Bar Business
GLASS EVERYWHERE REFLECTIONS ON WAITING FOR OUR FIRST FEMALE VICE PRESIDENT By Ashley Senary Dahlberg
Photo courtesy of Lauren Corriveau.
A
fter the election of Senator Kamala Harris to our second-highest executive office, my social media feeds filled with one viral image: a depiction of Harris, as an adult woman, clad in her signature dark pantsuit, triumphantly striding alongside a depiction of a young Ruby Bridges, in her dress and pigtails. Both familiar images, the two, together, stirred emotions in me: pride, relief, triumph, and more than a touch of bittersweetness. Four years and several days prior to Harris’s ascension, I joyfully arrived at the office in a white pantsuit, bounding around, giddy at what seemed like the imminent election of a woman lawyer to the nation’s highest office.1 Since then, I’d put the pantsuit away. Something about it
bothered me. It seemed . . . misplaced. A relic of a very particular time, and a very specific hope. If a suit can look both overly expectant and dejected all at once, this one did. So much looks different now too, four years since that night in 2016, when so many women like me held their collective breaths. I look different now, too. I’ve birthed another child and spent too many long days and nights in my office chair during the pandemic, working and fretting over the state of most things. Beyond the suit’s literally not fitting, I didn’t feel like looking at the suit, and so I stuffed it into the back of the closet next to the symbolic things – the things we save but know we’ll never wear – that we can’t bear to part with. I tucked it next to my wedding dress (never washed, but
carefully bagged) and a flimsy cap and gown. I also tucked away my long-held sigh. That, I tucked into my chest, hoping it would not suffocate me when I least expected it. It, like the suit, would have to wait for a day I hoped would arrive within my lifetime. Four years and several days later, Harris, a woman lawyer, would finally be named to ascend to the second highest executive office in the land. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, himself a powerful lawyer, was now, too, a trailblazer in his own right. Yet, there she was—and there he was—a seemingly impossible vision-comereality, underneath a sky of dancing drones and bursting fireworks. She’d worn a white pantsuit, and I exhaled slowly. On Saturday morning, on the day the election was called, I’d begun stringing up our Christmas tree with my five-year-old son. I had been looking at the inside of my home (and nowhere else) for so many months, and my bottle of celebratory wine (replaced, since 2016) was still sitting in the fridge. The wait, it seemed, would continue. My breath would stay buried a bit longer. I needed some light, quite literally. When the election was finally called, I was in the middle of the frustrating task of untangling a string of lights as my toddler grew increasingly impatient. I turned the television louder and walked right up to it, looking closely at Harris on my screen. I stood a foot away, in what I know was subconsciously my need to really look and make sure that the woman on my screen was real. I turned my phone’s video camera on and pointed at the television. “Do you see that LADY?” I said to my son. “THAT LADY is going to be the Vice President of the United States.” That week, my son had learned about voting in his virtual kindergarten class. “Do people vote for the Vice President, too?” Yes. Yes, they do. I may have cried a little. The photo of Harris and Bridges was so stirring because it was a reminder that we are not alone and that, together, we can achieve extraordinary, difficult things. Harris herself invoked this idea in several speeches prior to the election; that is, that she does not stand alone before us, but instead is simply the highest and most visible pillar of a community of women, particularly Black and brown women, who for so long have been passed over. As a child, in 1960, Ruby Bridges desegregated the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. Bridges, though depicted as a child
January–February 2021
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San Antonio Lawyer 19
