Nancy Patricia Pelosi, born March 26, 1940, to a political family in Baltimore, is the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Representing four-fifths of the city and county of San Francisco, CA, she is the highest-ranking elected woman in United States history. Pelosi is second in the presidential line of succession, immediately after the vice president. She returns to the post after having served in it previously from January 4, 2007–January 3, 2011, when she was the first woman to hold the post.
I decided to make a perSISTERS print for Nancy Pelosi because of the suggestion of a young man I met in one of my Female Power Project booths at a street market in DC. 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 sited 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 sited 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.’”
Pelosi is so powerful and effective because she is able to get a group of people (Democrats in the House of Representatives) to work together to pass legislation. She does this by figuring out how to appeal to their interests, give them what they want and need professionally, and convince them to vote a certain way according to her strategy.
She is often targeted by the right wing and others, but she knows this is because she is effective. Being vilified does not hurt her feelings. “Be thick-skinned if you are going to take power” is the message BEHIND the message “Take Power.” And the message IN FRONT is: to raise up powerful women we need to admire, respect, and support women who are thick-skinned. We must check ourselves when we find we are reacting negatively to powerful women. We don’t have to interpret their effectiveness as selfishness, deceitfulness, and coldness. We all need to work on this.
DESIGN NOTE
In the original photographs by Gage Skidmore (I created a composite of two from the same shoot), the pantsuit Pelosi wears is orange. I changed the color to fuchsia in my interpretation because Pelosi got a good bit of attention for the fuchsia dress she wore in her speaker swearing-in ceremony on January 3, 2019. There is a lot to say about how the clothes of powerful women are treated in the press. I don’t think it is sexist to talk about clothes because I believe that a garment always means something. I think that Pelosi believes this too, and uses dress in her toolbox of power. For example, when I was zoomed in, working on the photo of Pelosi, I saw that she was wearing a woven fabric watch band with a rainbow gradient. She was representing her LGBTQ constituents, the people whose needs she has championed, and who have elected her again and again.
Pelosi’s image based on photographs by Gage Skidmore which I found here.
Read more about Pelosi on Wikipedia, and at these links:
New York Times Magazine article by Robert Draper
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-nancy-pelosi-problem/554048/
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