Meet Marianne, She Founded Feminist.com and Has Spent Spent 30 Years Amplifying Feminist Voices
What will it take to make a woman president? This is one of many questions on women’s leadership that Marianne Schnall has ventured to answer through her work as a journalist, author, and interviewer.
Marianne is the founder of Feminist.com, and her journalism has led her to interviews with prominent female leaders including Maya Angelou, Gloria Steinem, Oprah Winfrey, Melinda Gates, Jane Goodall, and more. Her work has appeared in CNN, Refinery29, TIME, Huffington Post, and ForbesWomen, and she is the author of the book What Will it Take to Make a Woman President?, which includes interviews with politicians, public officials, and activists exploring the intersections between women, leadership, and power.
FEMINIST sat down with Marianne to discuss feminism and women’s leadership:
What does being a feminist mean to you?
Being a feminist to me starts with the dictionary definition of feminism: “the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.” From there it is also making sure we are talking about and aiming for a feminism that is “intersectional”—a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw whom I have interviewed many times—which takes into account the intersections of our multiple identities as a “prism for seeing the way various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other.” And feminism to me very much includes men and all genders and non-binary identities. We are all harmed by constrictive gender roles and stereotypes that prevent us from living a life that allows us to embrace all our human qualities and be our authentic selves. Feminism is also the right and ability to make our own choices for ourselves, and to get the support we need to follow our true calling to chart our own destiny.
You've had such an inspiring career, from authoring multiple books to interviewing leaders like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Wangari Maathai, and Jane Fonda. Where did your feminist journey start?
I started out in my twenties as a reporter for an entertainment magazine interviewing celebrities and covering industry events, which was exciting but didn’t fulfill me in a deep way. A turning point for me was in 1992, when I asked to cover the March for Women’s Lives at the National Mall in Washington. That was my first time interviewing feminist and political activist figures like Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda. It was also the first time I was part of a rally of hundreds of thousands of people coming together to speak out for the issue of reproductive choice and control over our own bodies, which I honestly can’t believe we are still defending today. I was so moved by that powerful experience that I decided I only wanted to interview thought leaders and celebrities who had an important message or were helping to highlight a cause or organization creating positive change in the world. It was after interviewing and working with Gloria Steinem, and interviewing other feminist figures, that I felt like my real feminist journey began, and I went on to found Feminist.com a few years later. Gloria has remained a very important mentor and role model for me. My mother, Carol Schnall, who passed away last year, was an important feminist role model for me too. She was a trailblazer in her own right, convincing her skeptical, old-fashioned father, my grandfather, to let her take over the family business, becoming one of very few female executives in the glass industry where she excelled and earned a great deal of respect. I feel like I am still learning and deepening my feminist journey, especially as the mother of my two incredible daughters who are in so many ways so much more self aware and confident than I was at their age, both doing great things in the world. As much as we have to learn from older generations of women, there is a lot we can learn from younger generations right now as well.
Obviously, we're huge fans of online feminist platforms. What inspired you to launch Feminist.com? Who did you create it for?
It is hard to believe that Feminist.com will celebrate our 30-year anniversary in 2025! When I first launched the site with a group of women colleagues in 1995, it was inspired by the fact that in the early days of the Internet, only 15% of Internet users were women. Most organizations weren’t online and didn’t have websites, so we wanted to provide the very first Web presence for a variety of important women’s groups like the Ms. Foundation, V-Day, Equality Now, Girls Inc., Voters for Choice and others. We helped organizations share their information and provided content, resources, information and networking to encourage more women to go online. It is so wonderful after all these years to see how much the Internet has grown to be a thriving place, uplifting so many feminist voices, organizations and platforms (including FEMINIST!), and our site and organization has evolved as the Internet and feminism have evolved over the years. In fact, we are currently in the process of reimagining the Feminist.com site for our 30-year anniversary in 2025, so stay tuned for more details on our relaunch! But our mission will always stay the same: to help educate people about what feminism is and serve as a hub to uplift diverse feminist voices and organizations and connect people to feminist news, resources, actions and each other—more important today than ever.
Your book What Will It Take to Make a Woman President? was recommended by Beyoncé! How did you get the idea for this book?
The book was inspired by a question from my then 8-year-old daughter, Lotus. After Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, one morning we were talking in the kitchen about how exciting it was to have our first African American president. She started running through all the names of the presidents she could remember and realized they were all male and innocently asked me, “Have we ever had a woman president?” I told her no, and she asked, “Why haven’t we ever had a woman president?” I tried to answer her the best I could and then thought to myself, That is a really interesting question that I should work into some of my interviews sometime. Then, shortly before the 2012 election, when the number of women in the House of Representatives had just decreased rather than increased, I was on the red carpet covering an event for CNN and decided to work in “What will it take to make a woman president?” as one of my questions to the people there, including Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, and Arianna Huffington. I came back home and asked others, including Nancy Pelosi and Kirsten Gillibrand, to respond to that question as well. That article wound up on CNN’s home page and got so much attention that my agent suggested this be my next book. I reached out to Gloria Steinem to see what she thought about that book concept and asked if she would grant me an interview. She encouraged me, saying she knew I would look at it through a variety of lenses and perspectives, and she agreed to be my first interview for the new book. I wound up interviewing 48 people from elected officials to activists, journalists to artists, and explored not only how we could get a woman president and more women into the political pipeline, but how we could advance more women leaders across all industries. It was an incredible journey, one that I am revisiting again now with the prospect of electing Kamala Harris as our first Black and South Asian woman president, sharing some never-heard-before audio from my archives and doing new interviews to get insights on this pivotal and historic moment for a special election series platform and podcast.
While writing the book, you interviewed some incredible women, including Maya Angelou and Gloria Steinem. What were the biggest lessons you learned during the writing process?
There was so much commonality among the answers. All of the interviewees shared that the symbolism alone, of finally breaking that glass ceiling and electing a woman president, would have a profound impact on the U.S., the world, and women and girls who have been limited by the reality that “you can’t be what you can’t see.” They also talked about the substantive benefits, since women bring important attributes, experiences, and perspectives to politics and leadership. Many people also spoke about having women and diversity in politics as a matter not just of equality but as a necessity to having a reflective democracy. I also learned a lot about the barriers that women candidates in politics face: sexism and bias in society and media coverage, the hurdles of fundraising, and the lack of policies that support working women and families, like paid leave and affordable child care. And many made the point that, in addition to structural obstacles, women often also face internal glass ceilings of not seeing themselves as leaders in the first place. The disempowering messages society and the media give women and girls encourages them to fit in, conform, to be “liked” all the time, to value others’ opinions more than their own—distractions that are not congruent with developing confidence and being effective leaders. Finally, the importance of being our authentic selves. This was one point Nancy Pelosi said again in a recent interview when I asked what advice she would give Kamala Harris or other women leaders, and she replied, “Just be yourself.” If we do pursue leadership, we need to have faith in our vision and what we uniquely bring as a leader.
You first came up with the idea for What Will It Take to Make a Woman President? during the 2008 election, after Barack Obama's election in 2008. Now that 12 years have passed, what would it mean to you for Kamala Harris to be elected America's first woman President?
Having spent so much time immersed in this subject of how important this milestone would be for so many reasons, it would be so monumental to finally celebrate breaking what Hillary Clinton has called, “the highest, hardest glass ceiling.” It would signify that our country is ready to move into the future and would be symbolic for girls and women everywhere to know that they can reach the highest office in the land. It would also be significant for boys and men, to get more accustomed to seeing women as leaders and transform our often outdated notions of what leaders and leadership look like. And the fact that Kamala Harris is multiracial means that this would be additionally important and inspiring for Black women, South Asian women, people of all races—so many people could see themselves represented in her victory. It would mark a very hopeful direction in terms of paving the way for the representation and diversity that we know that we would all benefit from. It will be powerful!
What is the best advice you've ever received as a journalist?
Having had the pleasure of interviewing many incredible high-profile figures throughout my career, I have received so much brilliant life advice and wisdom. If you ask my daughters, they’ll tell you I always go around quoting the people I interview, for example this quote from Jane Fonda: "We're not supposed to be perfect; we're supposed to be complete. And you can't be complete if you're trying to be perfect." I also always loved this insight from my interview with Amy Poehler, about learning how to "surf your life": "Find your center of balance. Face the waves, try to catch one, ride it and know it will end, but another one will come!" And Oprah once offered me this piece of advice about taking time for stillness: “Drowning out the noise of the world helps reconnect you to your own happiness.”
One particular figure I had the honor of interviewing twice, and whose words I continue to draw upon in my life, are from poet and civil rights activist Dr. Maya Angelou. After she passed away, I was asked by Forbes to write a tribute article: 5 Lessons I Learned From My Interviews With Maya Angelou. Some examples of wisdom she shared with me, which I often repeat to myself, to my daughters, and to others in a variety of contexts throughout my life, are when she told me, “I would encourage us to try our best to develop courage. It's the most important of all the virtues, because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can be anything erratically—kind, fair, true, generous, all that. But to be that thing time after time, you need courage.” Another point she made that I think about a lot was, “We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated. It may even be necessary to encounter the defeat, so that we can know who we are.” These powerful messages of cultivating courage, growth, self awareness, strength, and resilience seem especially relevant and important right now and a wonderful way for us all to honor Dr. Angelou’s legacy.
