Kamala Harris Transformed into Commander in Chief

“There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”— Madeleine Albright, former US Secretary of State

“Never let anyone tell you who you are. You show them who you are.” — Kamala Harris, Vice President of the United States

What a difference a convention makes! During her three and half years as Vice President, Kamala Harris was portrayed as incompetent, incoherent or just plain dumb. Harris does seem to have past difficulties in speaking extemporaneously. She’s been mocked numerous times for this, but it is strange that an accomplished District Attorney and Attorney General would suddenly become tongue-tied when she moved to Washington. It doesn’t make sense, especially since she came into her own quickly after Joe Biden dropped his candidacy for a second term.

There may have been other forces at work besides Harris’ communication skills. At the convention, Harris allowed herself to embody traditional masculine qualities as part of her counter-offensive to Donald Trump’s crowd size obsessions. This is a departure from many female political figures who leverage their motherhood and family ties as the basis for office. This move may have been threatening to the East Wing of the White House.

Jill Biden is a generation older and whatever national power she has gained has been solely through marriage. She has never held public office. I think it’s possible that Biden may have tried to hinder Harris’ career because she could not relate to Harris’ life choices.

Let’s start first with Harris’ transformation into a commanding presence and why it departs from a more traditionally feminine image that American women tend to use when running for office. Unlike many female politicians, who often display some level of individuality in color and cut, Harris wore a dark navy suit on the last night of the Democratic National Convention. She joined the ranks of men as a fellow soldier by donning the uniformed colors of many male convention speakers. The modern day business suit is indeed derived from military uniforms.

Her shift to the masculine, however, didn’t place her into one gender box or the other. Her suit and blouse were designed to flatter her female figure, not to hide it.

This fashion statement topped off the DNC’s humiliation of Donald Trump. Initially, Trump was portrayed as “weird,” but over the course of three days, the illustrations of this weirdness made it clear that behind Tim Walz’s folksy description were grave concerns about his capacity to lead. By the fourth night, Trump’s masculinity was in question as speaker after speaker pointed to his repeated denigration of American soldiers, including former Senator John McCain who was held prisoner of war in Vietnam for five years and refused an early release unless every man captured before him was released as well.

Harris’ acceptance speech was a checkmate to the game of phallic chess that Donald Trump started in his 2015-2016 campaign. She positioned herself as the candidate with the true understanding of masculinity: “As Commander in Chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” But her message was about more than American military might. It also signaled that female bodies — and male bodies — can hold both masculinity and femininity. Harris ripped the essentialism inherent in Trump’s misogyny right out from underneath him.

This show of masculinity from a woman’s body may have made Jill Biden uncomfortable early on in her husband’s term. Women don’t always rebut phallic games with their own assertion of power. Many often take on a motherly role, either chiding men or sometimes scolding them. They rarely enter the competition directly and assert their own strength, preferring to rely on womanly wiles or an essentialism of feminine morality to achieve their goals.

I see this traditional feminine approach in Jill Biden, an approach that is designed to assert the moral upper hand without engaging in direct competition. It was most noticeable to me in 2023 when Jill Biden unintentionally offered a glimpse into her personal relationship to power and competition. Last year, she held a press conference to invite the winners of the NCAA women’s basketball championship to the White House: “I know we’ll have the champions come to the White House; we always do. So, we hope LSU will come,” Biden said on Monday. “But, you know, I’m going to tell Joe I think Iowa should come too, because they played such a good game.” For obvious reasons, her staff had to adjust and clarify this comment. In competition, after all, there is only one winner. And just because there is only one winner, it doesn’t mean that the runner up is considered a “loser.”

Jill Biden didn’t seem to understand how open and direct competition works. No one, including Iowa’s women’s team, expects recognition for coming in second place. There are no participation trophies, unless the game involves very young children who are just learning sportsmanship. Jill Biden may have insisted on being addressed as Dr. Biden and maintaining her teaching position during her time as First Lady, but that doesn’t mean she’s fully with comfortable women taking on traditional masculine behaviors.

On the contrary, Jill Biden’s desire to invite Iowa to the White House could reflect a time when women in the United States had far less power. Before Ruth Bader Ginsburg made six Supreme Court arguments against gender discrimination in the 1970s (she won five), American women were more constrained by statutory discrimination and were far less represented than today in legislative houses and powerful professions. Under these conditions, it is understandable that someone raised in the 1950s and early 1960s might choose to focus on women’s support, not competition. Solidarity is priority for safety in highly patriarchal societies. It’s a means of protection. It keeps women from being easily targeted and left with no defenses.

Unfortunately, this supportiveness — often dubbed “empathy” — has a way of backfiring as women gain power. When an individual woman chooses a different path in an eroding patriarchal culture, she risks being shunned for placing her individuality above group support. Woman may choose out of fear or bitterness to police gender boundaries rather than risk new competitive roles. They may choose to ostracize women who break the mold.

“You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.” — Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

How must Jill Biden have felt when Kamala Harris, a self-made woman who didn’t ride the coattails of her husband, was chosen to be her husband’s running mate? Despite maintaining her professional life as First Lady, it’s possible that she’s having trouble relinquishing indirect strategies for influence that made more sense decades ago.

This is a choice, not an evolutionary development. As former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright noted in the epigraph above, women make conscious decisions to support or undermine other women. Women decide whether and how they are going to build careers, even in highly patriarchal settings, and they do it while married with children. Women around Jill Biden’s age or a generation older, such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nancy Pelosi, Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Sandra Day O’Connor, Geraldine Ferraro, Barbara Jordan, Elizabeth Warren, Jean Kirkpatrick, and yes, even Phyllis Schlafly, chose to build their own professional and political careers without dynastic influence. They all had children and raised families and yet gained great power despite cultural and structural constraints.

If I were going to explore Harris’ political regression during her time as Vice President, my research-nose tells me to start by focusing on the role of Jill Biden. Repression and jealousy are powerful forces. One double-bind in particular stands out to me: Harris has spoken about how difficult it was for her to demonstrate that she was staying in the background and being a loyal soldier to Joe Biden. Nevertheless, Joe Biden assigned her the border crisis, a hot-button issue that requires great authority to address. This was a no-win situation for Harris and may have been designed to humiliate. Perhaps Jill Biden had some influence regarding this assignment. Women may be discouraged from assertive behavior in more patriarchal cultures, but backhanded attacks are allowed, maybe even encouraged sometimes.

Now that Harris’s public image is no longer subject to Biden’s Oval Office and background pillow talk, she can truly show who she is. She has the opportunity to tear down gender stereotypes in politics and make it more comfortable for American women and girls to ask for what they want, not backstab each other. If elected, she could become the role model for the next generation of American female leadership.