Dear Madam President: An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Run the World by Jennifer Palmieri
Jennifer Palmieri was the Director of Communications for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. It was this experience and the difficult lessons she learned during this campaign that inspired her to write the Dear Madam President, an emotional and inspirational open letter to the eventual first woman president of the United States, and the future women leaders everywhere in the world.
In the Dear Madam President, Jennifer Palmieri also talks about Hillary Clinton. That said, this is not a book about Hillary, but about the challenges she had to face, not least of which is confronting the misogynist and authoritarian demagogue Donald Trump.
When Jennifer Palmieri joined Hillary's Clinton 2016 campaign, she didn't think it was going to be that hard or even that big of a deal to elect the first woman president. America has already elected the first black president, and that seemed a more difficult thing to do. She admits that she was wrong on two accounts. First, she didn't appreciate, from a historical perspective, what a big deal it was to elect a woman as a president, and second, see didn't realise that all this "stuff" that hanged around Hillary stemmed from the fact that she was a woman.
Palmieri does not believe that everyone who voted against Hillary did so for sexist reasons but she believes that the pervasive gender bias that Hillary Clinton encountered during the 2016 presidential campaign held her back in many ways.
Jennifer Palmieri argues that in order to make easier for all women working to succeed in whatever role they choose, we need to understand what happened in 2016 and not allow this kind of disaffection and corrosive alienation to take hold again in the future. Her advice to future Madam President is to start listening to what people have to say, even when she does not agree with them, and also to make sure that there is a place for everyone at the table. Calling out women who remain quiet during a conference for example, and having a vibrant exchange of ideas, will increase their confidence and their ability to try to succeed.