Of course this is how New York gets its first female governor

Female power in the shadow of male failure

¹Later this month, Kathy Hochul will be sworn in as the new governor of New York State, the first woman to hold the position. Glass ceiling broken! Kind of.

Hochul is ascending to power the way a great many women throughout history have: By filling a gap left by a man. In this case, it’s Andrew Cuomo, who resigned in disgrace after the New York Attorney General’s investigation of him yielded damning reports of sexual harassment and retribution. It’s still an exciting moment (and still appalling that it’s 2021 and New York has never elected a female executive). But it’s also a bit of a let-down to see that, yet again, a woman gains newfound access to power through a man.

The first women to serve in the U.S. Senate got there by being married to senators who died. The first female senator, Rebecca Latimer Felton, served just 24 hours in the seat her husband left when he passed away. The second female senator, Hattie Wyatt Caraway, also filled her dead husband’s vacant seat; she, at least, was later reelected. Ditto Margaret Chase Smith, the nation’s third female senator; she got her start in national politics by filling her dead husband’s seat in the House. The fourth female senator, Dixie Bibb Grates, was appointed by her husband, the governor of Alabama, to fill the vacancy left by Hugo Black upon his Supreme Court appointment. The fifth female senator, Gladys Pyle, did get elected in a special election, but under complicated and unusual circumstances; she was never sworn in, only served a two-year term, and she never actually performed any senate duties. The sixth female senator, Vera Cahalan Bushfield, was also appointed after her husband, who held the seat, died.

This pattern continues as you go down the list of female senators: Appointed to fill a dead husband’s seat, or appointed by a living and politically powerful husband, or serving for record short times. It’s not until Nancy Kassebaum took office in 1978 that a woman was sworn into a senate seat without being appointed by her husband or filling a congressional vacancy left open by her husband.

That isn’t to diminish the importance of these women holding office; often, the vacant-seat-filling was a way springboard to a longer political career. Margaret Chase Smith, for example, filled her husband’s seat in the House, but eventually got elected to the Senate on her own — and was the first woman to do so. But the road to women gaining political power in their own right was paved by women who succeeded their husbands, and it was slow and still-unfinished work.

It’s not just male death that puts women in power; it’s also male failure. Female and minority CEOs are often appointed to revive failing companies; they are then more likely to be pushed out, and overwhelmingly likely to be replaced by white men. One study found that, of 608 CEO transitions between 1996 and 2010, just four — four! — were a female or racial minority CEO being replaced by another woman or man of color. Instead, 604 of 608 female or minority CEOs were replaced by white men.

This is the glass cliff: Women ascending to power only when there’s a crisis and they’re expected to save the day, and then shouldering the blame when they can’t fix a mess someone else made. It’s a parallel dynamic to the glass ceiling, which limits how high women can rise.

I’m not sure what you call this latest dynamic of women being elevated to take over because a man has to resign because of a sexual harassment scandal, but Kathy Hochul isn’t the first. Tina Smith replaced Al Franken in the Senate after he resigned. Barbara Underwood replaced Eric Schneiderman as New York AG, and then Leticia James won the next election. Rashida Tlaib won her seat in Congress in the wake of John Conyers resigning over sexual harassment allegations. In 2018, the New York Times found that of 201 powerful men brought down by #MeToo, more than half were replaced by women. And that isn’t just men in politics — it’s men in media, entertainment, and business.

This isn’t a bad thing. Women have historically faced complex barriers to power, while men have had a big leg up — first formally, and now more subtly. And power has long gone hand in hand with abuse of power, including sexual abuses; those abuses have been one factor keeping women from rising. As much as we talk about the men felled by #MeToo, there’s no easy way to account for all of the women whose prospects were curtailed, sidelined, or snuffed out entirely by men who saw them as sexual objects (or as simply existing outside of the real of the potentially powerful), and treated them accordingly. It’s all of this unrealized potential that is the bigger and more devastating story of #MeToo, and the piece that’s impossible to prove and to fully comprehend. So it does seem like at least a tiny slice of justice that women, finally, are elevated to fill roles vacated by men who sexually harassed their way out of power.

But it reveals the bigger injustice underneath it all: That so many women’s professional trajectories are stunted because so many misogynist men still decide our laws and policies, report our stories, and create our art, films, music, and television shows. It’s 2021, and 20 states have never had a female governor (that will go to 19 once Hochul is sworn in). New York still has never elected a female governor. The United States has never elected a female president — but we have elected a deranged former game show host with no political experience.

This glass-ceiling-breaking moment is, in other words, complicated and bittersweet. The good news is that more women in power seems to beget more women in power, and that inches us a little closer to equality. But I really wish we’d hurry it up.

xx Jill

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1. Photo by Lindsey LaMont on Unsplash