Kamala Harris is accustomed to having to work to make her voice heard. Of course she is: she’s a woman. She’s a Black woman, a South Asian woman. Not so many decades ago, a voice such as hers would have been hard to make heard in the broader public sphere, let alone from a podium or expressing the policies of a government.
What do we hear, in 2024, when we listen to her? What does it mean to have a woman running for US president now, eight years after Hillary Clinton hit that glass ceiling hard — and two years after the reversal of Roe vs Wade? That catastrophic, regressive decision of the US Supreme Court indicates a new threat to women’s rights. I have had the benefit of access to safe and legal abortion, and I used that access with hardly a second thought — I’m almost ashamed, now, that I took it for granted.
Progress is not inevitable; we are far beyond Francis Fukuyama’s notion of “the end of history” arriving thanks to the triumph of liberal democracy. No such luck. In 2023 the UN warned that progress towards full equality for women across the world had gone into reverse. Considering the history of feminism can — at least — point towards a better future. If rights for women around the world are to be protected and preserved, we must hear women’s voices clearly, must give them room to speak.
Harris has demonstrated across her career that she knows what it takes to make people listen. Let’s say it: to make men listen. In the 2020 vice-presidential debates, Mike Pence kept trying to interrupt her. Eventually she held up the flat of her hand. “Mr Vice-President, I’m speaking, I’m speaking,” she said, acknowledging with her repetition that he seemed to believe he was entitled to talk over her. He was not: and she let him know in the plainest terms.
When I hear Harris making room for herself to be heard, I recall my much-missed friend and mentor Professor Lisa Jardine, “the leading British female public intellectual of our times”, as an obituary described her when she died, aged only 71, in 2015. She was the chair of the Booker Prize when I judged it in 2002, an experience that is one of the best of my life — not least because she demonstrated, over and again, an inspiring combination of leadership and kindness. She would stand her ground; and she herself would listen. That same year she founded the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary University of London; she was a polymath historian who had begun her academic life as a mathematician.
Lisa knew what it was like to be the only woman in a roomful of men, and she knew too what it took to be heard. If you find yourself in such a situation, Lisa once told me — as I know she told many, many other younger women — always be sure to speak first. “It doesn’t matter what you say,” Lisa grinned. “Ask for a glass of water. Ask for someone to open the window. Then, when it’s time for you to say something important, the men will be accustomed to the sound of your voice.”
And let’s not forget that it was a woman’s voice, by all accounts, that finally got an intractable Joe Biden to admit that running for a second term was a threat to the Democratic party’s chances of winning the presidency. Even after his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump on June 27, Biden had made it plain as plain can be that he would never step aside: that is, until Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi appeared on MSNBC on July 10.
Pelosi was asked about the mood in the Democratic party, the perceived despair at Biden’s intransigence. She began her answer by praising Biden — her very good friend and ally for decades — before saying, with steely rigour: “It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run. We’re all encouraging him to make that decision, because time is running short . . . He is beloved, he is respected . . . People want him to make that decision . . . whatever he decides, we go with.”
It was hardly a coded statement. A week and a half later, Biden dropped out of the race. When asked about Biden’s decision, Jennifer Palmieri — former White House director of communications and communications director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election campaign — said of Pelosi: “She’s tougher than all of them. And men won’t say hard things. They won’t.”
Clara Bingham’s new book The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973 is a striking collection of women’s voices. Bingham is an American journalist and producer whose previous book, published in 2016, was Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul.
That book was an oral history of the tumultuous period between 1969 and 1970, which brought perhaps greater unrest and change in the US than 1968, the year when both Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F Kennedy were assassinated. It was her chapter on “women’s liberation” — I notice how inclined I am to use those quotation marks — that led her to address the subject more fully, and centre the remarkable women who effected so much change over the course of a decade.
Much of the time I was reading The Movement, I was hanging out with my 24-year-old son — we were on holiday together, just the two of us. He’s well-informed, follows politics closely (he’s the one who explained what was going on in the French elections to me) and is, of course, a feminist. (Favourite remark from toddlerhood: “Mum, can men have tattoos?”) Yet over and again I felt moved to read aloud to him from this book, to demonstrate just what kind of battles needed to be fought to bring about women’s liberation: and I too was reminded that no quotation marks are needed, for that was the struggle, in the starkest terms.
Sure, I was not unaware that in 1963 (the year Clara Bingham was born, the year Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published, the year Sylvia Plath died by suicide), a young American woman might dream of becoming a doctor, a lawyer, a college professor — but dreaming was pretty much all she could do. She could not compete in a marathon or play varsity sports. If she was single, she couldn’t get a prescription for birth control, never mind have a legal abortion. She could not prosecute her rapist. If she wanted to come out as a lesbian, she would have had a mountain to climb. As Bingham sets it out in her introduction, in a single decade, “thousands of years of human custom and behaviour were upended”.
There are so many extraordinary (and funny, and heartbreaking) stories of courage here from women of every stripe that it’s impossible to pick out just a few — yet in the aftermath of the Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health decision of the US Supreme Court, issued on June 24 2022, which removed the constitutional right to abortion established by Roe vs Wade in 1973, hearing women describe their experiences of abortion before Roe is particularly shocking.
Activist Frances Beal describes having an illegal abortion at 17: “It was a backstreet abortion, on the kitchen table. It was horrible because I started bleeding, and I was bleeding, bleeding, bleeding, bleeding, bleeding.” Her boyfriend took her to the hospital; they bought a ring and pretended they were married. The doctors grilled her: if she revealed that she’d had an abortion she could have gone to jail. The place was full of suffering young women. “I remember a doctor saying to one of the young girls, ‘Easier going up than coming out, huh?’” The gist: women’s sexual activity deserves punishment.
Beal is a Black woman; Bingham’s book is instructive on the way that many white second-wave feminists — notably Betty Friedan — failed to consider Black women’s experiences or include them in their activism. Beal, in a 1969 pamphlet titled “Double Jeopardy”, said a Black woman was “a ‘slave of a slave’. When the black man in America was reduced to such an abject state, the black woman had no protector and was used and is still being used in some cases as the scapegoat for the evils that this horrendous System has perpetrated on black men.”
One of the most powerful voices in Bingham’s book belongs to Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress and, in 1972, the first Black woman to run for a presidential nomination. “I almost killed myself because I wanted to show the machine that a little Black woman was going to beat it,” she said of her tireless campaigning for Congress. When she stood for the Democratic nomination she said: “I am not the candidate of Black America although I am Black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that . . . I am the candidate of the people of America.”
That is surely Vice-President Harris’s aim — to be the candidate of the people of America — and she stands on Chisholm’s shoulders, as she has often said. Her identity is indelibly a part of her — when Trump, speaking to a gathering of Black journalists in Chicago last month, attempted to question that identity (she “happened to turn Black” a few years ago, he said, astonishingly) his remark — to say the least — backfired.
To be sure, there is a hard road ahead for Harris, as Trump still has many paths to victory. Yet there is no doubting the momentum of her campaign and that she can be seen — more than Hillary Clinton ever was — both as a woman and as a person, and that is no small thing. Brilliant as Hillary Clinton is (and despite the jokes that the only reason Bill got to be president was because he was married to Hillary), it was impossible, during her candidacy, to shake off the idea that she had got to where she was at least in part by being the wife of the most powerful man in the world. (It’s notable that in Trump’s bizarre interview with Elon Musk, he said of Vice-President Harris’s Time magazine cover: “She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live. It was a drawing, and actually, she looked very much like a great First Lady, Melania.”)
The issue is how we do, or do not, transcend our identities. I would argue that we should be able to hold both ideas in mind at once; a tough call, in times when giving voice to a thought can mean just shouting on social media, rather than any kind of genuine engagement. Our experiences define us, yet we can also seek to transcend them.
One of the voices heard in Bingham’s book is that of poet and editor Honor Moore — who has herself just published A Termination: an account of the abortion she had in 1969. Abortion would not be legal for another four years; a psychiatrist’s letter enabled her to have the procedure safely. She was 20 years old. “I didn’t have a self,” she writes; her choice to control her fertility was the beginning of her selfhood.
In Sexed, Susanna Rustin’s history of British feminism, she begins with a reference to Mary Wollstonecraft, 18th-century author, philosopher and pioneer of women’s rights. “In order to claim their natural rights as rational creatures, Wollstonecraft argued, women must first ‘obtain a character of a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex’.”
Does it not seem astonishing that half the human race is still fighting to claim this distinction? The battle for true equality between the sexes is far from over. Yes, there’s cause for hope; but cause for vigilance, too. As Rustin notes: “In 2020, a survey by the British charity Hope Not Hate found that 50 per cent of boys and men aged 16-24 believed that ‘feminism has gone too far and made it harder for men to succeed’.”
The history that Harris carries in her person is remarkable. Her Jamaican father was Black; her mother Indian. Let’s not forget the “System” that Beal referred to: the “Three-Fifths Compromise” in article one, section two, of the Constitution of the United States declared that any person who was not free would be counted as three-fifths of a free individual for the purposes of determining congressional representation — thereby vastly increasing the political power of slaveholding states. In theory, the 15th Amendment gave the right to vote to men of all races in 1870; but nearly another hundred years would pass before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited racial discrimination at the polls. Thanks to gerrymandering and other forms of voter suppression, this is another issue that has not gone away.
Ten days ago Harris reprised her commitment to be heard. “I’m here because we believe in democracy,” she said. She was standing in an aircraft hangar in Detroit, in front of a crowd of about 15,000 people. It was her first rally in the crucial swing state of Michigan since Biden dropped out of the presidential race in July. She had just announced that Minnesota governor Tim Walz would be her running mate. Harris was calling out Trump for his party’s alignment with “Project 2025”, the 900-page document produced by the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation that reads like something out of The Handmaid’s Tale.
As she addressed the throng, pro-Palestinian protesters attempted to drown her out. Harris, however, wasn’t having it. Her belief in democracy notwithstanding, Harris held the floor. “Everyone’s voice matters, but I am speaking now.” She repeated the line — no contraction, with stress on the verb, the action. “I am speaking now.” She carried on, but so did some voices from the crowd. She was smiling; she wasn’t stern, but firm. “If you want Donald Trump to win,” she said simply, “then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”
The clip of Harris quieting the crowd is only a couple of minutes long. I watch it once, and twice and three times, and each time I am startled at how moved I am by her clear statement. She is not, it should be stressed, silencing the protests of those calling for a new direction in the Middle East; she has called for a ceasefire in Gaza, and condemned the loss of civilian life in an Israeli air strike against a school building in Gaza last weekend. But in the moment, she knew it was time for her own voice to be heard. As a woman, as a person, she held the floor. We have a long way to go still, and yet it almost seems possible to believe that we are seeing — and hearing — Kamala Harris in the character of a human being. Mary Wollstonecraft and Lisa Jardine would rejoice.
Erica Wagner is author of ‘Chief Engineer: The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge’ (Bloomsbury)
‘The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973’ by Clara Bingham is published by Simon & Schuster and Atria/One Signal Publishers. ‘Sexed: A History of British Feminism’ by Susanna Rustin is published by John Wiley and Sons
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