MOLI VIEW™

Voting makes me sappy. Waiting while poll workers shuffle through thick books of names, pulling back the curtain, pressing the little "Vote" button — in a society that seems more fragmented every day, casting a ballot is a rare shared experience (even if frightening numbers of Americans still ignore this coveted franchise). Getting to vote back in January for either a female presidential candidate or an African-American one was a particularly verklempt experience for me, despite the fact there's a raging debate about whether that vote counts for shit, having been cast in Florida.

But why has it taken our country so long to get this far? Sometimes it seems like the U.S. will be the last nation ever to get a female leader. After all, women have been proving since at least the days of Cleopatra that you don't need gonads to govern. With Cristina Kirchner in Argentina and Michelle Bachelet in Chile, South America is way ahead of North on this issue.

There are some who argue that women lead differently than men: gentler, more peaceful, maternal. About the only nice thing I can say about Margaret Thatcher is that at least she proved that sexist generalization wrong. Iron Ladies of Liberia, a powerful documentary by Siatta Scott Johnson and Daniel Junge that played last week at the Miami International Film Festival, explores this notion of gendered power by looking at the first year in office of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. The African country's first female president appointed several women cabinet members to help her pull Liberia out of a tragic morass after years of civil war. The film shows in graphic montages the beyond daunting task ahead of them: rivers full of trash, no electricity, no running water, 90 percent unemployment rate, crushing international debt.

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