Where is our Good Queen Bess?

In a conversation with a colleague about Hillary Clinton I noted that it may have been easier for the British to elect the first female Prime Minister in 1979 than for Americans to elect the first woman President today because English cultural memory already has an example of a strong and respected female leader-- Elizabeth I-- as well as two successful later queens: Victoria and the present Queen Elizabeth II. Hereditary monarchy has a way of providing the occasional example of women who rule. And other countries have their own symbols of female leadership: France, for example, has Joan of Arc.

But America seems to lack an equivalent national symbol in our collective consciousness. We have plenty of admirable women in our history-- including Susan B. Anthony and Rosa Parks-- but they didn't rule the nation or lead it to military victory. We have Lady Liberty, but she is a statue, not a real person. And the English monarchs won't work so well for Americans-- we deliberately got rid of them.

So who, if anyone, would be the cultural equivalent for the American people of Queen Elizabeth or Joan of Arc? Myth and symbol are powerful things in American politics, indeed, in all politics. If there are no obvious candidates in the collective imagination, the first female President will have to forge her own cultural narrative of female leadership at the same time she runs for the Presidency; in the alternative, she will have to call on other leadership stories and symbols from our past and modify them in ways that are plausible to contemporary Americans. (The story of JFK as the first Catholic President is one such story). Or, even more likely, she will have to do both.