Where Does the Dream of a Female President Go From Here?

The crowds at the Music Box Theatre for Suffs on Broadway missed that memo. Shaina Taub’s musical, which follows the suffragist movement around the Nineteenth Amendment, had been playing to sold-out crowds for months by the time Kamala Harris began her campaign. The sudden switch at the top of the ticket brought a whole new resonance to the show. “I’ll never forget that day,” says actor Nikki M. James, whose performance as journalist and advocate Ida B. Wells earned her a Tony nomination. James was just 90 minutes out from a Sunday matinee when President Biden, on the heels of stepping aside, tweeted an endorsement of Vice President Harris.

James’s thoughts spun. “I’m a Black woman, the daughter of two immigrants,” she says. “But growing up in the New York-New Jersey area, being middle class, college educated—I hadn’t felt, growing up, like I was walking against the wind. And then, in the last 10 years, I felt the wind coming from the front for the first time in my life.”

The first person she saw when she got to the theater after hearing the news was the actor Anastacia McCleskey, who played activist Mary Church Terrell. In the play, Wells’ character and Terrell’s have ongoing debates over the value of aligning with—and trusting—white women. “We just held each other and cried,” James says. “Then we looked at each other and said, ‘We have to prepare ourselves for the rest.’ All the things that ended up being said about Kamala, I could have written those scripts. So it was a moment of celebration, but also girding.”

When the curtain came up at the performance that day, the audience broke into its typical applause. Then, before the actor Jenn Colella could utter a word as suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, the chants began. Kamala! Kamala! “I believe we were her first rally,” James says, laughing. “I felt so hopeful. In that moment, I was like, we’re gonna win.”

Harris’s eventual loss unearthed James’s own attachment to the idea of seeing a female president. “The part that makes me sad now,” she says, “is that it’s taken me a long time to realize how important this is to me. When Hillary lost, it was devastating, but I didn’t connect it to her being a woman. With Kamala, I realized how successful the system had been in disconnecting me from the idea of a woman president meaning something. To see two qualified, unbelievable women be dismissed—it illuminated for me how far we haven’t come since 1920.”

If 2016’s outcome was a shock that wore off with time, 2024’s seems to be one whose sting is deepening with distance. It wasn’t just the election that another qualified female candidate lost. It was also the election in which Republicans bypassed a supremely qualified woman—Nikki Haley—to put a man with far less experience and far worse temperament on the ticket. It was the election in which, while 92% of Black women and 61% of Hispanic women voted for Harris, 52% of white women voted for Trump, dispelling predictions of secret feminists hiding votes from their MAGA husbands and enlarging the solidarity gap to depressing proportions.