Strategy that has been used for ages to demonise female leaders

A reader’s feedback recently piqued my curiosity enough to revisit the story of Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution. Like many of us, I had carried the popular version of her story for years. The frivolous, vain queen who supposedly told her starving subjects to ‘eat cake.’ Except she never actually said it.

History, it turns out, did what society often does when systems fail. It found a woman to blame.

Contrary to popular belief, Antoinnette did not trigger the French Revolution, nor was she the architect of France’s economic collapse back then. Long before she became queen, the country was already deep in debt from issues other than her fashion sense and love for beautiful spaces.

But it was more sensational to blame her. She was a woman, a fashionable one at that, a foreigner and most critically, married into the highest office. That made her the perfect target to channel the public’s outrage.

To rile up the masses, scandalous pamphlets, the Twitter of their age, were distributed to portray her as immoral, sexually deviant, manipulative and extravagant. The revolutionaries figured that the more outrageous the accusations, the more upset the public got. She became the face of a failing system. They used her to validate their anger and cement her place in history as someone she herself could barely recognise.

Centuries later, the same strategy is being used to fight and undermine women in leadership.

The other day, a doctored photo of a female politician flooded our screens. In the manipulated image, she appeared to be attending a public rally in a mini skirt. The intent was obvious. To discredit her worthiness as a leader by shifting the conversation from her vision to morality and decency. Because attacking women for their competence requires proof, opponents resort to attacking their morality because it not only sells faster, but it also provokes outrage and distracts the public from what truly matters.

Technology may have evolved, but misogyny has not. It simply adapted to new terrains. Sexualised attack on women in leadership did not start today. Besides working at proving their intellectual worth, women struggle with the burden of proving their virtues to a public that has no moral basis to judge them. When a woman rises to public life, scrutiny quickly shifts from how she can serve to her appearance, marital status, her tone and even her fashion sense. The tragedy is, women have been known to be the harshest critics of their fellow women.

Several centuries later, is it right for society to continue engaging women through such narrow and misplaced lenses? History is full of women who have risen to leadership by sheer grit, wisdom and charisma. Leaders like Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia, Angela Merkel in Germany, and our very own Wangari Maathai confronted scepticism and went ahead to lead with grace and strength. Their legitimacy had nothing to do with their skin tone, dress size, or appearance. They were simply competent.

The danger of continuing with this view is that it discourages capable women from stepping forward to seek leadership and, in so doing, denies society worthy service. Our democracy suffers every time a woman is forced to retreat to the background because of incessant sexualised propaganda and falsehood that have nothing to do with her work. For most, the cost isn’t worth it.

Antoinette was not executed for any crime. She was not imprisoned and subjected to torture because she betrayed her country. She was imprisoned, unfairly tied and sent to the guillotine because she was a woman in proximity to power. The public needed a face, a symbol for their anger, to validate their anger, and she fit the bill.

She never said "let them eat cake," but a lie repeated too many times became her death sentence. In our time, travel lies even faster and wider. A lie retweeted, a manipulated photo, or a misleading post shared too many times is just as destructive. Technology has changed, but what needs to change along with it is the objectification and weaponisation of women.

Ms. Wekesa is a development communication consultant