“I am standing here as your candidate for prime minister,” said Jo Swinson, the leader of the Liberal Democrats at their party conference this week. Boldly laying out her plan to ‘exit Brexit’ if they win the next election, she says, “There is no limit to my ambition for our party.”
Ah, ambition. That filthy admission that you may just want to succeed. Can be a major selling point… if you’re male. Practically grubby if you’re a woman.
Jo Swinson has it in spades, and not just for her party which, by the way, thanks to her, is up in the polls. Her declaration that she will take the Liberal Democrats all the way to number 10 is fighting talk, yes, but fighting talk it’s time we took seriously.
Jo Swinson is a more than credible threat to Boris Johnson, whom she has called a dictator who “only cares about himself” and Jeremy Corbyn, whom she has labelled a “1970s socialist” who is unfit to be prime minister. She has positioned herself as a better choice than this binary she is caught between and many have assumed her gender as the reason. Would it be awesome to see a woman elected our new prime minister, see a woman beat them both and clean up Brexit?
Err, yeah.
But careful now. Jo Swinson – like any female leader- should be judged on more than just the sum of her lady parts.
She joined the Lib Dems aged 17 and went on to become the youngest MP in the house, aged 25, and the first to be born in the 1980s. She has worked as spokeswoman for her party on a broad spectrum of issues including Scotland, women and equalities, communities and local government and foreign and commonwealth affairs. She has served in government; as parliamentary private secretary to Nick Clegg and also as parliamentary undersecretary for employment relations and postal affairs. In 2015, she was elected unopposed to become deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats.
She lives between Scotland and London with her husband Duncan Hames, a policy director and former Lib Dem MP himself, and her two young children, one of whom was born just last summer. She was state educated in Glasgow before gaining a first class degree from LSE and was a marketing manager before her jump into politics, where she has a fairly stellar voting record on everything from parental leave to gay marriage, welfare to human rights.
She is a woman who has clearly worked hard to get what she wants, who has stuck her neck out for her own progression, as well as that of her party. This behaviour would seem typical in any run-of-the-mill male politician, businessman or just, well, man. This is because male ambition is assumed, female ambition is… suspicious. Ambitious females are instead, greedy, grabby, cold-hearted, unusual. They are treated as anomalies and often taken down for their audacity. No wonder two-thirds of women in the UK claim to have imposter syndrome. We are conditioned to believe that striving to do better is somehow out of our reach, and that it would be almost unattractive to be ambitious.
Just look at the unkind and unjust vocabulary we appear to save only for female leaders. Margaret Thatcher was a battle-axe, a ball buster, an Iron Lady. Angela Merkel is frequently described as ‘mannish’ and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was met with an unpleasant barrage of undiluted misogynistic language. Whatever you may think of their politics, their actions are forever viewed through the prism of their gender; making it impossible to disentangle the commentary on their policies from the fact they are female. Just look at Theresa May. Her career as PM was bookended in mockery; first for her leopard print shoes and then the fact she welled up whilst resigning. Had she had testicles instead of kitten heels, this latter display of emotion would have been roundly praised. Instead, it only served to bolster the campaign of a certain mop-headed old Etonian, whose entire run for leader rested on his promise that a bolder, louder, more aggressive male would get us a better deal on Brexit.
Jo Swinson is stepping up for a job where 98% of her predecessors have been men, on to a political stage where the overwhelming majority of templates for behaviour have been male. This is the space she is now operating in, where her every move, speech, outfit and, yes, ambition, will be viewed with more intense scrutiny because she happens to be a woman. As she said herself recently, we are kidding ourselves if we think otherwise. Late last year, Jeremy Corbyn allegedly called Theresa May “stupid woman” and just last week, Swinson herself was told to “sit down darling” in the House of Commons. Commenting this week on a recently-leaked handwritten note of Boris Johnson’s, calling Cameron a “girly swot,” Swinson said the insult was “rather revealing”: “If he thinks being a woman is somehow a weakness, he’s about to find out it is not.”
This is why Jo Swinson, whether you care to vote for her or not, is the poster girl for modern female ambition. Thanks to examples like hers, women are waking up to the idea that ambition should not be unexpected in a woman, but a necessary component for progress. Look at the tidal wave of bold, brilliant female politicians emerging in America; from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren, and the change they can instigate. Swinson is part of this movement, of wiping clean female ambition of its unfair and unsavoury reputation, and re-positioning it as potent, equal and much-needed force to be reckoned with.
After all, aren’t we tired of holding ourselves back? Isn’t it exhausting that female ambition comes at such a price; of ridicule, derision or the offhand suggestion that we should “sit down darling?”
We do not expect women to be ambitious, but we should.
Jo Swinson will not sit down, darling. And nor should we.
