Waiting for a Madam President of the United States!

Waiting for a Madam President of the United States!

By Arun N. Toké, editor

Did you know that each and every one of the 46 Presidents of the United States, has been a male in its almost 250-year history since the Declaration of Independence? Since the founding of the nation on July 4th, 1776, not even one woman has been elected to the highest office of the land!

Ask your female classmates, neighbors, friends and family members, “Can a woman lead the country?” and listen to what they say. Likely, they will all say, “Women are equally capable as men to lead the nation.”

Across the globe, many dozens of nations—in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia—have elected women as presidents or prime ministers to lead their countries during the last 65 years. Some of these countries have elected women leaders multiple times over the decades. Various countries like the United Kingdom, India, New Zealand, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Central African Republic, Argentina, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Indonesia… the list is too long to include them all here! But unfortunately, the United States has not made the list so far!

Just recently, in October 2024, Mexico also joined the ranks of over 25 countries with women heads of their governments when Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in as the first elected female President of the nation located just south of our border! Why haven’t we elected a woman to lead the United States of America yet?

Will the people of the United States choose to elect our first ever woman president this November? Many capable women leaders in other nations have shown clearly that women can lead as well as men, and sometimes even better.

Perhaps, you have studied the history of our country, and you know that women were not given even the basic rights to vote when the Constitution was first written. It allowed only landowning white males a right to vote. African Americans, and even the Indigenous People (who had lived here for generations) were not considered citizens of the country, and were not able to vote or run for any political office.

It was the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, adopted in the year 1920, after a decades-long suffrage movement led by women, that gave women the right to vote and thus help elect their representatives.

Interestingly, a number of European countries also enacted laws to give their women citizens a right to vote around the same time. Russia did so in 1917, Germany in 1919, and the United Kingdom began the process by granting women limited rights in 1918, and then full rights in 1928. Did you know that New Zealand became the first country to grant women voting rights in 1893? Nineteen other countries had also granted these rights to women before the United States did so in 1920. However, Switzerland did not grant women voting rights until 1971! In Asia, India granted some of its women the right to vote in 1935, while it was still a British colony. When India became an independent nation in 1947, the country’s constitution, adopted on January 26, 1950, gave its women full voting rights.

While the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments of the 1860s were enacted to bring full citizenship rights to non-whites and former slaves—primarily African Americans—it was not until the year 1965 as the Voting Rights Act was signed into law by President Johnson, that Blacks in the South gained meaningful access to the ballot box. Thus also including the African American women (who were left out in the 19th Amendment of the 1920)!

Unfortunately, the country still does not have a true democracy. Because we have an archaic system of “The Electoral College,” which gives disproportional power to small states in electing the President, at times, we have had presidents who did not get the most votes. For example, in the 2016 presidential election, even though Hillary Clinton received 2.9 million more votes than Donald Trump, she did not become the President because she lost the Electoral College. She came very close to becoming the first woman president of the country!

The U.S. Supreme Court Justices are appointed for a lifetime. And, they are not even elected by the people. Until recently, all of these justices were also male and white (Sandra Day O’Conner was the first woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court in 1981). They interpret the laws and decide what is constitutional and what is not. Here is an example worth noting: reproductive health rights for women.

In 2022, the “Roe v. Wade” decision, which had guaranteed national access to abortion for women for about 50 years was struck down by the Supreme Court. As a result, some states now have severely restricted women’s rights and have caused great harm to many women living there. Thanks to progressive leaders, Democratic states still have reasonable family planning options, including an abortion procedure, for families, couples, and women.

In 1917, Montana’s Jeanette Rankin became the first woman to serve as a Congressional Representative in the nation. Since then over 300 women have been elected to serve in the U.S. Congress or the Senate (the upper house). Ms. Kamala Harris became the first woman to serve as the United States Vice President in January 2021 after Sen. Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris (who had previously been elected as a U.S. Senator, and before that the Attorney General, of California) won the 2020 presidential elections.

In 2024, we have a precious opportunity to turn the page in our nation’s history by electing Ms. Kamala Harris as our next President. Who we elect as the President will shape the future of the nation (and even the whole world because of our tremendous global power). The implications of the choice we make as a nation are huge. We have serious issues facing us: the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the accelerating climate change crisis, and the nuclear weapons threat…

We need a truly capable leader who has a deeper understanding of the many complicated issues our nation (and our world) faces, and then lead us with fairness, kindness, and compassion to solve these pressing problems. Someone who knows and speaks the truth and works to bring the country together; someone who does not make hasty decisions based on short-term, selfish, or financial gains.

In 2024, our choice is clear, in my humble opinion.

—Arun N. Toké, editor.




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