—But Ruling It Was Harder appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Barry Kalb, who was covering the hearings for the Washington Star, contacted the lawyer representing the White House counsel. “I will never tell anybody where I got it,” Kalb pestered, “Have we got anybody on the list?”

The lawyer’s response was brief: “Mary McGrory.” Her name was last, highlighted with two stars and an asterisk.

The only things that usually get forgotten faster than yesterday’s newspapers are the people who wrote them. But McGrory, a trailblazing columnist first for the Washington Star and later the Washington Post, is a rare exception. I had the pleasure to know Mary during the 1990s, when I worked at the State Department, serving as an occasional source for her, and attending a few of her uproarious parties. Throughout her long career, she stuck it to politicians and other men in power with an innovative style and commitment to shoe-leather reporting. In the process, she shattered the inner sanctum of America’s cosseted opinion pages and pushed publishers to come to terms with a radical notion: that a woman could cover politics every bit as well as a man.

To understand why McGrory matters requires stepping back to when she broke into the business in the 1950s, a time when newspapers were still the dominant force in how the country thought about politics and the world. At the pinnacle of journalism stood a handful of men—and they were all men—astride the opinion and editorial pages of the major dailies. Their columns championed their pet causes and denounced what they viewed as wrongs. The influence of these self-appointed sages was enormous. Pundits like Walter Lippmann and Joseph Alsop at the New York Herald Tribune and James ‘Scotty’ Reston at the New York Times were syndicated in hundreds of papers across the country. They dined with presidents, and saw it as their duty to guide these leaders’ hands, holding sway over public opinion to a degree that is almost unfathomable today. At the same time, they adroitly trafficked in their roles as consummate insiders. Getting selective leaks and invitations to fashionable Georgetown parties often trumped the public’s right to know.

Washington Star promotional photo: Bettmann/Corbis

McGrory grew up in a lower middle-class suburb of Boston. Fascinated by journalism from an early age, she delighted in the comic strip Jane Arden, which detailed the exploits of a spunky fictional woman reporter. McGrory was the first in her family to graduate from college, and decided to become a reporter despite being told that this was an inappropriate career path for a “nice girl.” When she started as a columnist in the 1950s, getting married was widely seen as a fireable offense for a woman journalist, and women were banned from membership in the National Press Club.

The only reason she was able to break into covering politics (after long stretches in the book pages) was her sheer persistence. Her big breakthrough came when she was assigned to write columns for the Washington Star on the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. McGrory’s commentary rapidly became a national sensation because it was unflinching, irreverent, and funny. She went so far as to describe Army counsel Joseph Welch staring at Senator Joseph McCarthy “as a scientist might observe a new and unpredictable monster.” This was brave writing, at the height of the red scare when McCarthy destroyed the careers of scores of journalists and civil servants.

McGrory wrote about the foibles and hypocrisies of senators and presidents as comfortably—and as pointedly—as you might talk with your neighbors. A pair of members debated on the floor of Congress, “like two elderly polar bears negotiating the pas de deux from ‘Swan Lake.’” Efforts by a politician to restrain an underling were akin to “a small man trying to take a large dog for a walk.” Her friend and sometime-target Bobby Kennedy remarked, “Mary is so gentle—until she gets behind a typewriter.”

McGrory and Bobby Kennedy: Mary McGrory Papers/Library of Congress

McGrory was quick to realize that with the advent of television, print reporters needed to offer a more granular exploration of politics if they hoped to compete. Rather than opine from their offices like the pundits of the day, she formed her opinions first-hand in hearing rooms and on the campaign trail. She assiduously avoided unattributed quotes or “insider” leaks, and felt what the man (or woman) on the street had to say was often as important as the words of government officials with fancy titles.

McGrory became a fixture of American political life, and every president who rose to power during her career as a columnist came to know her prose well. Lyndon Johnson tried (unsuccessfully) to woo her, both romantically and professionally, but was left to lament, “Mary McGrory is the best writer in Washington, and she keeps getting better and better at my expense.” Nixon ordered the IRS to audit her tax returns three years running. The first President George Bush confided in his journal, “She has destroyed me over and over again.”

For good and bad, McGrory made personality central to understanding American politics. Her lack of objectivity would make a journalism professor blush. She viewed the world through a lens of absolute right and wrong that made her writing burn with passion, but was so unforgiving that it undermined some of her most important personal relationships. “When Mary McGrory gets pissed off,” Anna Quindlen of the New York Times observed, “she is more pissed off than anyone. I expect her column to catch fire around the edges.”

McGrory never claimed to be perfect. She was known not only to lose car keys, but also entire rental cars. Her garden was a widely celebrated failure, as was her cooking. Technology of all forms baffled her. Her romantic life was disjointed, disappointing, and hidden from all those around her.

But no shortcomings diminished her mark on political journalism, which she made over five decades and 12 presidential campaigns. She authored more than 8,000 columns and won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1975, becoming the first woman to do so. Her work was syndicated in close to 200 papers across the country. Up to her death in 2004, following a stroke in the newsroom a year earlier, her long virtuoso performance was instrumental in felling barrier after barrier to women in journalism.

McGrory at Watergate Hearings: Mary McGrory Papers/Library of Congress

Without McGrory, coverage of American political life would be far less rich. She was willing to speak truth to power, even when it ensured that criticism would rain down upon her, from the McCarthy hearings to after September 11. Today, in a campaign season some have taken to calling a “post-truth election,” that is an example reporters would do well to emulate.

The post How One of Nixon’s Greatest Critics Changed Journalism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Molina, now 66, has made history before. She first burst onto the political scene in 1982 by upsetting the candidate of a powerful male-dominated Eastside machine for a seat on the California State Assembly. Through that victory in her first run for office, she became the very first Latina elected to the California Assembly.

Since then, she has amassed a long unbeaten streak in campaigns. In the process, she became the first Latina elected to the Los Angeles City Council in 1987 and to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in 1991, a post she held for 23 years.

Those victories revealed not only her political talent, but something also about the cross-currents that shape the places she has represented: the unincorporated territory known as East Los Angeles, adjacent communities in Northeast and Southeast Los Angeles, and the west San Gabriel Valley. Communities in these areas are often dismissed as poor and monolithic, where statistics reveal high unemployment and underperforming schools. Molina, as a product of two movements (women’s and Chicano), spoke to the aspirations of these communities that, while once seen as existing on the margins, have come to represent an authentic heart of L.A.

Molina’s career trajectory also reflected not only political but also social progress in L.A. In her 1982 race for the Assembly, she beat the Eastside machine by defeating Richard Polanco, a strong candidate later elected to the Assembly, with backing from powerful political players such as Richard Alatorre and Art Torres, as well as Eastside power broker Lou Moret. After five years, she left the Assembly to run for an open seat on the Los Angeles City Council, once again dispatching the Eastside machine with her victory over Larry Gonzalez, a then trustee of the Los Angeles Unified School Board.

That victory, like her 1991 election to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, was made possible and fueled by the federal Voting Rights Act. The U.S. Department of Justice and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) filed suit against the City in 1985 and the County in 1988 charging that redrawn political district lines had diluted and fractured Latin voting strength. The districts she won were both newly created, Latino-majority districts drawn in response to the litigation.

The nature of her victory–against the machine and the establishment–shaped Molina and her reputation as a giant killer, machine buster, vibrant force for women, and finally as a carrier of grudges. On this last point, she came to be widely perceived as having a pointed, harsh, frequently unfriendly and sometimes vindictive governing style.

One of the most significant facts of political life for the past two decades in Los Angeles was that Molina and organized labor did not get along. Labor, after all, had heavily supported Art Torres. Molina never forgave nor forgot, providing a frequent third vote for much of her tenure against various labor concerns and demands. A Democrat, Molina grew ideologically moderate-to-conservative during her time on the board. Labor leaders, while not regretting having supported Torres, were clearly dismayed that Molina chose not to understand why labor had supported Torres, a long and trusted ally of the house of labor.

Her final act–deciding to challenge the 14th District City Council incumbent councilman José Huizar in the March 2015 city elections–stunned many people who had expected her to retire from politics after 32 years. But given her history, maybe this should not have been so stunning. While some have pointed out how hard it is for elected officials to give up power, she has said she still has fire in the belly. History has proven that she certainly loves to beat the odds.

And her timing might be right. L.A. has very few female political officeholders these days. On the City Council, only one of the 15 seats is held by a woman, Nury Martinez.

But there are risks to her legacy in making another run for political office. The concern of many–including those who have long supported her–is that if she loses, she will no longer be remembered just as a political giant slayer and role model for women of color. She could go down, as well, as someone who should have quit while on top and made room for the next generation of candidates and officeholders.

The post Can Gloria Molina Still Slay Giants? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One way to answer that question is by examining the story of the greatest woman ever to rule in the ancient world: an Egyptian pharaoh who serves as model and cautionary tale for today’s female politicians.

Hatshepsut understood the obstacles in her path. In Egypt in the 15th century B.C., women were considered sexual companions and the carriers of men’s seed, not rulers. But Hatshepsut found her way to the throne of the richest and most powerful state in the ancient world. Yet few today even know her name, much less how to pronounce it (Hat-shep-soot, if you’re wondering).

A mere 25 years after her death, ruling elites had her statues smashed into bits. We only know about her today because, while those long-ago revisionists chiseled away at the first layers of her Temple of Millions of Years at Deir el Bahari, her detractors kept most of the sacred structure intact and left outlines of her inscriptions and figures readily visible. Archeologists first pieced back together the fragments of statues thrown into pits in the sand in the 1920s and 1930s, but their reconstructions didn’t always make sense to me.

I wrote my book about Hatshepsut, The Woman Who Would Be King, after the birth of my son, beginning it in the darkest hours between nursing and diaper changes. Motherhood made me realize, as I never had before, how trapped women are by our bodies, our ability to reproduce and nurse, the oxytocin that compels us to nurture and bond.

Hatshepsut must have felt the same kind of entrapment after she gave birth to the child of her half-brother, the king, while still in her early teens. That child (named Nefrure) was a girl, not the son for whom her people had so fervently hoped. But in the end, Hatshepsut’s lack of a son laid the foundation for the rest of her strange and charmed life.

Hatshepsut’s husband passed away after only three years of rule, when Hatshepsut was very young, perhaps about 16. At the time, the next in line to be king of Egypt was a mere infant–not her own baby, but a baby belonging to one of her husband’s second-class wives, one of the many beauties in the harem.

Hatshepsut had the power to fill this vacuum. Her bloodline was impeccable, reaching back to the kings of the earlier 18th Dynasty. She had an education, likely begun in early childhood and probably led by the highest-ranking dowager queen, the High Priest of Amen, and her own father, himself a king. Not only was she the highest-ranking royal wife, but also she was Egypt’s most powerful priestess, known as the God’s Wife of Amen, with lands and officials of her own.

Hatshepsut made sure the young king–that infant son of a lesser wife–was cared for, educated, brought up in the temple mysteries, and trained in the military arts. But since he was still too small to fill the role of king, Hatshepsut took charge and acted as regent.

So it was Hatshepsut who gave the vizier–the king’s second-in-command–orders about trading ventures to the land of Punt, who discussed treasury matters with her royal steward, and who put down insurrections in Kerma (in modern-day Sudan). She even personally oversaw the collection of the spoils of war, according to a tomb inscription written by her overseer of the treasury.

Then, for reasons that were not recorded, Hatshepsut was given–or decided she needed–more. When the young King Thutmose III was just 8 or 9, Hatshepsut was crowned king alongside him, with, as far as we can see, the full support of her courtiers, Egypt’s elite families, and its powerful temple priesthoods. For the rest of the reign, Hatshepsut took the lead: In reliefs, she is always shown first. Hatshepsut became a king, because ancient Egypt had no word for a female ruler.

She won this prize because she was the most able person for the job and understood the complex relationships among all the players. Hatshepsut also built a strong cohort of supporters: men whose continued prosperity depended on her power. Chief among them was a financier named Senenmut, in charge of palace and temple treasuries. All the income–lands, gold, oils, wine, perfumed ointments–of these two great institutions was under his control. Many historians cannot help but suggest that she had an affair with Senenmut to maintain her power. But no real evidence of an affair exists, and Senenmut was not Hatshepsut’s only avenue to power.

When Thutmose III was approaching his 16th year, she tried another unprecedented strategy to retain power. In statuary, in reliefs, maybe even in rituals before her elites and populace, she took on the appearance of a man. She bound her breasts; she wore a masculine kilt; she tied on the long beard of kings; she wore a bull’s tail down her back to take on the powers of the most important of the sacred animals of ancient Egypt. She was ostensibly past childbearing years, which meant that she would never bear her own heir to the throne, and her co-king was quickly becoming a man. She had to stay ahead of him.

Historians have given many explanations for Hatshepsut’s power plays: an unreasonable greed and lust for influence being chief among them. In many history books written by 19th- and 20th-century Egyptologists, she was cast as a witch who cruelly usurped the rightful king’s throne before he was old enough to do anything about it. But an analysis of the political forces at play suggests a different story; there is no sign that the ruling elites sought to remove her and she never sought to oust her young co-king.

She actually helped Thutmose III’s position by keeping him by her side. She taught him the kingly arts by example, demonstrating how to cultivate a professional group of bureaucrats to manage her country’s wealth, create jobs, and commission monuments. Thutmose III accompanied her on campaigns to Kush, presumably participating in the battles, the dispatch of enemies and the taking of spoils. The investment paid off: Thutmose III became the greatest warrior king Egypt had ever seen.

Her success in keeping Egypt rich and powerful likely explains why we have forgotten her. Men wanted to claim her successes after her rule. Her reign became troublesome as Thutmose III was grooming his chosen son to be next in line. It is even possible that a child of Nefrure’s–a higher-born offspring–was a threat to Thutmose III’s chosen heir, or that Nefrure herself was creating her own avenues of authority. Divine kingship is a tricky thing, and the possibility of another woman taking the throne was a complication he decided to erase. So down went the statues and the first layer of the temple reliefs.

We’ve come a long way since the 15th century B.C., but what’s interesting is how much remains the same.

Like Hatshepsut, Hillary Clinton has a golden political pedigree and a carefully cultivated network of supporters within the Democratic Party. She served capably as secretary of state, one of our country’s most visible roles. But, as a possible contender for the presidency in 2016, she is still often regarded with suspicion, if not outright hostility. Some claim she overstepped her bounds when she took on healthcare reform as first lady; others can’t help but criticize her pantsuits, “shrill” voice, and hair-styling. There’s a friction when a woman tries to step into a role that before her was always played by a man.

The post Why Don’t Women Rule the World? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This is what America was like before the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The women’s liberation movement changed women’s lives socially, economically, and politically. It was described as “the revolution that will affect everybody” on the September 4, 1970, cover of Life magazine. And it did. So why do I always get the same question from younger audience members at screenings of my independent documentary, Feminist: Stories from Women’s Liberation: “Why didn’t I know about this?”

The first time I got the question was in a letter from a first-year college student who had watched the film in her classroom. The information in the film was new to her, and she wrote that it made her angry that she didn’t know this history.

I began making my film, Feminist, in 2004 as a straightforward documentary about historical facts, but I learned so much that I finished the film a different person. My feminism strengthened to the point where I can easily talk with people who reject the term feminism because the facts of the movement are within reach for me, and I can share the reasons why feminism changed our country for the better. I understand now that not remembering this movement preserves a male view of American history that values male leaders of history over female ones.

Ten years ago, a co-worker at my film-editing job at Technicolor whispered to me: “Are you a feminist?” She was putting distance between herself and the word—something I had observed other women do over the decades. I reached into my memory for images and quotes to help explain why I was a feminist, and I couldn’t grasp any.

I knew I had positive feelings toward feminism. My family had discussions about women’s movements at the dinner table. When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I lived in Little Five Points in Atlanta, the area where the political activists, gay women and men, filmmakers, theater people, and feminists lived, and I was immersed in the counterculture of that time. I even volunteered at the feminist bookstore Charis Books and More.

At the time I had the discussion with my co-worker, there were no documentary films about the entirety of the women’s movement, so I decided to make my own. (Many years after I started the project, PBS, in partnership with AOL, aired a series on the women’s liberation movement in 2013.) My film is an independent film born out of a need to tell a story that hadn’t been told. My budget was 90 percent financed by me.

One of the things I realized in making this film was that the movement does not figure prominently in history textbooks. My daughter’s fourth-grade textbook, History-Social Science, California Studies (Houghton Mifflin) includes a six-page chapter, “A Call for Equality,” that covers the years 1960 to 1975. There is a discussion of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Civil Rights Act, and Cesar Chavez. Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers, is only mentioned briefly. There is just one sentence about the women’s liberation movement: “Women also spoke out against unequal treatment in the 1960s.” The message to students: You don’t need to remember these women.

That message is also conveyed in our public memorials, where we don’t honor the women of the women’s movement. Only nine of the 100 statues in National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol building are of women. Not one of them is a woman from the women’s liberation movement. I have never seen a park or an elementary school named for a feminist from that time. Moreover, there is not even one federal holiday in the United States named for a woman.

When I started the film, I figured we don’t celebrate the women’s movement as we do other social movements because it was too complex—encompassing issues of class, religion, race, and language, among others. The feminists of the 1960s and ’70s also prided themselves on not having leaders: Every woman had a voice in the movement. I thought it might be hard to pull out individual successes to honor. But I was wrong: As I worked on the film, I discovered many concrete successes—including ones that weren’t included in textbooks or honored in public memorials.

Here’s one: the annihilation of segregated employment listings in newspaper—the “Female Help Wanted” and “Male Help Wanted” sections—in 1973.

Then there’s Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, which gave a name to the discontent of middle-class housewives and the rigid social roles they were pressured to fulfill. She and others went on to create the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, which differed from other women’s organizations of the time because it took political positions.

I learned about other heroes of the movement, like Aileen Hernandez, the first female commissioner for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Her relentless work to include gender discrimination in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act led to the founding of NOW. She was joined in that contentious fight by Pauli Murray, whose insight and actions helped to propel the women’s movement forward. Murray also helped write NOW’s mission statement.

My film also explores an important day in women’s history: August 26. In 1920, it was the day that women’s right to vote became law, and, in 1970, NOW organized the Women’s Strike for Equality on August 26. Many worried about a low turnout, yet there were 50,000 people in attendance. In 1971, a joint resolution requested by Congresswoman Bella Abzug made August 26 “Women’s Equality Day”—a commemorative day, not a federal holiday.

The feminists of the women’s liberation movement—who considered themselves second-wave feminists following in the footsteps of the suffragists—saw that women’s history was a necessary part of their movement.

When they marched in 1968 to protest the Miss America Pageant, they held posters with images of 19th-century suffragists, like Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth that read: “Our Heroines.” The stories of these early feminists were minimal in textbooks of the time, even though suffragists were very disruptive—they were arrested, jailed, and force-fed when they went on hunger strikes. When I interviewed feminist Sheila Tobias for my film, she told me: “One of the great travesties of growing up in the ’50s was not knowing about women’s history except for a brief moment in time in which there was suffrage.”

By the 1970s, feminists were trying to correct the historical record to include women’s history. They began women’s studies programs in universities and instituted Women’s History Month in March.

It’s important to note that the feminists made up the women’s liberation movement as they went along—there was no guidebook. No one had protested these ideas before—including the fact that a recorded history that focuses on men alone helps to maintain an unequal society.

And now we have problems with our cultural memory of the women’s liberation movement. I think our failure to honor the movement is rooted in our conflicted feelings about women as major players in American history.

The way we remember the Miss America Pageant protest in 1968 in Atlantic City, New Jersey is a good example. There is no statue on the Atlantic City Boardwalk to commemorate an important protest about standards of beauty for women and a contest tied into capitalism, war, and race. Instead, our cultural touchstone from that day is the negative and trite association of feminists as “bra-burners.”

Bras were just one of the items protestors were encouraged to bring that day that signified how the male-dominated culture was keeping women locked into rigid ideas of beauty, but they weren’t burned. Starting a fire on the boardwalk was illegal, so protestors opted to throw Playboy magazines and other items in a “freedom trash can.” Still, the bra-burning image remained—a symbol that was easy to belittle as women focusing on something trivial. Misinformation and myths sometimes serve as placeholders in our memory when facts are not remembered.

I consider myself a person who actively fights for women’s reproductive rights, and many would expect that my partisan walls would harden after making the film, but they actually softened. I was surprised to find out there were many conservative women who were feminists during the women’s movement: One of the artifacts I collected during the making of my film is a badge that reads: “GOP for ERA” (the controversial Equal Rights Amendment). I now listen to women who have different political opinions than I do about very controversial topics such as reproductive rights.

Recently, two conservative women who are actively anti-abortion—whom I might have gotten into pointed arguments with in other circumstances—came to a screening of my film. At the end of the film, I asked who would consider themselves feminists. One raised her hand. The other pinned on the button I gave audience members that read, “Proud to be a Feminist.”

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Conservatism took root among the white, educated women who landed in the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys with their professional or corporate spouses after World War II. As these men and women’s fortunes rose with the postwar economic boom, many of them connected with the new conservative intellectuals on the coasts who denounced welfare liberalism. They excitedly read the National Review after its release in 1955 and listened to the radio addresses of the libertarian Christian preacher, James Fifield, who spun individualist ideals from the Bible during broadcasts from his downtown Los Angeles ministry.

Though not necessarily more passionate about their conservatism than the men, the excitement of the women of the ’50s came from how they viewed their role as community volunteers. These were women who could not serenely carry on with their everyday business because they believed communists were taking over the country before their very eyes–and it was their duty to help stop them. They began opening bookstores in their communities to teach the public, as they saw it, about how the big government and political “subversives” threatened freedom. The metropolitan region sprouted, by my count, 36 different conservative bookstores to disseminate the volumes of literature that these women had been circulating amongst themselves for years.

Poor Richard’s Book Shop, the first, opened its doors at Hollywood and Vine in May 1960. Operating out of a family-run insurance agency, owners Frank and Florence Ranuzzi built a thriving walk-in and mail-order business. Frank ran the agency while Florence ran the non-profit bookstore. Shelves displayed thin paperback guides to communist history, philosophy, and tactics that walked readers through Marx, Hegel, Lenin, Chinese “brainwashing” techniques, and front groups. Ex-spy memoirs proved so popular as to constitute their own genre. Shoppers could choose from titles like Witness by the famous Alger Hiss antagonist Whittaker Chambers and The Big Decision by Matt Cvetic, who infiltrated a Pittsburgh unit of the Communist Party for the FBI.

Poor Richard’s became a political headquarters for the conservative movement, where the Ranuzzis and their friends produced bumper stickers, printed leaflets, and organized protests. Florence Ranuzzi also presided over lively discussions, which, according to her daughter, gave Poor Richard’s the feeling of a conservative “salon.” Men, women, and teenagers would drop in on Saturdays to sit around a big captain’s table and hear Ranuzzi give talks about communism.

There were other bookstore hotbeds. The South Pasadena Americanism Center opened shortly after Poor Richard’s in 1961. Founder Jane Crosby, a leader of the John Birch Society, envisioned the non-profit store as an outlet for the knowledge and materials that she and her friends had been acquiring through their studies of communism over the years. “We have been lending books back and forth between ourselves so we can become informed,” she explained to the Los Angeles Herald Express. “Now we want to come out from behind the bushes and get right out on the main street.”

Crosby and her team of housewives developed the atmosphere of the South Pasadena Americanism Center with care. Shelves of books stood amidst a robust patriotic décor of gold-toned walls and curtains dotted with liberty bells. The visitor could scan literature by category: Education, American Principles, Economics, United Nations, Communist Techniques–making it easy to locate Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative, J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit, or Verna M. Hall’s Christian History of the Constitution. The John Birch Society’s American Opinion Magazine could be purchased as well. The furniture encouraged customers to do more than buy. With a big round oak table and comfortable rocking chair, the Americanism Center made it easy for shoppers to sit, read, and talk with salespeople about the materials.

Just as coffeehouses and student unions served as the public spaces of the new left, patriotic bookstores became nerve centers of the emerging Los Angeles right. Although men and women shopped in these stores, women ran most of these establishments. To many curious Southern Californians who wandered in, these proprietors represented their most direct human encounters with the conservative movement. The women volunteers not only stocked the shelves and worked the register but also made reading suggestions and answered questions both in person and over the phone. Their friendly demeanor contrasted sharply with the tone represented in much of the material they sold.

The Americanism Center, like Poor Richard’s, functioned as a political community center. People could register to vote there, and the events calendar announced lectures, luncheons, workshops, and meetings. On the counter sat petitions for patrons to sign and postings of groups and political candidates in need of phone-callers and envelope-stuffers. Conservatives in Los Angeles also came to rely on the South Pasadena store as a support center and hotline–all they had to do was dial through to the red, white, and blue phone at SY.9-1776.

In 1962, one concerned woman called because she realized that a tennis ball she purchased at Bullock’s was made in Czechoslovakia. The Americanism Center volunteer she spoke with assisted her by sending along a copy of the Shopper’s Guide to Communist Imports. Another caller reported that her conservative views had recently cost her a job she had held for 17 years. She was desperate for work and hoping that someone at the center might help find an employer friendlier to her political outlook. In 1963, the popular anti-communist lecturer Florence Fowler Lyons called from Presbyterian Hospital, where an ambulance had taken her. She just needed to talk … after collapsing with grief upon the death of her cat.

What happened to the bookstores and these women? They failed to last into the 1970s, primarily for the same reason that most non-profits and “movement” bookstores do–they rely on the time, energy, and money of a small group of people who cannot sustain the energy and momentum. Times also changed. When the immediate threat of communism lost its potency, the housewives moved on to other causes.

But the L.A. women and their bookstores left a mark. Today, conservative booksellers, driven more by ideology than profits, thrive online. And Republicans now produce candidates–like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann–who resemble the old booksellers in perspective, style–and fervor.

Buy the book: Skylight, Amazon, Powell’s.

Michelle Nickerson is assistant professor of history at Loyola University, Chicago and author of Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right, from which this article is adapted. She speaks to the Huntington-USC Institute on California & the West at the Huntington Library on September 7 at 12 p.m.

*Photo courtesy of Michelle Nickerson.

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