Identity Politics is a column written by veteran journalist Susan Milligan, covering the big issues in the socio-political ether as they intersect with design, art, and other modes of visual communication.

Inside Europe’s iconic cathedral was a tragic lineup of man-made disruption and grim foreboding. There was the host, French President Emmanuel Macron, whose government had just collapsed days before and was fending off calls to resign. There was First Lady Jill Biden, whose husband had been hounded from the presidential race, told that his re-election effort would merely ensure the re-installation of a convicted felon who pledged to be a dictator on day one. There was Donald Trump, who won, anyway, and was in the process of assembling a governing team with myriad ethical and political problems of their own. And there was Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, desperately trying to salvage what’s left of his war-ravaged country and knowing that Macron, and especially Trump, would hold tremendous power over the fate of his country and his people.

Then there was the Gothic guest of honor, Notre-Dame de Paris, its newly-rebuilt vaulted ceilings and restored artwork sending a singular, silent, and powerful message: I will endure. I have survived a devastating fire that threatened to end my 860-year-long life. My survival a testament to humanity’s resilience, stronger than any strongman whose time will come and, inevitably, go.

It’s been a trying time for many of us after the November elections, as we were hit with the painful truth that a plurality of our fellow Americans chose hate – or at least, decided that the hateful rhetoric spewed by the president-elect wasn’t a dealbreaker for them. And it’s not just Americans; people around the world are grappling with anti-democratic forces and helplessly watching as war destroys lives and communities in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan. Add in the escalating threat of climate change, and it’s fair to wonder and worry if we are facing the end times.

I had the tremendous privilege of getting inside the newly restored Notre Dame cathedral the week it re-opened and was relieved to hear the implied response from the structure: No. Architecture, art, and design are saying no; we will not let culture and humanity be destroyed, no matter how much humans themselves test our power.

That art and architecture outlast people is an indisputable truth, and people rely on it to sustain their culture and traditions long after they are gone. The original construction of Notre Dame is a testament to that fact. Building the cathedral took nearly two centuries, and the human commitment cannot be forgotten. Imagine the early builders of the cathedral, toiling away with 12th-century tools, knowing that only their descendants eight to ten generations later would see the finished result. It was a recognition that both the building itself and the concept of building would endure, providing a thread to hold together those generations no matter what wars, natural disasters, and political upheaval did to break those bonds.

Buildings matter. When the Twin Towers fell during the 9-11 attacks, the added insult to the unspeakable loss of human life was the assault on a symbol of New York City. And when a community chooses to rebuild, it is a defiant statement that the culture will not be erased.

Teatro La Fenice, the historic opera house in Venice, has been through it and rebuilt. “We burnt twice but twice we have risen from our ashes stronger. We are at your side, friends, so fear not!” the theater told its famous Parisian friend on social media after Notre Dame suffered its own blaze.

Warsaw did it. It’s a city, as we wryly observed when I was living in Central Europe in the 1990s, that was destroyed by the Nazis and rebuilt by the Russians — a terrible combination. The Poles lost about 90 percent of Warsaw due to German attacks during World War II, and artworks were destroyed or stolen on a massive scale. The Nazi’s point was not just to conquer Poland but to erase its culture, including its identity in architecture and art.

So, the Poles undertook a painstaking effort to rebuild the old town. With no photographic evidence to show what the historic area looked like, the Poles turned to art. Using the paintings of 18th-century artist Venetian artist Bernardo Bellotto to guide them, they rebuilt. Warsaw’s old town, while technically one of the capital city’s newer pieces of real estate, endures as it was in its golden age hundreds of years ago.

And so it was with the cathedral, sited at what was deemed in the 18th century the starting point of the roads of France. After the massive fire destroyed much of Notre Dame in 2019, the decision was quickly made to restore it. Suggestions to “modernize” it in some way – replacing the legendary spire with a 300-foot flame, a greenhouse, or a column of light – were speedily rejected as disrespectful, even blasphemous, to Notre Dame’s history.

Instead, two thousand workers – engineers, roofers, restorers, cleaners, and the organ specialists who cleaned, repaired, and reassembled the church’s famed organ – put Notre Dame back together again, pretty much exactly as it had been. They worked through the pandemic. They braved the threat of noxious dust. They restored 17th-century paintings. The most striking thing about the cathedral is how light it now is, the stone unblemished by weather, candle smoke, and centuries of grime that had made the interior darker for pre-fire visitors. There were some lovely new additions, including a copper figure – a combination of a rooster and a phoenix to symbolize the rebirth of the cathedral – that features the names of those who restored Notre Dame. A bell used at the Stade de France during Paris’ hosting of the 2024 Olympic games was donated to Notre Dame to ring with two smaller bells during mass.

But it’s still the familiar Notre Dame. And that’s important. It’s not just a place to worship, reflect, and gaze at old paintings. Notre Dame is a constant reminder that things can indeed endure despite history’s outside forces – a fire, a problematic political leader – disrupting things.

It’s a heavily emotional experience to enter the restored Notre Dame. One feels overwhelmed by a sense of community, shared sacrifice, and the stubborn resilience of art and creation. “It’s about building,” a Notre Dame worker told me as I breathed in the history of the newly refurbished cathedral. And it is, most importantly, about hope. Notre Dame wants us to know: We will survive.

Susan Milligan is an award-winning veteran journalist covering politics, culture, foreign affairs, and business in Washington, DC, New York, and Eastern Europe. A former writer for the New York Daily News, the Boston Globe, and US News & World Report, she was among a team of authors of the New York Times bestseller Last Lion: The Rise and Fall of Ted Kennedy. A proud Buffalo native, Milligan lives in northern Virginia.

Images courtesy of the author except where noted; header image design by Debbie Millman.

The post The Dame Persists Undeterred by Human Follies appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Identity Politics is a column written by veteran journalist Susan Milligan, covering the big issues in the socio-political ether as they intersect with design, art, and other modes of visual communication.

Hillary Clinton has a long career of being first. First female chair of the Legal Services Corporation in 1978. The first woman to be made a partner at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock the following year. First Lady of Arkansas, First Lady of the country (and first First Lady to hold a law degree), the first woman to be elected a US senator from New York (and first First Lady elected to the Senate). The first woman to win the Iowa caucuses and, of course, the first woman to win a major party nomination for president.

The ultimate first – making it to the Oval Office job – was beyond her grasp. And her 2016 loss had all the elements of the frustrations women have endured in less-publicized employment struggles: she won the popular vote but didn’t get the job because of arcane rules that are the election equivalent of old boy’s club practices that keep women out of the room where it happens. And the presidency didn’t just go to any man, but a man who was notorious for his misogynistic remarks, a man not stopped even when a recording emerged the month before the election in which he bragged about being able to “do anything” to women, even “grab ’em by the pussy,” because he was famous.

Such is the painful conundrum of being a trailblazing woman. You often get burned.

Now, Kamala Harris is trying to be the first woman president. And she’s avoiding some of the pitfalls that beleaguered Clinton because Harris is not actually branding herself as the would-be first woman president – let alone the first Black and Asian woman president.

Even though she is facing the same general election foe Clinton did (and Trump has actually escalated his misogynistic rhetoric this time around), Harris doesn’t draw attention to her gender or to the historic possibilities of her candidacy. It’s just there, without her remarking on it.

Hillary Clinton made her femaleness a part of her campaign – sometimes awkwardly so: in her first run, in 2008, she needled primary opponent Barack Obama for being a bit too sensitive to criticism. “I’m with Harry Truman on this,” Clinton said at a Pennsylvania rally that year. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Just speaking for myself, I am very comfortable in the kitchen.”

Harris, meanwhile, unironically talks about her favorite method of preparing collard greens: washing them in the bathtub and cooking them with bacon fat, garlic, and chili peppers. But it’s not in the reassuring context of – don’t worry; I still cook for my husband and kids even though I want to have my finger on the nuclear button. It’s just foodie talk.

Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits were a consistent topic of media conversation, despite the fact that the pantsuit was designed to serve as an unremarkable campaign uniform, much like a man’s suit. Harris wears pantsuits – sometimes with fashionable heels, sometimes with comfortable kicks – but there’s nary a mention of it in stories about her rallies. And while there have indeed been comments about Harris’s looks (Trump seems particularly obsessed with it, complaining about descriptions of Harris as a “beautiful woman,” and insisting he’s better looking than she is), it was Clinton who was the subject of a Washington Post story about displaying “cleavage” on the Senate floor (she didn’t, really, unless you looked very closely). And it seems an absurd observation now when we have a US senator content to wear hoodies and cargo pants on the Senate floor.

Harris has been sexualized, to be sure, with the right-wing suggestion that she “slept her way to the top” because she once dated former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown (never mind that she was a district attorney, state attorney general, and U.S. senator). But the slurs haven’t filtered into the mainstream media coverage of her, even on a sanitized or wink-wink level. Clinton, meanwhile, always had the albatross of her own marriage around her neck – blamed for staying with a straying husband.

Harris’s gender is an asset this year in a way that has zero to do with any kind of “first.” With reproductive rights a central issue in the election, Harris has an inherent credibility on the issue even the most pro-choice man in politics can never have. Her candidacy underscores the perverse contradiction this fall: can we really be ready to elect our first female president, even as women’s bodies have been increasingly under the control of the state? She doesn’t have to talk about how personally insulting it is to her, as a woman. It’s obvious.

And Harris has Clinton to thank for taking the front-line assault in the presidential gender wars. To be sure, Shirley Chisholm took the worst of it in 1972, when the idea of a woman (especially a Black woman) running for president was so anathema to American politics and culture that she wasn’t even allowed to participate in televised primary debates (only after legal action was she allowed to make one speech). She simply wasn’t taken seriously as a candidate for the highest office in the land.

Clinton was taken seriously, making the attacks on her more personal and arguably more vicious. And it paved the path for Harris, who could not have run a campaign so remarkably un-gendered if Clinton had not taken the hits first. Some of it is the times – people are more used to women leaders, making the possibility of a female president more normal and arguably inevitable. Clinton, too, reads more like a 1970s-era feminist, Wayne State University associate professor Janine Lanza, an expert on gender and politics, observed to me – and younger women can’t relate to that as much. Harris epitomizes a more modern kind of feminist. She doesn’t talk about it directly; she just lives it. And thanks to the advance work of trailblazers like Chisholm and Clinton, she just might end up living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

For added commentary, PRINT’s Amelia Nash reached out to design industry leaders for their take on the topic of gender, identity, and brand as they intersect in politics and electioneering. Read their responses here.

More topics in this series:

What the Age-Old Campaign Against Childfree Cat Ladies Doesn’t Get

Susan Milligan is an award-winning veteran journalist covering politics, culture, foreign affairs, and business in Washington, DC, New York, and Eastern Europe. A former writer for the New York Daily News, the Boston Globe, and US News & World Report, she was among a team of authors of the New York Times bestseller Last Lion: The Rise and Fall of Ted Kennedy. A proud Buffalo native, Milligan lives in northern Virginia.

Header image composite by Debbie Millman.

The post Kitchens, Pantsuits, and Cleavage Oh My! Running for President While Female appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Welcome to a new column we’re affectionately calling, Identity Politics. Written by veteran journalist Susan Milligan, we’ll be covering the big issues in the socio-political ether as they intersect with design, art, and other modes of visual communication.

“You’ll change your mind.”

I first heard those words when I was still a teenager, having just informed adults that I had no interest in having children. Such declarations were seen as a radical – and temporary – flirtation with Women’s Liberation and a misguided rejection of All Things Normal and Natural for females. At that age, I was treated with a patronizing kindness by those whose smug smiles conveyed their assurance that, of course, I would be overcome by baby fever, settle down, and consent into a life where I might well have a career, but of course would reproduce and always, always put my children first.

As I got older, my childless state became a source of perplexity, judgment, alarm, and finally, pity, as it became clear to others that the time had passed for me to fulfill my expected role as a mother. How could I have missed the memo, waved frantically in my face by myriad sources – older adults, media warnings about my ticking biological clock, advertisements, and marketing that celebrated marriage and parenthood? The sappy engagement ring ads, food sold in family-sized packages, the pregnancy test commercials that overwhelmingly featured married couples hoping so much for the little blue line that reveals that she – oops, “we,” in the couple-centric vernacular that erases the one thing a woman can do that a man can’t – is/are pregnant.

Decades later, despite dramatic demographic and social changes, we’re still in the same place. It’s arguably worse, since American politicians, opinion leaders, and marketers have had decades to adjust to the new reality of American households but haven’t. A first-of-its-kind 2021 Census Bureau report on childless older Americans found that nearly one in six adults age 55 and older are childfree. In 2023, 47 percent of adults under 50 said they were unlikely to have kids—a big jump from just five years previous, when 37 percent felt that way, according to the Pew Research Center. Another Census study found that 58 percent of households are childless (though this figure likely includes empty nesters), up from 7.7 percent in 1940.

The anger and outright hatred towards the childfree among us has been ugly and mounting. The silly (and suspiciously manufactured-looking) videos of “trad wives” on social media underscore the idea that a “traditional” wife, wearing a spaghetti-strapped tank top on her ballerina body, is so much happier staying home all day, making homemade Oreo-style cookies for her kids and waiting for her husband to get home from his paying job. A popular meme online contrasts drawings of two women—one, described as an “Established and Complete Woman,” in a flowy dress and smiling as she holds her husband’s, who is carrying one of their four children. The other depicts a scowling single woman with a cat, a sex toy, a glass of wine, a sorry-looking slice of pizza, and a tally of “men I’ve whored myself out to.” The moniker for this woman? “A Victim of Feminism.”

And now, the crusade against childfree women has become part of the presidential campaign. Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance in 2021 excoriated the “childless cat ladies” who are unhappy and “want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” Asked about the audio, unearthed after Vance became his party’s nominee for vice president, Vance snipped that he had nothing against cats. Another audio clip of Vance, discovered in August, features him castigating the head of a teachers union for not having children. “If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children,” Vance says, “she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”

Newsweek, which wrote a mea-culpa story in 2006 countering its own 1986 cover story warning single women that their chances of getting married after age 40 were lower than the chance of getting killed by a terrorist, hasn’t evolved. It’s just modernized the line of attack. An opinion column in the magazine this summer piously informed readers that wealthy and uber-successful Taylor Swift – one of the most effective brand ambassadors in the world – is a terrible role model for girls. Why? Because she is unmarried, has no children, and has had a lot of boyfriends.

And that’s the root of the anger and renewed backlash: it’s not (just) that women are remaining single and childfree. It’s that they’re happy that way. And that has provoked a range of reactions from incomprehension to out-and-out rage.

Sure, you won’t see ads anymore like the 1930s pitch for Listerine, noting of a halitosis-afflicted female: “And as her birthdays crept gradually toward that tragic 30-mark, marriage seemed farther from her life than ever. She was often a bridesmaid, but never a bride.” However, as Jess Lloyd, head of strategy at the advertising firm Hill Holiday, noted in a 2018 column in Adweek, single women still felt the judgment. In a study conducted by the firm, nearly half of single women felt “virtually nonexistent” in advertising, and when they were portrayed, it was often as “hyper-sexualized, desperate or lonely.”


Entertainment and food establishments offer “family days” and family discounts irrelevant to single and childless consumers. And while people drive alone more than three-fourths of the time (even more so for single drivers), vehicle advertising tends to show families and groups driving together, behavioral economist Peter McGraw wrote in a column for Contagious, a creative and strategic agency.

The underlying premise of political campaigns, media, and advertising is that singlehood and childlessness are temporary—states that people universally want to escape. That explains why Republicans – seeing the overwhelming electoral advantage Democrats have among single women – haven’t responded by crafting policies to appeal to that voter group. They’ve just tried to get them married. And more insidiously, shaming them into having children (or making it hard to end an unwanted pregnancy).

Good luck with that. According to the Census Bureau, women (and men) are marrying later. The Pew study found that the childless are not mostly reproductively challenged: 57 percent of the adults under 50 who said they are unlikely to have kids said a major reason is that they don’t want them. The side-by-side meme of a happy wife and mother and a miserable single woman means to insult unmarried, childless women. But it misses the point: very many women would prefer to be the female on the right than the one on the left. You can get over a hangover. There’s no recovering from a frontal lobotomy, as the woman on the left appears to have been given, in a caricature that’s arguably as insulting and reductive as the one depicting the single woman.

It will get nastier before the childfree cat ladies take their rightful role in politics and the consumer market. Eventually, candidates, advertisers, and the media will figure out that if they want our votes, our money, and our attention, they’re going to have to accept us as we are. In the stump speech slogan of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, we are not going back.

Susan Milligan is an award-winning veteran journalist covering politics, culture, foreign affairs, and business in Washington, DC, New York, and Eastern Europe. A former writer for the New York Daily News, the Boston Globe, and US News & World Report, she was among a team of authors of the New York Times bestseller Last Lion: The Rise and Fall of Ted Kennedy. A proud Buffalo native, Milligan lives in northern Virginia.

Header image background by Marlene Stahlhuth / Death to Stock

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