washingtonpost.com – Tuesday morning, after the Associated Press had called the Democratic nomination for Hillary Clinton, and before the round of primaries that put her over the top with pledged delegates Tuesday night, I sent out a call for readers favorite fictional female presidents, now that this particular fantasy is a step closer to becoming an American reality.
The results only served to illustrate how shallow our dreams of female leadership have tended to run. People overwhelmingly cited Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell), the secretary of education who becomes president when humanity comes under devastating attack in the science fiction series “Battlestar Galactica,” with a few votes for Geena Davis, who played a vice president who also ascends to the top job when the president dies, albeit under entirely normal circumstances, in “Commander in Chief.” And as I waited for election results to roll in across the country on Tuesday, I found myself thinking less of fictional women who have led their societies and more about talented women of both history and invention who were destined to rise only as high as, and in tandem with, their husbands.
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