What a Female Vice President Can Mean for Boys
Michael Perez / AP
On January 20, Kamala Harris, the California-born daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, will become Vice President of the United States. Like every other Vice President in our nation’s history, she will have supporters and she will have detractors, but what can’t be denied is that Harris’s ascension to this position represents a significant moment in our national history.
Our nation has had 48 Vice Presidents, and all of them have been men. This is not to impugn those who held the office, but instead to spotlight that for more than two centuries the Vice Presidency was an exclusively male domain. I have no doubt that Harris’s emergence will be celebrated as a profound model for girls and women, and rightly so; at the same time, however, I think her attainment demands the attention of boys, particularly boys who learn and live in a community that enshrines dignity as one of its core values.
To see dignity is to see humanity, and to see humanity is to see possibility—and in the case of Harris, the possibility of national executive leadership. That we have not yet had a female Vice President speaks not to the limitations of women, of course, but rather to the ease with which possibility (and thus dignity) can be denied through a lack of recognition and imagination, and how quickly that denial comes to be seen as natural and appropriate and part of the “order of things.” (There was a time in the history of boys’ schools, for example, where the idea of academic and institutional female leadership was anathema. We can only tremble at the poverty of Browning boys’ experience if such were still the case.) Should the story of Kamala Harris do nothing else, it can stir our boys to awareness of what they may previously have had the luxury not to notice or mark as significant, and to use that awareness to exercise both curiosity and compassion about the meaning of it all.
“Kamala Harris’ attainment demands the attention of boys, particularly boys who learn and live in a community that enshrines dignity as one of its core values. ”
But in addition to cultivating awareness about the world, I hope that the Harris story will also help our boys realize something about themselves, namely, that the narratives about gender which limited women also limit men. Women worldwide continue to battle for safety, opportunity, and standing that men have long enjoyed. But empowering women and girls can also, in a manner of speaking, free men and boys. When Kamala Harris breaks a longstanding barrier by becoming our Vice President, Browning students are reminded that they can also push past hidebound notions of what roles or activities are typically “feminine” or “masculine,” and can instead explore more fully who they want to be in the world. This certainly makes for a more interesting Browning, and offers our boys more pathways to creating meaningful lives.
Whether one is a fan of Kamala Harris’ politics or not, it is worth celebrating that a century after women were fully awarded the franchise in the United States, we will see one in the second seat of our government’s executive branch. In a community that asserts the importance of dignity, curiosity, compassion, and purpose, this moment is decidedly relevant to the mission we have set for ourselves.