Editorial: On women in office, we’re still only getting there – Plattsburgh Press Republican

Everyone, including President Joe Biden, made quite a big deal out of Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi being the first pair of women to rank high enough to sit behind the president as he delivered his first address to Congress last week.

Let's be grateful that it was one more first for women that we won't have to celebrate again.

It was a very big deal, of course. Women have never in our nation's history occupied those two elevated offices at the same time. We have never had a woman as a vice president before.

We nearly had a woman president, we all still recall. Hillary Clinton was very narrowly defeated by Donald Trump in the 2016 election. In fact, she won the popular vote by a margin of 3 million but lost in the Electoral College.

Women have run for vice president before, but their running mates couldn't win the top office. Republican Sarah Palin in 2008 and Democrat Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 were on losing tickets.

A couple of other women ascended to lesser, but still noteworthy heights. Frances Sissy Farenthold had her name put into nomination for vice president at the Democratic National Convention in 1972 but got no further.

And Toni Nathan, the 1972 Libertarian candidate for vice president, became the first woman to win an electoral vote when one Republican elector voted for her instead of for his partys candidate.

Women's progress as measured by political success is still being scoured whenever the occasion arises because it is undeniably part of our history. But it's not a part we should be especially proud of.

Why should a nation dedicated inviolably to equality of all take almost two and a half centuries to put a woman in the second seat, and why have we not yet put one in the first?

We didn't even grant them the right to vote until the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Up until then, did men really think women did not have the brains or the need to be able to express their opinions in a manner that mattered?

As a nation, we were generally proud in 2008 to have finally elected a Black president, although that achievement might have lost some of its luster in light of recent multiple episodes of racist killings and other malignant behaviors.

While we still have never elected a female president, at least we finally have a female vice president on our resume.

But we are still left to observe the noteworthiness of having two women at the shoulders of our president as he gives one of the most important speeches of the year.

We should be proud that we have finally put them there but chagrined that we haven't put one at the podium.

You could say we've come a long way in the last 101 years. In 1920, we at last acknowledged that we had been using only half of our brainpower.

Someday soon, we'll consummate the process fully, and we'll be able to stop congratulating ourselves for our baby steps.

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Editorial: On women in office, we're still only getting there - Plattsburgh Press Republican