Women, Politics and the Public Sphere

Brooks, Ann

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781447341376
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de género

Women, Politics and the Public Sphere is a socio-historical analysis of the relationship between women, politics and the public sphere. It looks at the fault-lines established in the eighteenth century for later developments in social and political discourse and considers the implications for the political representation of women in the West and globally, highlighting how women public intellectuals now reflect much more social and cultural diversity. Covering the legacy of eighteenth-century intellectual groupings which were dominated by women such as members of the 'bluestocking circles' and other more radical intellectual and philosophical thinkers, the book focuses on women such as Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft. These individuals and groups which emerged in the eighteenth century established 'intellectual spaces' for the emergence of women public intellectuals in subsequent centuries. It also examines women public intellectuals in the US including Samantha Power, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Warren, Condoleezza Rice, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg.

SIX

Contemporary women public intellectuals: the United States (1)

Introduction

The last two chapters of the book analyse the contribution of a range of contemporary women public intellectuals who have moved from being highly successful academics in universities in the US into roles in different political administrations of the US, both Republican and Democrat. While their position circumscribes their commentary as public intellectuals, they have established themselves as significant women contributors to social and political discourse. In each case they are analysed in relation to early years, their academic career, their noteworthy publications, their service to the administration and their contribution and legacy as public intellectuals. Chapter Six provides an analysis of three high-profile women public intellectuals: Condoleezza Rice, Samantha Power and Susan Rice.

Female leadership in higher education

An article on female leadership in the world’s top universities, in The Times Higher Education (THE) on 8 March 2018 maintains that female leadership in the world’s top universities is actually moving backwards. Bothwell (2018) shows that the number of top universities led by women has declined in the last year, which is in contrast to the recent progress made in closing the gender gap. This is according to THE world rankings data.

Bothwell reports that just 34, or 17%, of the top 200 universities in the latest 2018 rankings have a female leader, two fewer than in 2017. The country with the highest proportion of female university leaders is Sweden, and Bothwell shows that of the six Swedish institutions that make it into the top 200, four are led by women. Additionally, Bothwell shows that one of Spain’s two universities represented in the top 200 is female led – the Autonomous University of Barcelona – and two of Switzerland’s seven representative universities have a female leader.

As one might expect, the US has the highest number of female presidents, at 11, accounting for 32% of female leaders in the top 200. Seven of the 34 female leaders in the top 200, or 21%, are leaders of UK universities, including Louise Richardson, vice-chancellor of the world’s highest-ranked university, the University of Oxford. Bothwell shows that while gender parity in the US is little better than the average for the entire top 200, with only 18% of elite American universities headed by a woman, UK universities are outperforming the global average with 23% of their top universities having a female leader. The figure was 19% per cent for both nations in the previous year, 2017.

Of the 27 countries that are in the top 20, 17 have no female university leaders. The top 10 universities led by women in 2018 include the University of Oxford (1), led by Louise Richardson; Harvard University (6), led by Drew Faust; Imperial College London (8), led by Alice Gast; University of Pennsylvania (10), led by Amy Guttman; University of California, Berkeley (19), led by Carol Christ; Cornell University (19), led by Martha Pollock; London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) (25), led by Minouche Shafik; University of Washington (25), led by Ana Mari Cause; McGill University (42), led by Suzanne Fortier; and University of Wisconsin-Madison (43), led by Rebecca Blank. The analysis of 199 universities was based on university leaders in post on 1 March 2018.

Condoleezza Rice

Uncowed by the prospect of failure, Rice has made a career of arriving in positions of power during difficult times and critics say, without the requisite experience. At 35, she advised President George W. Bush, who named her national security advisor in 2001; again she was the youngest person to ever hold the position. After eight years in Washington, Rice returned to Stanford as professor of political science and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution. (Bell, 2010)

Jonathan Freedland, in an article in The New York Times, 1 July 2007, reviews Marcus Mabry’s Twice as Good, which is a biographical analysis of Condoleezza Rice. Freedland makes the point that Rice has regularly enjoyed poll numbers 20 points higher than those of the men she serves. In 2006, Freedland notes, she topped an Esquire survey of women whom men would most like to take to a dinner party, ahead of Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey and Jennifer Aniston. Despite this, Freedland makes the point that the views of the colleagues she served with – Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney – are more well known.

Early years

Condoleezza Rice’s speech to the Republican Party, 30 August 2012, as reported by Amy Davison Sorkin, reflects important aspects of her personal and political thinking:

“My fellow Americans, ours has never been a narrative of grievance and entitlement. We never believed that I am doing poorly because you are doing well. We have never been jealous of one another and never envious of each other’s success.

“A little girl grows up in Jim Crow Birmingham. The segregated city of the South, where her parents cannot take her to a movie, theatre or to restaurants, but they have convinced her that even if she cannot have a hamburger at Woolworths, she can be the President of the United States if she wanted to be, and she becomes the Secretary of State.” (Cited in Sorkin, 2012)

In these comments Rice offers a caricature of liberal positions – and a rejection of them. She is in effect saying that her parents were telling her to ignore the present and think of the future.

In his book Twice as Good: Condoleezza Rice and Her Path to Power (2007) Marcus Mabry provides a sympathetic biography of Condoleezza Rice and focuses on her formative years. Drezner (2008), in his review of Mabry’s book, argues that ‘Mabry’s thesis is that Rice’s strengths are also her weakness. Her focus, discipline, determined optimism and grace under pressure enabled her to overcome race and gender barriers (as well as former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld). However, this also makes her unable to acknowledge failings, unable to acknowledge errors in judgement.’

However, Condoleezza Rice brought to the table a unique understanding of the socio-political context in which she grew up. As she shows in the following extracted section from her latest book, Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom (2017):

As a child, I was part of another great awakening: the second founding of America, as the civil rights movement unfolded in my hometown in Birmingham, Alabama, and finally expanded the meaning of ‘We the people’ to encompass people like me. There is nothing more thrilling than the moment when people finally seize their rights and their liberty.

Academic career

Rice’s intellectual prowess has been the subject of significant criticism, given the elevated positions she has held in academia and in the Bush administration. Her academic career is a strong one. She earned her bachelor’s degree in political science, cum laude, and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Denver; her Master’s from the University of Notre Dame; and her PhD from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

In a rather unpleasant assessment of Rice’s scholarship, Brown (2008), in his article ‘10 Percent Intellectual: the Mind of Condoleezza Rice’, maintains that at Notre Dame, where her academic papers were assessed by her adviser, George A. Brinkley, a Soviet scholar commented on her essays as follows:

‘It lacked depth and attention to different interpretations and points of view … her evident skills and potential were not developed into more mature scholarship’. At Notre Dame she received a ‘terminal M.A.’ (a degree not leading to a PhD). She then returned to the University of Denver where she wrote another M.A. thesis titled ‘Music and Politics in the Soviet Union’, ‘not a fantastic piece’, in terms of scholarship. She received her PhD in 1981, and published it in 1984 by Princeton University Press … The book was mercilessly panned in the American Historical Review by Joseph Kalvoda. She published little and nothing of consequence. The article that helped her get tenure at Stanford is titled ‘The Party, the Military and Decision Authority in the Soviet Union’, World Politics in 1987.

As professor of political science, Rice had been on the Stanford faculty since 1981 and won two of the highest teaching honours – the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. She was a beneficiary of affirmative action programmes when hired as a political science professor at Stanford, but as provost she rejected that policy in making tenure decisions.

Rice served on President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Council (NSC) staff. She served as Senior Director of Soviet and East European Affairs and Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. In 1986 she also served as Special Assistant to the Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (see below).

In the US, being invited to serve in political administrations does not involve a resignation from an academic position and generally involves a leave of absence or secondment. Universities benefit from the reflected prestige and academics do not have to give up an academic career for political/administrative service. Such arrangements do not exist in the UK, thus limiting the academic calibre of government and limiting the experience of academics in academia. There is far more in the way of direct appointments to positions in the administrations in the US.

Rice returned to Stanford and served as Stanford University’s provost from 1993 to 1999, during which time she was the institution’s chief budget and academic officer. As provost, she was responsible for a $1.5 billion annual budget and the academic programme involving 1,400 faculty members and 14,000 students. In 1997 she also served on the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender-Integrated Training in the Military.

It might seem stunning to most academics that Rice should be appointed as provost with no management experience. In an interview with Katherine Bell in the Harvard Business Review (2010), Rice discusses her view in taking on the position:

“Well I had one advantage. It was clear what my focus should be. Stanford was in deep economic trouble – we still had $157 million of earthquake damage – so I knew that budget stability and rebuilding the campus were my primary responsibilities. I had also just come out of Washington and I felt I’d been in pretty big shoes being the Soviet specialist at the end of the Cold War, and so I just sort of took it on. Early on I didn’t know how to delegate. I was always trying to do other people’s jobs. I learnt you’ll drive yourself crazy doing that, and you won’t have good people working for you very long. I got better at delegating, I think, after that.”

The linkages between publication and policy development can be advantaged in this process. Rice wrote Germany Unified and Europe Transformed (Zelikow and Rice, 1995) with Philip Zelikow, who is described as a lawyer, diplomat and historian. Brown (2008) comments that Zelikow drafted the original manuscript. Rice drew on Zelikow at a later point while serving in the George W. Bush administration in 2002.

From 2005 to 2009, Rice served as the 66th Secretary of State of the US, the second woman and the first African-American woman to hold the post. She also served as President George W. Bush’s Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (National Security Adviser) from 2001 to 2005, the first woman to hold the position.

After eight years in Washington, Rice returned to Stanford in 2009. She is currently the Denning Professor in Global Business and the Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business; the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution; and a professor of political science at Stanford University.

Some have encouraged Rice to stand for public office again, including for the presidency, against Trump. Charles Krauthammer, a conservative columnist but significant critic of Trump, was on Fox News on 11 May 2016, proposing Rice as the new FBI director after the public and undignified sacking of James Comey by Trump. Krauthammer suggested that Rice’s background as a Russia specialist made her a good candidate for the new FBI director, who could oversee the investigation of the 2016 election hacking. From an interview with Susan Glasser (2017) in Politico Magazine, Rice, at least at present, seems to be settled into an academic role, as she admitted to Glasser: “Anything I can do from California I’m prepared to do. I’m a very happy professor” (Glasser, 2017).

Service in the administration

Rice was the first African-American woman to serve in significant higher-level positions in US administrations. She served as George W. Bush’s Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (National Security Adviser) from 2001 to 2005, being the first woman to hold the position; and, as stated, from 2005 to 2009, she served as the 66th Secretary of State of the US, the second woman to hold the post.

Drezner (2008), in his review of three contemporary books on Rice, makes a rather scathing comment on her performance in the role of National Security Adviser and Secretary of State. He comments: ‘Among foreign policy cognoscenti, the consensus opinion is that Condoleezza Rice has been a below-average-to-disastrous national security adviser and an average secretary of state. She outlasted or outfoxed bureaucratic rivals to become George W. Bush’s most trusted adviser in foreign affairs.’

In his overview of the three books on Rice – Marcus Mabry’s (2007) Twice as Good: Condoleezza Rice and her Path to Power; Elizabeth Bumiller’s (2007) Condoleezza Rice: An America Life; and Glen Kessler’s (2007) The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy – Drezner provides an interesting account of their views.

Drezner (2008) notes that Rice was

a disciple of former National Security Adviser, Brent Scrowcroft’s realist internationalism for most of her policy making career, she embraced much of the neo-conservative agenda following the September 11 attacks – and yet on becoming secretary of state, she jump-started multi-lateral diplomacy with the regimes of Pyongyang [North Korea] and Tehran [Iran].

Mabry’s commentary on Rice is seen by Drezner as the most sympathetic and has been outlined above. Bumiller was White House correspondent from 2001 to 2006 and her coverage is focused on Rice’s National Security Council tenure. She identifies most of the Bush administration’s bigger foreign policy blunders as being the result of Rumsfeld’s and Vice-President Dick Cheney’s approach, which was to cut out Rice from decision making. Bumiller also indicates that there was implicit sexism in much of this. She also notes that Rice tolerated ‘a dysfunctional interagency process’ for far too long, despite evidence that all was not well.

Kessler’s assessment of Rice’s performance focuses on the first two years. He was the State Department’s chief correspondent and argues that Rice found herself changing course on numerous issues – particularly on democracy promotion. Kessler also shows that Rice’s alienation from the State Department’s foreign service officers presents a parallel to her experience as Stanford provost.

Brown (2008) tends to confirm the assessment of Rice by Bumiller an...