Gender and the American Presidency.

Kenski, Kate

Gender and the American Presidency. By Theodore F. Sheckels, Nichola D. Gutgold, and Diana B. Carlin. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. 192 pages.

Senator Hillary Clinton's competitive campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Governor Sarah Palin's selection as the Republican vice presidential candidate in the same year, and the wins by women in U.S. Senate races that brought the 113th Congress to a record level of 20 women now serving in the Senate have once again brought to the fore questions about women and the American presidency. The U.S. has yet to elect a woman president. In only two elections--1984 and 2008--have women even been on presidential tickets as vice presidential running mates. While progress has been made over the last one hundred years in women's political rights generally, the nation has not reached gender parity in elective representation. In their timely book, Gender and the American Presidency, Theodore F. Sheckels, Nichola D. Gutgold, and Diana B. Carlin examine the biographies and rhetoric of nine prominent, modern-day women to ask a fitting question: "Why not Madam President?" (p. viii).

The book's approach is an inductive look at why prominent women have not been given the nod for the presidency and/or presidential tickets. "We chose to proceed as we did based on a hunch that the stories, if told without the lens of current theories about gender and politics firmly in place, might point to some new or differently-cast hypotheses," state the authors (p. viii). After a brief overview of the project, the book presents one chapter for each of the women the authors selected: Nancy Landon Kassebaum, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Mikulski, Elizabeth Hanford Dole, Nancy Pelosi, Olympia Snowe, Christine Gregoire, Kathleen Gilligan Sebelius, and Linda Lingle. In each chapter, the authors lay out short biographies explaining how these women came to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Senate, or governorship of their states. The authors then examine each woman's rhetorical style before speculating on why each woman was never chosen for higher office. The book ends with a chapter offering 11 maxims suggesting why a woman has yet to be nominated by her party, let alone to win the presidency.

The title of the book should have, perhaps, been Women and the American Presidency rather than Gender and the American Presidency, as it does not examine the backgrounds and rhetoric of high-profile males. The word "gender" implies comparison, which is not the approach here. Rather, Sheckels, Gutgold, and Carlin chose to focus on women only. One limitation of this approach is that any allusions to the women featured in the book as being affected because of gender are speculative. Of the 11 maxims suggested in their conclusion, all but two observations seemingly would apply to both female and male candidates. Their maxims regarding foreign affairs experience, raising money, being dynamic but not overly aggressive, being attractive and looking the part of president, possessing rhetorical finesse, and not being a centrist apply to male candidates as well. It is true that the gender of a candidate might differentially affect these maxims. Yet without the stories of male counterparts on which to pivot, one cannot sufficiently gauge questions about the extent to which gender matters for each maxim. Some researchers, such as Erika Falk in her book Women for President: Media Bias in Nine Campaigns (2nd ed., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), use a paired comparison approach that matches visible female politicians with male politicians whose profiles are similar and then employ rhetorical and/or content analyses to illustrate gender differences. For those wanting to argue that the research suggests that it is the quality of being female that has resulted in lower levels of elective success, a comparison to similar male candidates is in order--a limitation of this book.

There are, however, two observations in Gender and the American Presidency that are primarily, if not exclusively, gender concerns. The authors note that women have to demonstrate independence from their husbands, as Elizabeth Dole had to do when she ran for the Republican nomination in 2000 and asked her husband, Bob Dole, to scale back his campaign involvement. Men, on the other hand, are presumed to be independent and thus can freely utilize their wives as campaign resources, which is an important observation. The authors also point out that female candidates cannot assume that their gender struggles will resonate with female citizens, who might not have experienced comparable gender constraints, especially in the younger generations. These observations are significant and certainly worthy of further exploration by scholars.

Gender and the American Presidency's strength is that it presents a diverse set of biographies that are compelling to read. Each chapter is written succinctly and is well organized. The women selected for inclusion in the book come from different parts of the country, have served in the political sphere in different ways, and represent both parties (five are Democrats; four are Republicans). Sheckels, Gutgold, and Carlin's work thus would make a useful addition to gender and politics courses for undergraduates, in particular. Instructors could use the nine anecdotes to ground theoretical discussions about the causes for women's lack of presence in high levels of elective office. In this spirit, the book continues to ask important questions about women and elective office that have yet to be resolved in the academic literature or in real life.

--Kate Kenski

University of Arizona