If not Michelle, how about Jill?

Thoughts on leadership and women's paths to power

I’ve only heard one person suggest replacing Joe Biden on the ballot with Jill Biden, joking “then they wouldn’t have to change the name.” But I keep hearing laments about Michelle Obama’s lack of interest in trying to become President of the United States. “She’d be great.” “Too bad she doesn’t want the job.”

At first I thought this too was a joke. But it seems that the expectation that a wife should be poised to step into her great-man husband’s shoes when he is unable to continue - in Barack Obama’s case, because he couldn’t run for a 3rd term as president - is common.¹

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Hillary Clinton, after all, was rewarded with a chance at the presidency. But it has to be said that she did the work of campaigning in her own name, and served as senator and then as secretary of state. When she was the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, she came to the job with political experience of her own.

In her first foray as a candidate, she called herself Hillary Rodham Clinton, but the Rodham was soon dropped. It was the Clinton brand that gave her the boost she needed, and conveyed the message that there would be an ex-president at her side and behind the scenes. After the Indiana primary vote in 2016, she was referred to by an MSNBC reporter as “the former first lady” rather than as former secretary of state.

Photo by Nicola Styles on Unsplash

Today’s enthusiasts for Michelle Obama are calculating that her name, celebrity, and likability would be backed up by someone who actually knows the job.

In that case, why not Dr Jill? She must already know a lot about domestic issues and foreign policy, right? She could study at night and get coaching and surround herself with the right staff. President Joe Biden has vast experience. What a fine counselor and support he could be.

There are lots of women politicians who have succeeded on their own, including the current vice president. But it seems that a woman whose prominence is the result of marriage to a Great Man has appeal even to liberal feminists. If not Michelle, why not Jill? Perhaps you think it could work?

I don’t. Such proposals just remind me of House of Cards and Evita, and tell me that we haven’t really grasped what leadership requires, and means.

Here are a couple of relevant passages from a chapter “Leading from the Fringes: Women’s Paths to Political Power” (or full PDF) that I wrote for the book Women and Leadership (and, yes, we put Michelle Obama on the cover):

A common English-language expression is that “behind every great man there’s a woman.” The British writer Edna Healey (1918–2010), herself the wife of a well-known politician, Denis Healey, wrote a biography of the wives of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and David Livingstone, exploring the price women pay for loving a man with driving ambition or a sense of vocation that transcends ordinary concerns such as supporting a family or even being at home from one year to the next. Her own marriage, she wrote, was a perfect partnership, and her own ambition was satisfied by being a help-meet to her husband.

The idea of the “power couple”—an intimate partnership that pairs two people’s strengths and weaknesses and enables one partner, and the couple, to achieve things he or she could not have achieved alone—goes back through the ages. There are numerous accounts of weak or sickly leaders bolstered by strong mothers, wives, or lovers. An 1885 collection of biographies entitled Queenly Women, Crowned and Uncrowned, explains that “Josephine was exactly the partner [Napoleon] needed. Her courtly magnificence, her urbanity of manner, and her fascinating talents contributed scarcely less than his victories to the advancement of her husband.”

Mothers have been even more important, and influential, than wives or other sexual partners. The mothers of kings or prospective kings have exercised both official and unofficial power, generally to benefit their sons but occasionally not. Irene (c. 752–803), mother of the Byzantium Constantine VI, “decided that her only child, Constantine VI, was not competent to rule . . . She had him blinded and then ruled in her own right.”

The classic pattern was a beautiful or sexually attractive woman who used her personal attributes to attract or “catch” a man and thus to rise in the world, first by obtaining wealth and status but then by exerting power through her husband. Such women have often been regarded as mere gold-diggers, or as proxies for their husbands or families. They have been criticized and denigrated when they, like first lady Edith Wilson (1872–1961), who took over many of Woodrow Wilson’s executive duties as president after he suffered a stroke, claimed they were only carrying out their husbands’ wishes—and, of course, maintaining their husbands’ position and power. But the reality is that they often exerted their own ideas, and influenced the men whose names we know while theirs have faded from history.

In the twentieth century, there have been influential wives and daughters, some of whom became politicians themselves. Most notable among them is Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962), perhaps the wife who was most successful in achieving her own place in history, campaigning and participating in public policy during her husband Franklin’s presidency and serving as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly after his death.

Beautiful young women like Imelda Marcos or actresses like Jiang Qing, wife Mao Zedong, or Eva Perón are in the tradition of the ambitious concubine who rises to power. Indira Gandhi, India’s third prime minister, and the former Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra rose to power in countries that had previously been led by male family members.

More and more we see women leaders who have worked their way up in the same way men have traditionally done. By 2016, a growing number of the world’s countries are or have been led by a woman—including Angela Merkel (b. 1954) of Germany and Tsai Ing-wen (b. 1956) of Taiwan—with few sharing the path to power of so many female leaders of the past: the result of their connection with a man. Click here to download the chapter.

How about the United States? Would you be happy to see a former first lady as the first women president?

PS: I’m making the fat paperback Women & Leadership (356 pages) available at $29.99 instead of the usual academic price of over $50 through the new Ingram e-commerce system, which lets you order directly without going through Amazon. This is only the second time I’ve tried this and I would love to get some feedback on the system if you do order a copy from Ingram. This offer is good through August 19th, when the Democratic National Conference begins in Chicago. Click here to order.

"This compilation provides a diverse, timely overview of women and leadership, successfully navigating the topic without descending into essentializing claims. Contributing authors are leading scholars in the field, including Alice Eagly and Bruce Avolio. A particularly helpful introduction provides context for the chapters that review differences between women’s and men’s leadership, for example, and examine barriers to women’s Leadership and the leadership labyrinth (in contrast to the glass ceiling ). Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic levels; general readers." --Choice

1. And, admittedly, there are women who take this on willingly. A recent example is Yulia Navalnaya, who is now subject to an arrest order herself.