Can women break the ‘glass ceiling’ in a ‘man’s world’? Or is that the wrong question?

Editor’s note: August 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the adoption of the 19th Amendment, and racist policies kept too many women of color from the polls for decades beyond that. 

As we mark this anniversary and weigh that history, MPR News with Kerri Miller is asking: What does it mean to be a woman in America today? This series airs weekly; our conversations have looked at the role of Black women and power over time and women’s access to political power following the nomination of Sen. Kamala Harris for vice president of the Democratic ticket.

Political adviser and author Jennifer Palmieri writes that her usual response to losing a campaign is to keep fighting, but the 2016 election took a lot out of her. The former director of communications for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2016 campaign for president took a moment to see what the world would do.

As she shares in her new book “She Proclaims: Our Declaration of Independence from a Man’s World,” there was a turning point for her: the Women’s March in 2017.

Palmieri writes: “As soon as I saw the news reports detailing the numbers of women who’d turned out for the march, I knew that women had turned a corner for good. Women in America had each other’s backs in a way I have never experienced before, and it made me grateful beyond measure. It also gave me hope.”

MPR News host Kerri Miller talked with Palmieri Tuesday about the history of the suffrage movement, feminism, access to power and Palmieri’s vision of women declaring freedom from a man’s world and their worth.

Guest: 

• Jennifer Palmieri is a Democratic political adviser and the author of “Dear Madam President: An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Run the World.” Her latest book is “She Proclaims: Our Declaration of Independence from a Man's World.”