Women’s Ambition 100 Years in the Making

The night before we celebrated 100 years of white women finally getting the right to vote, a black woman dominated the political conversation.

“So let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can,” former First Lady Michelle Obama said in her Democratic National Convention keynote. “Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.”

Less than a week before we marked 100 years of white women finally getting the right to vote, another woman of color had people actually coveting newspapers because her face was splashed on their front pages.

“[Trump] inherited the longest economic expansion in history from Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and then, like everything else he inherited, he ran it straight into the ground,” said vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris in her recent acceptance speech.

One hundred years after the 19th amendment was ratified, this is what ambition looks like, worn proudly. Hang that thing like a flag with a capital A and let it flutter and fly for all the world to see.

At a time when we seem to be on the cusp of understanding that equal representation is not charity, settling, window dressing, affirmative action or tokenism, are we really still in conversations about whether ambition is a derogatory term when applied to a…