In 1995, Walmart banned this "Someday a woman will be PRESIDENT!' shirt. https://t.co/yJn6eJKWbf pic.twitter.com/Al9V2lucU0
— NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt (@NBCNightlyNews) July 28, 2016
Come November 2016, now that she’s officially the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton could become the first female president of the United States. At the same time, reporters unearthed a 1995 story when Walmart pulled a T-shirt from their racks that featured a cartoon drawing of a girl proclaiming, “Someday a woman will be PRESIDENT!”
According to the Washington Post, the cartoon was a frame from a “Dennis the Menace” comic strip, and it was made by Ann Moliver Ruben, a psychologist who wanted to give girls more confidence in their leadership abilities. This desire arose after she surveyed 1,500 elementary school students in Miami, and found that only half of them believed that a woman could one day be president.
Ruben sold the T-shirt to a Walmart store near Miami, but the store pulled the item after customers complained that it was too “political.” But Ruben got the story to the Associated Press, which culminated in a protest in front of the store, as well as women flooding Walmart with their phone calls to express concerns. Walmart’s spokesman then said the company overreacted, and later order 30,000 t-shirts for over 2,000 stores.
Amazingly, the Washington Post interviewed Ruben — who is now 91 — after Clinton officially became presidential nominee.
“I’ve been waiting 83 years to see what happened yesterday,” she told The Washington Post on Wednesday in a phone interview. “This is a wonderful time in our history, and I thank God I’ve lived to see it happen.”
Boing Boing has a scan of the original Associated Press article, where Ruben had responded to Walmart pulling this T-shirt by expressing sorrow that “promoting females as leaders is still a very threatening concept in this country.” Unfortunately, this prospect still probably scares a large swath of America, but it’s hard to deny that we haven’t made progress in seeing Clinton get so close at this juncture. If it has gotten easier to imagine women in leadership roles, including the presidency, then Ruben’s shirts probably have something to do with that.
(via Washington Post and Boing Boing)