Edited by Jasmine Ryu Won Kang
It is official: Kamala Harris is the first female elected Vice President in the history of the United States and the first South Asian candidate elected into the Oval Office. Senator Harris’s election to vice presidency is punctuated by a critical moment in American history when COVID-19 has taken the lives of over 200,000 Americans and infected nearly 10 million Americans. Her groundbreaking victory as Vice President represents more than just a milestone for women in office – it is also emblematic of a new age for women in positions of power that continue to shatter the glass ceiling and challenge the status quo.
Born in Oakland, California, Kamala Harris is the daughter of immigrants. Her mother Shymala Gopalan was a cancer researcher from India, while her father Donald Harris was an economist who immigrated from Jamaica. In 2016, Harris was California’s third female senator and the second Black woman elected into the Senate. Harris’s candidacy gave thousands of women a reason to head to the polls this election, as they hoped to one day live to see a woman assist in the healing of a deeply divided country in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. However, as Harris proclaimed in her speech, she aims to “to walk by faith, and not by sight,” and leads by example when no other woman has walked a mile in her shoes as the Vice President of the United States of America.
This election marks four years after Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Many people feared that what happened in 2016 would happen again, and a woman would lose due to the myth that the country would not be ready yet to see a woman serve as President or Vice President. Since then, American women have mobilized voters all across the country and pushed against voter suppression in states like Georgia in pursuit of a brighter future for working-class families, immigrants, and women of colour. Stacy Abrahms is a testimony to this – for a decade, she worked alongside grassroots organizations in Georgia to register more voters and turned the southern state blue for the first time in nearly 28 years since Bill Clinton’s presidential win in the 1990s.
Harris’s political rise to power is also a turning point in female participation in Congress, as the 2020 election cycle saw more Black women run for Congress than at any other time in history – 130 Black women were candidates running for Congress this year. The Center for American Women and Politics reports that this resulted in 24 Black women serving in Congress this election cycle out of an overall 131 women, with 100 Democrats and 31 Republicans. Kamala’s ethos on gender representation in office is illuminated in her statement: “While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last—because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.”