The Skimmer

Notes from the Cracked Ceiling

by Anne E. Kornblut Crown; 280 pages

Will the U.S. elect a female President anytime soon? You could be forgiven for saying yes, since Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin came closer to the finish line than any women in history. But you would be wrong, says Washington Post White House reporter Anne E. Kornblut. The 2008 election, she writes, may actually have been one of the worst things ever for women in U.S. politics: "It revived old stereotypes, divided the women's movement, drove apart mothers and daughters, and set back the cause of equality in the political sphere by decades." Clinton and Palin suffered brutal personal attacks during their campaigns, venom that Kornblut ascribes to sexism. Won over by Barack Obama, young women failed to appreciate the historic nature of Clinton's quest. Sarah Palin's good looks, meanwhile, "contributed to the narrative of her as an idiotic pawn." Still, the author's in-depth interviews with powerful female politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Claire McCaskill and Janet Napolitano show that the distaff political troops are on the move.

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