At a rally for former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump in September, Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders schmoozed with the crowd about how her kids keep her humble. “Unfortunately, Kamala Harris,” she said, mispronouncing the vice president’s name, “doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.”
The remark was widely interpreted as a jab at Harris’s blended family, which her political rivals use to cast her in a selfish light, as though the choice to not have biological children is shameful. Harris addressed the disparaging comments about her family on a recent episode of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, telling host Alex Cooper, “This is not the 1950s anymore. Families come in all shapes and forms.”
But it was her response to the attack on her vanity that sent my jaw to the floor. She could have taken the opportunity to make any number of pithy digs at her opponent, a man so vain he’s put his own name on skyscrapers, steaks, and a university. But instead, Harris threw the whole concept – that humility is the epitome of virtue – under the star-spangled campaign bus. “I don’t think [Huckabee Sanders] understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who are not aspiring to be humble,” she told Cooper.
In 2021, 63 percent of all graduate degrees were granted to women. Women activists have organized some of the biggest protest movements in modern history, including Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. More women than ever are being elected to office. Between a gender pay gap, over-policing of Black communities, Black maternal mortality rates, and the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, to name just a few issues, today’s women literally can’t afford to be humble. Our bodies, our livelihoods, and our futures depend on our advocacy for our own self-worth.
Since the earliest days of the American revolution, humility was considered the patriotic duty of women, whose primary role was to serve their husbands and sons – those who could think out loud and voice the bold opinions they weren’t entitled to have. Humble women couldn’t vote until the 1920s, because it was understood that their opinions didn’t matter. For much of history, humility was the line between life and death for women who could legally be physically abused by the men in their households. And racist labels like “uppity” have been used to justify the institutional abuse of Black women since the time of slavery.
Until only recently, a woman’s humility had been compulsory, written into law. And while a lot of that policy has been undone (thanks to the tireless work of some very outspoken activists who are remembered for their bravery, not their humility), the attitudes animating those policies still shape life for a lot of women and girls.
The subtext of Huckabee Sanders’s accusation was that the choice to not have biological children stems from an over-inflated ego. But women don’t need to give birth to be humbled – just the experience of moving through the world as a woman is humbling enough. In the US, you might be put down, told you can’t do certain things, reduced to your physical appearance, all in a day. You might be gaslit, your worth might be questioned. You will be underestimated. You might be assaulted. You might be blamed for your own trauma. If you do actually consider childbirth, you might be denied life-saving healthcare.
Sometimes we have to laugh when sexism humbles us, like when we carry an iced latte, three pears, and some vinyl records all in our hands because our clothes aren’t built with big enough pockets. But most of the time, it’s pretty sobering.
Many of even the most high-achieving women can chart their adolescence by episodes of gendered humiliation. In sixth grade, I was placed in the middle school honors band, where I beat out a group of older boys for a competitive spot as the first-chair trumpeter. I faced so much sexual harassment that year that I quit before I started eighth grade.
In high school, in front of the whole class, my physics teacher told me to put a cardigan over my tank top because I could be giving someone the wrong idea. In college, invigorated by the freedom of traveling without my parents for the first time, my friends and I were grossly sexually harassed on a public bus and were terrified to travel without men for the rest of our semester abroad. After two years in my first job out of school, I asked for my first raise. I excelled in the role, and had compiled information about competitive rates to show that I’d done my homework. I was told that I was asking for something unreasonable and soon after got a demotion.
The resting state for women in this country is humility. The work is to overcome it, not let it stifle. If anyone needs a dose of humility, it’s the men in power who think they have the authority to play games with women’s bodies. It’s the people who stormed the capitol thinking they could overturn the results of the election with violence. It’s the people who believe their religion and their worldview should dictate the lived experiences of everyone regardless of individual beliefs. The people who most need a reality check are the men who feel entitled to everything without having really earned anything.
Humility can be beautiful in the right context. It can breed kindness, deep listening. It can lead to empathy, respect, personal responsibility. Humility can be healing. And it’s something we should demand from our leaders when they inevitably get things wrong, whether it’s their weak climate policy, their funneling of taxpayer money into wars and prisons, or their removal of constitutional protections for the right to an abortion – all mistakes I wish our politicians could summon the humility to correct.
But the form of humility championed by Huckabee Sanders and other mouthpieces of the GOP – the biblical virtue that’s been weaponized against women for millennia – has no place in politics.
I don’t want to live in a country that prizes a woman’s humility over her potential or her intellect, her ingenuity or her spirit. “You can’t grow the strength of our country if you underestimate the capacity of each person,” Harris told Cooper in that same interview. Whether or not we choose to uplift ambitious women, we will all have to live with the consequences for years to come.
Emma Glassman-Hughes is the associate editor at PS Balance. Before joining PS, her freelance and staff reporting roles spanned the lifestyle spectrum; she covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, travel for Here Magazine, and food, climate, and agriculture for Ambrook Research.
