When Walmart banned a T-shirt about women becoming president
In 1933, Ann Moliver Ruben said her cousin, Irwin, told her that a girl could never be president.
Decades later, corporate America, it seemed, was trying to tell her the same thing.
Ruben, a psychologist from Pittsburgh, had been studying children’s perceptions of women leaders in the 1990s when she stumbled upon a Dennis the Menace comic strip in a Sunday newspaper — an episode in which a young, curly-haired feminist named Margaret told him: “Someday a woman will be president!”
Ruben put the slogan on T-shirts and sold them to a Walmart store in Florida, which pulled them from the shelves later. According to Ruben, Walmart said that “the message went against their philosophy of family values.”
Following a nationwide uproar, Walmart put them back — and, Ruben said, she later created a new version with a second message on the back: “Someday is now.”
Ruben, a 91-year-old women’srights advocate, said that “someday” came Tuesday night at the Democratic National Convention when Hillary Clinton became the first female presidential nominee for a major party.
“I’ve been waiting 83 years to see what happened yesterday,” she said Wednesday in a phone interview. “This is a wonderful time in our history and I thank God I’ve lived to see it happen.”
In Philadelphia Tuesday night, Clinton addressed the crowd at the Democratic National Convention at an unprecedented moment in history.
“I can’t believe we just put the biggest crack in that glass ceiling yet,” Clinton said, adding: “If there are any little girls out there who stayed up late to watch, let me just say: I may become the first woman president, but one of you is next.”
Over the decades, Ruben broke her own glass ceilings. During the Second World War she earned a college education at a time when most women did not do that. Later she pursued and received a master’s and then a doctorate, according to her website.
In1993, Ruben began studying children’s attitudes toward women leaders, surveying 1,500 elementary school students in Miami. She found that nearly half of them believed only men could be president, according to an article in the Miami Herald the next year.
“The girls who finished the survey were sad,” she told the newspaper at the time. “It was clear that if they’re going to do anything, they’ll have to do it themselves. They can’t count on boys who grow up to be men to help them.”
Ruben created a company called Women are Wonderful Inc., and started selling T-shirts to raise girls’ self-esteem, according to a 1995 report in the Herald.
“I don’t want girls to believe what I grew up believing — that a girl can never be president,” she told the newspaper.
Indeed, more than 20 years ago, it was Ruben’s inspirational T-shirts, based on a cartoon, that created a flap, exposing tension between competing ideals.
The 1993 Dennis the Menace comic showed Dennis building a clubhouse. No girls were allowed. Margaret attempted to school him on all the things girls would do, including growing up to become president.
Ruben said she called the cartoon’s creator, Henry King Ketcham, and then got permission from King Features Syndicate to use the frame for a T-shirt.
Ruben said Wednesday that she put one of the T-shirts on her 8-monthold grandson, boosted him atop her shoulders and went to see an Associated Press reporter to get out her story.
“Wow, it still pains us that we made this mistake 20 years ago,” Danit Marquardt, director of corporate communications for Walmart, said Wednesday in a statement.