More than a decade ago, in 2007, in Revisiting Madam President, Lori Cox Han and Caroline Heldman asked the question: is the United States ready to elect a woman as president? Their answer then was an emphatic “no,” with the unsuccessful candidacy of Hillary Clinton in 2008 providing the exclamation point. Their recent book, Madam President: Gender and Politics on the Road to the White House, which takes us through the early 2020 primaries, comes to a different, much more nuanced conclusion of cautious optimism (p. 200). The results of the 2020 election suggest that we have reason to be more hopeful.

The first chapter, by Cox Han, provides an overview of the 2016 election, with an insightful analysis of the Clinton campaign and a prescient discussion of the pool of potential presidential candidates. The remaining chapters use a wide variety of qualitative and quantitative analyses, building on previous research and coming at the central question from a range of perspectives and time periods. For example, “Masculinity and Media Coverage on the Campaign Trail,” by Meredith Conroy, applies the theory of gender-conflict framing to a sample of 300 print-edition news articles from the New York Times and USA Today from 2000 to 2012; it explores how traditional print media reinforced a political culture of masculinity in presidential campaign coverage: “When media rely on masculine terms to elevate male candidates, and feminine qualities to debase male candidates, they are essentially elevating men and debasing women, and this will have implications for women running for the presidency for years to come” (pp. 70–71). Using a qualitative approach, Caroline Heldman’s chapter, “Electing a Woman President in the #MeToo Era,” examines how sexism and sexual violence shaped the 2016 presidential election and campaign rhetoric, arguing that Trump’s 2016 success “using sexism as a strategy, and so easily weather[ing] 22 allegations of sexual misconduct, does not bode well for future female presidential candidates” (p. 91).

Karen Hult, in “Sex, Gender, and Leadership in the Executive Branch,” also concludes, “It remains difficult to be confident that a woman soon will be elected president” (p. 160). She provides an in-depth look into women serving as governors, other elected statewide officers, mayors, and federal cabinet secretaries and agency heads as possible pipelines to the presidency. Most striking are the data on the number of female senior White House staff from 1969 to 2018, including the positions of senior adviser, assistant to the president, deputy assistant, and special assistant. The number of zeroes in the columns throughout the entire 20-year time period is stunning.

There is, however, some good news. Meena Bose’s chapter, “Gender and Leadership Challenges in National Security,” explores the challenges that female presidential candidates may face in the post–9/11 era regarding issues of national security and terrorism. Historical case studies of women as presidential and vice presidential candidates, including Margaret Chase Smith, Shirley Chisholm, Pat Schroeder, and Elizabeth Dole, provide the context for an analysis of the role that national security issues played in the 2008 and 2016 campaigns. Bose shows that national security issues and expertise (or lack thereof) did not play major roles in the success or failure of women’s candidacies, which is a “significant advancement” in the possibility of having a female president (p. 186).

Linda Beail and Lilly Goren, in “Women, the Presidency, and Popular Culture,” explore why television characters “should be taken seriously as insights into what disturbs, frightens, excites, and inspires us … about gendered power, especially executive power” (p. 98). Providing a deep dive into shows such as Madam Secretary, House of Cards, Scandal, The Good Wife, and Veep, the authors show that television today is a bright spot for how we envision women in power, concluding that female characters have “proliferated in number and diversity” and “have gained power and expanded opportunity, no longer limited to primarily domestic and supportive familial roles” (p. 117).

The subject matter covered in the chapters is much broader than the title of the book suggests. For example, the chapter by Anne Pluta and Misty Knight-Finley, “Comparing the Years of the Woman, 1992 and 2018,” analyzes the backgrounds of the women elected in these two election cycles to the US House. They find that the women elected in 2018 had higher levels of education, were much more diverse in their professional backgrounds, were less likely to have served in state legislatures, and were older than the women elected in 1992. In other words, the backgrounds of the women are looking more and more like the backgrounds of the men in the US House. Victoria A. Farrar-Myers, in her chapter “Money and Candidate Viability,” assesses the fundraising ability of US House members and their campaign expenditures and contribution sources in 2000, 2004, 2008, 2016, and 2018; she shows that successful female House candidates, especially successful female Republican candidates, spend more than their male counterparts. The ability to raise and spend money, particularly from small donors, is not a structural barrier for women, which is increasingly important in presidential elections. These chapters offer valuable insight into the women running for and serving in the US House. However, given that so few House members have used this office as a springboard to the presidency, it is not entirely clear what these chapters tell us about women on the road to the White House.

The chapter by Brian Frederick, Laurel Elder, and Barbara Burrell, “The Public’s Perceptions of Candidates’ Spouses,” explores how a First Gentleman might be perceived by the public. They provide a fascinating comparison of Melania Trump and Bill Clinton as the “least popular presidential candidate spouses in modern times” (p. 127). The authors conclude, “One factor that may spark an overhaul of traditional expectations for presidential candidate spouses would be a male assuming the role of presidential spouse” (p. 137). We may be seeing this overhaul beginning with vice presidential spouse Doug Emhoff actually quitting his job as a lawyer to be Second Gentleman, along with presidential spouse Jill Biden continuing her career as a college professor, making her the first First Lady to keep her day job.

Overall, the authors’ conclusions regarding the prospects of a woman president are mixed. The chapters that directly analyze campaigns, for the most part, focus on 2016 and prior elections. However, the recent success of Kamala Harris as the first female vice president has made it clearer that in the twenty-first century the political environment can change remarkably quickly. This edited volume is dedicated “to the first woman president: may she be elected sooner rather than later.” Given the astonishing numbers of women who ran for office in 2020, with Jill Biden already challenging traditional expectations for First Ladies and, most importantly, with Harris in the White House, the 2020 election brought us one big step closer to Madam President.