If you tend to be serious, cerebral, cautious, and strategic then you most likely see Hillary as a woman who can teach you something.  On the other hand, if you tend to be down to earth, practical, gutsy, and prefer to shoot from the hip, then Sarah models the behaviors you might most want to emulate.  Both women are intelligent, persistent, passionate, and committed to the causes in which they believe — traits we all can admire.  As women, we can appreciate the gifts each brings to the table without necessarily embracing her position on the issues. 

In some ways, this is the time we’ve all been waiting for –having female candidates with distinct personalities and positions in the spotlight.  For too long we’ve all been lumped into the “female” category, regardless of our unique views, communication styles, or personal preferences.  I wish more women would think about this when judging their co-workers.  The myth that women don’t like working for other women still runs rampant.  Sure there are women I wouldn’t want to work for, but there are just as many men I’d avoid as well.  When we finally come to the realization that there are more differences within any one group than there are differences between two groups, we will have taken a giant leap toward equality.

Lois described the many ways in which the Clinton campaign and Clinton herself reminded us how to deal with those who would hold women back.

Yet she didn’t win.  She did all those things right and didn’t win.  As Deborah Tannen has written, so much of what she said, did and wore was “marked” — commented upon, ridiculed, taken as indicators of weakness or inconsistency.

What does this teach us?  Does it really tell our daughters that they can be whatever they want to be?

Many women (not just Democrats) feel that something very unseemly and uncivil has taken place.  Many young women have been inspired by Clinton, but hopefully made more wary as they pursue their careers.  They should be wondering if some of what women before them accomplished at great sacrifice is being undone?

We do indeed walk a thin pink line in any job and we’ve seen that there are a vast number of people who want to keep it that way — not just in the media.  In this sense, we’ve been shaken hard — reawakened to snakes in the grass we considered harmless.

Hillary Clinton showed us how to fight back, those who despised her for her gender showed us that they are very much still around.

Then Gerry Ferraro made me feel better. 

Delivering the luncheon keynote address, she recalled her own historic candidacy, admitting that she did not intend to run for Vice-President in 1984 but rather was considering a run for Senate.  As things happened, Mondale asked her to join the ticket and she took the plunge─and the risk. 

She spoke of the exhilaration she felt at the convention when she looked out at the crowd and saw a sea of women ─ it seems that many of the male delegates had given their floor passes to the alternatives (women) who otherwise would have been in the balcony so that they could more closely share the moment with Ferraro.

But Ferraro also discussed the treatment she (and her family, including her ailing and elderly mother) received at the hands of the media.  She apologized for her language as she recounted that she and Mondale were known as “Fritz (his nickname) and Tits (not her nickname)”.  And she expressed her belief that the media treated Senator Clinton unfairly as well this time around.

Ferraro spoke candidly of the fact that she had shed a couple of tears upon seeing Clinton’s name on the ballot when she voted in the New York primary yet hadn’t welled up in 1984 she voted for herself.  She explained, “I am not an emotional person.  Yet, when I saw Hillary Clinton’s name on the ballot, I felt as though Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were there in the voting booth with me, and urging me to ‘pull the lever, pull the lever.’  The emotion I felt was because Clinton had a real chance of winning. I never thought we had a chance to win.”

By now you may be wondering how Ferraro made me feel better? 

Well, simply being in a room with someone who was such an ardent Clinton supporter made me feel better. 

And that fact that Ferraro is asking for a study to determine whether some of the media stepped “over the line” from their roles as journalists to those as analysts or even strategists made me feel that some of the worst offenders, at least, will get some sort of comeuppance.  I agree with Ferraro that it is important to explore the role of the media so that other women will not hesitate to run for public office because they are reluctant to put themselves in a position where no matter what they do, they can’t win in the press (my interpretation of her concern).

Ferraro also said that Clinton’s run has changed the face of American politics forever.  I agree, and definitely for the better.

Thanks, Gerry.  I needed that.

I hope you won’t find it too familiar to call you by your first name.  Studying you over the past year or so has caused me to feel as if I know you personally – so much more so than after you spent 8 years in the White House as First Lady.  I think that was your intention – to allow Americans to see who you are, not only what you stand for.  Once you opened yourself up to us, we opened our hearts to you.  What a wonderful leadership lesson for both men and women – vulnerability is not a liability but an asset. 

Thank you, Hillary, for the dedication you demonstrated to securing the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.  Do I agree with your stance on all of the issues?  No.  But do I respect and admire you for your selfless dedication to public service and your willingness to put yourself on the line, open to criticism, day after day, month after month?  You bet.  I don’t know how many of us would be willing to show the same courage under fire. 

You showed us in real-time what it means to walk The Thin Pink Line.  Moms, entrepreneurs, business professionals, volunteers, and even authors have learned invaluable lessons in a new brand of feminine leadership from how you handled yourself (and others) during the campaign.  Some of those lessons come from the myriad things you did right — others come from what you could have done differently.  Here’s what I know I will take away from your campaign — and what I hope other women will as well.

1.  We can be strong leaders without losing one ounce of our femininity.  You delivered tough messages fairly and kindly.  You played the game like a woman without playing the gender card.   

2.  We don’t have to acquiesce to louder male voices asking us to relinquish our goals.  By adhering to your vision to compete until every vote was cast and every voice was heard you persevered despite calls to step down.  

3.  Leaders have not only the right, but the responsibility to exhibit their emotions.  Masculine leadership is stoic.  Feminine leadership is genuine.  You showed us that in New Hampshire.

4.  Loyalty can be misplaced.  Like many women, you were loyal to those who showed loyalty to you — even when they  may not have been the best people for the job.  To best serve others, leaders must surround themselves with those who best serve them.  Tough decisions are best made sooner than later. 

5.  Focus on facts, not personalities.  You were at your best when you exhibited your command of the issues and concern for the American public, not reacting to the bait put out by opponents or critics.  Bill’s campaign strategy to counterattack doesn’t work for women leaders.   

6.  Fight fair, fight clean, but fight.  You waged an aggressive, but civilized, campaign.  You showed us that women can (and should) compete to win without going for the jugular. 

7.  Developing a leadership persona takes practice.  Over the course of the campaign the strident, tense Hillary was replaced by a woman with great confidence and ease in front of cameras and crowds.  As a professor once told me, “You demonstrate the self-confidence that comes with repetition.”

Again, thank you, Hillary.  You’ve represented all women, indeed all Americans, well.  You’ve changed the tone of political campaigns from animosity to even-handed competition.  You leave a legacy from which we can all learn and apply to our daily lives.  We look forward to learning even more from you in the years to come.

With gratitude and admiration,

Dr. Lois Frankel

However things turn out for Senator Clinton’s candidacy, this is a good thing. 

How does she do it? Where does such strength come from?

I’ve been reading a book, The Female Brain, in which Dr. Louann Brizendine, neuropsychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, explains that women have superior brain wiring for communication and emotional tones — even as infants. We see more relational subtlety. She argues, as do other researchers, that women and men have different brain sensitivities to stress and conflict. We could argue this for a lifetime, but there is a general perception that women have greater difficulty rebounding from disappointments in close relationships at work.

InThe Secret Handshake and It’s All Politics, though, I’ve written about women becoming “street fighters” and how important that capacity is to moving upward at work. So how do we go from being ultra-sensitive to being able to take a slam at work and get up again tomorrow ready to move on?

It takes a lot of learning the hard way, but here are a few important components: learning from watching others, including men, experience deep disappointment yet successfully move on, thinking about how someone you admire would handle it, getting some mentoring from street fighters, learning some defensive and offensive techniques, and learning how to read between the lines so you can anticipate such negative events before they even happen.

This is a tall order. If handling disappointment at work is one of the more difficult challenges you face, you could consider asking people about their worst disappointment, how they initially thought about it, who they went to for guidance, what they ultimately did and why it worked or didn’t.

Then you have to begin getting past small disappointments (that may seem large at first) so you can prepare yourself for bigger ones. No one escapes pain at work, but you can become better at putting it into perspective. As one T.V. commentator said of politics recently, “If you want a friend, get a dog.” While I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s impossible to make friends at work, it’s wise to know that work usually isn’t the place to look for your best ones.

Then a woman I met at last week’s Raleigh-Durham Chamber of Commerce Women’s Conference forwarded me an article entitled “We Scream.  We Swoon.  How Dumb Can We Get?” by Charlotte Allen writing for The Washington Post.  It almost made me doubt my confidence that women really do support one another.  You’ve got to read the article because there’s no way I can do justice to Ms. Allen’s venom, sarcasm, and condescencion toward women.  When I read it the first time I swore the author was an angry man using a feminine pen name.  I still hope that’s the case.  If not, it makes me wonder if Ms. Allen is projecting onto all women feelings she has about her mother (or perhaps Irish Grandmother) that would be best left for a therapy session.  Her statistics about women, men and cognitive ability are patently false.  And her suggestion that left to our own devices we would gravitate toward home and hearth is ridiculous.  Which just goes to show you can’t believe everything you read.

Next time you think a woman is your worst enemy or you can’t trust women, think again.  The playing field is already artificially narrowed for women.  Each time one of our own plays at the edge she widens the field for all of us — whether we personally like her or not and whether we personally want more space on the field or not.  We should be thanking Hillary Clinton for her efforts on our behalf.  We should put Meg Whitman’s picture on the dollar bill.  We should have a national holiday to celebrate Rosa Parks’,  Wilma Mankiller’s, Margaret Sanger’s and Harriet Tubman’s birthdays.  Are there some women jerks out there? Sure.  Ignore them and you’ll find many more women who can be your allies and advocates.

I’ve written in my books that we’re all at least 75% responsible for how people treat us. If we let ourselves be overlooked, patronized, dismissed, interrupted, and so on, we’re telling people it’s fine to keep doing so.

Is it fine for men to interrupt and talk over women, as Tim Russert and Brian Williams did repeatedly to Hillary Clinton the other night during the “debate”? In fact, research indicates that women are interrupted far more often. If women don’t decry such actions, we’ll all be seeing a lot more of them.

Barack Obama is an impressive man. But he is getting a free ride compared to Hillary Clinton. And many of us have seen that far too often to not recognize it. We won’t have enough women leaders until women as a group insist that we be criticized on substantive issues — the same ones used when judging men. When smirking and laughing together as Obama, Williams and Russert did when Hillary refused to be silenced wasn’t met with the same reactions when Barack went on and on, there’s a double standard. The longer that continues, the fewer women we’ll see in high places. Men will take these affronts as green lights to do the same at work. And of this I’m sure: Insults that come around and go unchallenged, come around again.