A heartbeat away — Susan Kaiser Greenland

The first in a series of posts between now and the election on women qualified to be just a heartbeat away.

Just out of college in the 1980s I worked for several large corporations in Manhattan as an intern, a secretary, and a script-reader to name just a few of the sundry jobs that made up the early years of my career. As a relatively junior employee, I was once brought into a matter that involved a female executive about whom there were many complaints, mostly from her subordinates, all of whom were men. My boss asked me if I thought there was anything to the complaints. There was no doubt that the female executive was brilliant. To rise to the top of the outrageously competitive old boys network running media companies at that time, a field where few would deny both age and gender discrimination was then rampant, a woman had to be brilliant. Unfortunately I agreed with the men who worked under her and the female executive’s actions seemed inappropriate to me as well. Eventually she lost her job.

I remember this matter not because of the complaint itself but because of what followed. Shortly after she was fired I ran into the executive while shopping for vegetables at a market near my loft in Tribeca. She stopped sorting through the bin of corn on the cob to call me out. Screaming at me on Houston Street the gist of her argument was this: “She and women like her had to fight dirty in a male dominated workforce to get where they were in order to make it possible for me to get where I where I was; a still difficult corporate work environment for women even in the 1980s. On behalf of the tribe I should have looked the other way. In fact it was my duty to have looked the other way.”

In retrospect I’m flattered she thought I had so much power as a very junior employee when in fact the determination to fire this executive had been made far further up the food chain and as the result of many opinions of which mine was just one. But she was right that I could have taken a different position than I did. Over the next week or so our exchange at the market ran through my mind frequently. I hadn’t held her to a higher standard because she was a woman, nor did she accuse me of doing so: her claim was that for the sake of the greater good I should have held her to a lower one. I should have covered for her. No doubt this executive did have to fight dirty to break through the glass ceiling and as a younger member of the sisterhood I had benefited. In her view it had been my opportunity to give back.

About 25 years have passed and I hadn’t thought much about this matter or our exchange before this election. In fact I have never told this story to anyone, even my co-workers at the time, before today. Not out of a sense of drama and obligation to keep this story a secret, but because her outburst wasn’t all that unusual back then. The story comes to mind now because joining the chorus of those bashing Governor Palin makes me feel uncomfortable. Twenty-odd years ago I made the decision that looking the other way if I saw a woman abuse power, even power she deserved and fought hard to obtain, would not advance the cause of feminism. To the contrary, women looking the other way under these circumstances would set all of us back. But that doesn’t mean I’m not concerned about the effect of Palin bashing on the other highly qualified women in politics; particularly in light of the bashing Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Edwards took in the Democratic primary.

Governor Palin’s choice to flirt her way through this election makes her gender an easy target. There are other extremely accomplished women in public life who have not made the same choice. Those are the women we will shine a light on from time-to-time between now and the election with faith that the contrast between these women and Governor Palin will say all that needs to be said on the issue of gender and what qualifies someone to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency.