Pearls, Politics, & Power

Articles by this Author

Goodbye Charm School: The Case for More Women Leaders

by Madeleine M. Kunin
AlterNet, April 16th, 2008

If we want a more representative and effective government, we should consider backing away from the traditional male style of leadership.

The following excerpt is from the chapter Women & Leadership in Pearls, Politics, and Power by Madeleine M. Kunin (Chelsea Green, 2008), and is reprinted here with permission from the publisher.

Leadership cookbooks that list the ingredients for effective leadership are more popular than ever. Almost every successful CEO has been impelled to divulge his secret formula. Most have bemoaned the lack of leadership "in our time," exemplified by Lee Iacocca's latest book, Where Have All the Leaders Gone?:

Had enough? Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff.

Men throughout history have struggled to define leadership, benign and not benign, from Jesus to Hitler, from Aristotle to Machiavelli. Leadership meant male leadership. There was no other, unless we count Joan of Arc and Queen Elizabeth I.

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Who's Ready for a Female President?

by Madeleine M. Kunin
The Washington Post, January 11th, 2008

Download the PDF here.

Statement about women rising to positions of power on the Jewish Women’s Archive.

As I walked into the crowded House Chamber for my inauguration as the first female Governor of Vermont, on January 10, 1985, I felt physically uplifted by the crowd. A group of women from other parts of the country who had traveled to Vermont to see a woman Governor inaugurated were cheering from the balcony. The sound of applause—not just for me but for women rising to a position of power—reverberated through the hall, like the sound of an orchestra.

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Madeleine Kunin's commentaries on VPR

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It's About Time

A 9-year-old girl was taking a tour through the Vermont Statehouse recently, scanning the portraits of the men. When she came upon mine, she exclaimed, "Finally, a woman. It's about time."

The question the country will answer in the next two years is, "Is it time for a woman president?"

There have been several significant firsts for women recently.

When Harvard announced that its next president would be a woman, Drew Gilpin Faust, the halls of academia were shaken. Only two years ago Harvard was caught in a contentious debate about whether women could be serious scientists, and now a woman is at the helm.

With Nancy Pelosi at the podium, wielding the gavel, all those 9-year-old girls know that the United States Congress is no longer a man's world. Its as if the sign in the tree fort that had been scrawled, "Girls, keep out," had been replaced with, "Women are Welcome."

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A Math Lesson on College Loans

THE Department of Education’s proposed new standards for overseeing student loans — a response to the growing scandal involving kickbacks from lending institutions to university student-aid officials — are a step in the right direction. But the department and the Bush administration could go further in making student loans cheaper, less cumbersome and, most important, not susceptible to corruption.

In fact, the method for achieving this is already on the books: the William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program, which omits the middleman and allows the government itself to give loans to students. It needs to be expanded.

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