Here is another design for Nancy Pelosi. (I had made the first one in 2019.)
Nancy Patricia Pelosi, born March 26, 1940, to a political family in Baltimore, was the Speaker of the House of Representatives from January 4, 2007–January 3, 2011, and again from January 3, 2019–January 3, 2023. Representing four-fifths of the city and county of San Francisco, CA, she assumed her office in the House of Representatives on June 2, 1987. Nancy Pelosi is the first woman to hold the rank of Speaker and after she stepped down she was widely called one of the most effective and consequential holders of that office.
This is the second design I have made for Nancy Pelosi and I will include some background on my first design below. Several things have prompted me to make something new for Nancy. For one, people kept asking for a Nancy fridge magnet and my previous design from 2019 was too complicated for such a small object. The biggest thing, however, is the video of her actions during the attack on Congress by the right wing extremists, instigated by the 45th President. Her daughter, Alexandra, filmed her mother reacting calmly to the unprecedented events: calling local governors to get National Guard backup; telling the Vice President not to let anyone know where he is (while ripping open a meat jerkey snack with her teeth while she held her phone); and trying to put things into place so that Congress could reconvene to install the next President … KEEP CALM. Mostly I admire her for standing up face to face to an extreme and dangerous President, with style and grit … HOLD ON. Finally, I was impressed by how she gave up the speakership and blew a kiss to her successor when she gave him her vote on the floor of the House. That just seemed so Nancy … LET GO.
I decided to make the first perSISTERS print for Nancy Pelosi [TAKE POWER] because of the suggestion of a young man I met in one of my Female Power Project booths at a street market in D.C. He had previously worked for Pelosi and admired her. He also told me about the “people don’t give you power, you take it” comment, which I found cited in numerous places. Pelosi is, and has been for a while, the most powerful and effective woman in American politics. Her story, and peoples’ stories about her, are a telling distillation of America’s ideas about female power. It isn’t rocket science; it isn’t subtle at all. Americans hate and distrust powerful women. According to a 2010 paper by Yale researchers cited by Peter Beinart in the April 2018 issue of The Atlantic, when presented with the same description, both men and women reacted negatively to an ambitious, power-seeking leader with a woman’s name, while the same description attached to a man’s name elicited support.
Beinart goes on to write, “As the management professors Ekaterina Netchaeva, Maryam Kouchaki, and Leah Sheppard noted in a 2015 paper, Americans generally believe ‘that leaders must necessarily possess attributes such as competitiveness, self-confidence, objectiveness, aggressiveness, and ambitiousness.’ But ‘these leader attributes, though welcomed in a male, are inconsistent with prescriptive female stereotypes of warmth and communality.’ In fact, ‘the mere indication that a female leader is successful in her position leads to increased ratings of her selfishness, deceitfulness, and coldness.’”
I challenge Nancy’s critics on the right and the left to mindfully address their unexamined bias against powerful women.
DESIGN NOTE
This image is based on a 2018 photo by Andrew Harnik showing Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer (then in the minority party in Congress) leaving a meeting with the president at that time. The way she is dressed, in a burnt orange coat, donning sunglasses in the D.C. winter brightness, caused a stir in the social media sphere. She radiates panache. Nancy is a master of this sort of Female Power: the power of the bright colored garment. It makes her stand out in the sea of dull colored power suits that most of her male colleagues wear. If you are going to be the exception to the rule of men holding the power, then do it exceptionally. A garment always means something. I hope as women gain parity in the halls of power we can continue to take up space brightly, as Nancy Pelosi does.
Read more about Pelosi on Wikipedia, and at these links:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-nancy-pelosi-problem/554048/
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