President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 electoral race, July 21, leading to the nomination of current Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris is running against Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump, and should Harris win, she will become the nation’s first female president. 

The U.S. is one of the few democratic countries that has yet to elect a female president. Kimberly Hamlin, a professor of Women in American History at Miami University, said she believes that one possible reason a woman hasn’t been president is that U.S. voters lack exemplary female leaders, which can subconsciously impact their perception of whether a woman can lead. 

“Voters in other countries have a historic example,” Hamlin said. “There’s women on their currency, there’s women in their statues, when they go to their National Art Museum there’s women.”

While the U.S. hasn’t elected a woman to serve as president yet, several recent female candidates have received a large percentage of votes. In 2016, Hillary Clinton became the first woman in American history to win a major party’s nomination. While Clinton won the popular vote, she lost the electoral college vote, costing her the presidency. 

Jean Sinzdak, the Associate Director for the Center for American Women and Politics, recognizes a factor in why voters haven’t elected a female president, or why historically women haven’t secured major party nominations is because of the ideology of whether the country is ‘ready’, or if a woman is electable. However, Sinzdak said this reservation is irrelevant.

“What we say repeatedly at the center is that Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote should put to rest the electability question,” Sinzdak said.

Clinton dealt with significant misogynistic rhetoric from her opponents during her electoral cycle, discrediting her and her ability to lead. During the election, Trump described her as a “nasty woman,” and some voters deemed her masculine and bossy. Hamlin reaffirmed this, saying that people judge women more harshly on their attitudes and perceived as bossy, rather than assertive like men. Regardless, many recognize Clinton for paving the way for female presidential candidates, having nearly become the country’s first female president. 

Harris’s campaign, however, seems to be taking a different approach than previous candidates of underrepresented backgrounds. Instead of addressing her gender or race consistently, she has focused on redirecting conversations to her views and qualifications.

“Listen, I am running because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender,” Harris said in an interview with CNN.

Almost immediately after President Biden dropped out of the presidential election, Whitman’s Women’s Studies teacher Linda Leslie, felt a shift in the American public’s feelings on the possibility of a female president.

“As soon as Biden stepped down, it was hopeful, positive, fun and jokes — social media just flooded with optimistic, funny, cheerful stuff,” Leslie said. “It just felt like it wasn’t going to matter that she was a woman.”

Besides Harris and Clinton most recently, dozens of women have run for president, breaking barriers along the way. 

The first woman to ever run for president was Victoria Claflin Woodhull, heading the Equal Rights Party ticket in 1872. She was only 33 at the time, and not eligible for the presidency, but used her campaign to advocate for women’s rights and free love — which contrasted the idea of having life-long marriage as the only sexual or romantic option for people — and her campaign highlighted the similarity of bodily and political autonomy.

“Victoria Woodhull was amazing and so ahead of her time, especially how she talked about sex, the sexual double standard and bodily autonomy for women,” Hamlin said. 

Shortly after Woodhull, Belva Lockwood ran on the same Equal Rights Party ticket in 1884. Lockwood was an established lawyer who co-ran a practice with her husband and through her courtroom representation, she sought to help people in need — especially women. She represented similar values in her presidential campaign but lost in 1884, and again in 1888.

Lockwood overcame many obstacles for women in law and was the first woman to argue in front of the Supreme Court, where she represented Kaiser in the 1880 case Kaiser v. Stickney.

Neither woman, however, ran for a major party’s nomination. Years later, Margaret Chase Smith changed that, running in the Republican presidential primary in 1964. Smith’s best-known feat is standing up to Senator Joseph McCarthy and his extreme methods of combating communism during her tenure as the senator of Maine.

Despite these notable candidates, no woman of color had run for a major party’s nomination. This all changed when Shirley Chisholm became the first African American woman to run for the Democratic party presidential nomination in 1972. Through her campaign, she advocated for equality for all people.

“I feel like the messages of her campaign — ‘unbought and unbossed’, democracy for the people, by the people — are timeless and inspiring,” Hamlin said. “She talked a lot about the objections that were raised to her not just by white people, but also by black men. She spoke so eloquently about intersectionality before we had that word.” 

Chisholm was also a major figure in the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, which attempted to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed. While the Equal Rights Amendment ultimately didn’t succeed, the government passed Title IX — a law protecting against discrimination based on sex in programs that receive federal financial assistance. 

Patsy Mink, a Congresswoman from Hawaii, wrote a majority of the legislation. Mink made history as the first Asian American woman in Congress and then made waves again during her presidential campaign in 1972 as the first Asian-American to run for the position. She ran on behalf of the Oregon Democrats, garnering two percent of votes.

While many of these women, especially women of color, didn’t get a substantial amount of votes or their party nominations, their campaigns can still be impactful.

“I think Shirley Chisolm, for example, presumably really knew that it was going to be unlikely that she, as a black woman, would get the party’s nomination,” Sinzdak said, “But she would talk about this in interviews later on too, that it was really important for her voice to be heard and people to see her doing it, so that it might make a difference.”

In the past several decades, many women have run for president and attempted to secure their party’s nominations. While Clinton and Harris represent the Democratic party, Nikki Haley has been an influential woman in the Republican Party this election. While Trump did ultimately attain the party’s nomination, Haley was a strong competitor and outlasted other popular candidates like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Nevertheless, Haley still struggled with misogynistic comments throughout her campaign. Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy criticized her “three-inch heels” during the November Republican presidential debate. These comments directly contrast the ones Clinton faced in 2016, which argued that she wasn’t feminine enough.

“If you’re too pretty, like Sarah Palin or Nikki Haley, it’s ‘why is she so pretty’ or if you’re not pretty enough, ‘why is she not, she’s really an old hag,’” Hamlin said.

Political opponents and voters have used gender-focused comments and other misogynistic behaviors to attack female presidential candidates since they began running in the 19th century. However, these women, and many more, continued to run for the highest position in the nation.

“I think the women who are running really believe they have a shot, and culturally, expectations have shifted, and society expectations have shifted,” Sinzdak said. “More women are serving in elected office than they ever have been before in history, so all of that contributes to an environment where they were likely to be successful.”