My Hillary Problem

A few weeks ago, before Super Tuesday, I was in quite a quandary. It's no secret that I am a huge Obama supporter, so much so that I have been volunteering for his campaign. However, when it seemed that Hillary might very well win the nomination, I was struggling with what I would do if she were the nominee. Don't ask me why I was worried about this months and months before the general election. I guess I was just on election overload.

A couple of years ago, if you had asked me if I would support Hillary in a presidential bid, I would have answered unequivocally yes. These days, though, I am not so sure. I am concerned about her electability. I believe she would have a very difficult time getting things done due to the animosity the entire Republican Party seems to have for her (and vice versa). Her condescension turns me off. I believe we need a fresh start and break from the past. And I really, really do not like the way the Clintons handled South Carolina.

In an effort to help quell my unease with Hillary, I started reading Carl Bernstein's A Woman in Charge. This biography is reputed to be one of the fairest and unbiased ones out there. After all, it is Carl Bernstein.

The book is an incredibly rich and detailed portrait of Hillary's life. It is extremely well-written and easy to read. I am only about 2/3 of the way through, but it is hard to put down and I expect I'll finish it in the next couple of days.

The problem is, the more I read,the less I like Hillary. For the first third of the book, she is very much a sympathetic character. That changes though, once she and Bill launch his political career. And it gets steadily worse the deeper in you get.

On the bright side, she comes across as very, very intelligent, genuinely interested in bettering the country, and a devout person of faith. On the downside, she is controlling, tunnel-visioned, rigid, paranoid, deaf to criticism or dissention, and willing to do whatever it takes to protect and further her career and her husband's, even if it takes something of moral or ethical ambiguity.

The one thing that really bugs me, though, has to do with how she has handled his affairs and what that says about her view of women. Even before she and Bill got married, she knew of his wandering eye. She thought long and hard about marrying him. She chose to marry him because she loved him. It seems she thought the pay-off would justify the risk. That’s her choice and if she is willing to put up with it, who am I to fault her?

What I dislike is the way she handled the affairs, even from the very beginning. Once Bill began running for office in Arkansas, his extramarital affairs became a real issue. Very early on, she chose a stance on the issue and has stuck to it throughout their entire political career. She chose to publically vilify the women involved, depicting them as women beneath her, women of questionable character who were just out to make a buck.

The issue came up during the very first campaign Bill launched. When Bill ran for Congress (and lost), he had an affair with at least one staffer. It was well-known by everyone in the office and other staffers served as accomplices by ushering the woman out the backdoor when Hillary pulled up. Of course Hillary found out about the affair and Bernstein writes this,

“Hillary made it know that she thought women from Bill's past, and by implication any other still in his orbit, were intellectually from another world than her Bill's, and thus represented no serious competition. This would be her condescending assertion through many an election season, the degree of venom and how publically she expressed it often dependent on the commensurate political danger to him and embarrassment to her."


From this point on, she had to deal with the issue of Bill's women, who were numerous. Bernstein writes, "The question of Bill's other women would become a prominent feature of the Clinton electoral landscape and, when raised by opponents or when the women themselves surfaced, Hillary would set the strategy of response: to attach the women as gold diggers and lying opportunists trying to capitalize on her husband's prominence."

Hillary's stance is all the more important because she truely ran his campaigns. So when she set a position, that is what the campaign took.

What bothers me is that Hillary is supposedly a voice for women and yet, she would publically disgrace the other women and not her husband, when she knew he was as guilty as they were. Yes, the women were wrong in having an affair with a married, but she married him knowing who he was and knowing it would not stop. Doesn't that say something about her too?

I would expect her to be angry at the women, but it seems hypocritical to me for her to bash them and not her husband, in fact bashing them to help her husband get ahead. In her campainging, Hillary directly appeals to women, but it seems she is ready to throw us under the bus when it would benefit her.

In addition, she apparently feels she is somehow above the rest of us too. Does she really respect and want to help women, or does she just use us to get what she wants? The whole thing just bugs me.

What do you guys think?

He, She, We

So we've been having a conversation through comments on my previous two posts about women in power. I am thrilled that Will started this whole dialogue. I love it when people comment and I love a good debate! All you lurkers out there, come out of hiding!

Will was suggesting that perhaps women don't bring anything different to the table than men do. Many of us like to think that women in government might be more compassionate and simply nicer than men. They would be more willing to work together and listen to what people had to say. They would govern with civility. We also like to think that they would be less eager to involve us in war and conflict. Is this really true though?

It seems to me that many women in power have gotten there not because of their female characteristics, but because of more masculine traits. Hillary Clinton is hated by many people and I think a large degree of this hatred is subconscious sexism. We don't like her because she is cold and calculating. She does not embody womanly traits. Much of the dislike of Hillary stems from the fact that she stepped outside of our notion of wifely boundaries in the White House, though it is naivete to believe no other first lady did this. They were just more secretive about it. Hillary rubbed people the wrong way when she defied their notions of what a First Lady should be and she continues to turn off folks with her ambitiousness, shrewdness and sometimes condescending manner. If she were a man exhibiting these traits, would people still dislike her?

Has Hillary brought anything to the table that men have not? In some ways, I think so. She has worked for children's and women's issues and that has to be informed be her gender and her role as a mother. Have women like Condeleeza Rice, Sandra Day O'Connor, Madeline Albright, and Margaret Thatcher brought anything different to the table than the men around them? I don't know.

I think a larger question is do we really want women to be substantially different? Would we want a very womanly woman in office? Could she even ever get there?

Finally, isn't it a little sexist to believe women would act differently in positions of power? Shouldn't we be judging individual people based on their own traits rather than making generalizations and assumptions based on gender stereotypes?

What does everyone think? Comment away!

Why Don't Women Rule the World?

My last post ended with a suggestion that the world might be a better place if women ran it. Will left this comment which got me thinking.



"Yes, the world might be better off with women running it; however, I wonder if we will ever know. Having gone through the sixties at a very impressionable age, I thought the influence of women at all the "decision making levels" in our society would surely make it a better society. I have been disappointed my friend. Apparently women do not want that. Look at how few women are in congress .. on the supreme court, etc., etc. (shouldn't it be about 50%?) What happened?" Will



I don't think it's that women don't want to be in positions of power. I think it is more complicated than that. I still believe that by and large, the world is a gentleman's club. I believe that the glass ceiling still exists in many sectors of commerce and government. In some cases this may be deliberate and probably not in other cases.

In my town, we have a county government that would put any good old boy network to shame. Really. There have been court orders and lawsuits to sort the whole mess out. Basically, a bunch of guys named Scooby, Lumpy, JJ and Jimmy control a large part of our county government through deals and nepotism. If you are not in with these dudes, you're toast. Hopefully the voters will toss the bums out this election cycle. At any rate, they have had a large degree of influence over which of their golf buddies or relatives get placed in appointed positions, and most of those placements went to men. While this is very much out in the open where I live, it is better concealed in other locales.



I also think that the fact that many women leave the work force to have children accounts for some of their absence in positions of power. They often take a couple of years off in their twenties or thirties and this stalls their rise. When they do go back to work, they face judgements and concerns about their dedication to their work. I have a very good friend who was subtly reprimanded when she told her employer she was pregnant with her second child. The employee evidently saw her pregnancy and maternity leave as a problem and almost a sign of disloyalty to the company. I believe this is very common and probably affects many women in that they are not as likely to be promoted as their male colleagues.

Age also comes in to play here. Usually people who reach the level of Supreme Court Justice or CEO are nearing the end of their careers and have been working many, many years to get where they are. The women who have reached this age did not begin their careers in as open a workplace. When they were in college, they may not have believed that they had every opportunity in front of them, as girls now believe. They may have been steered more towards nursing, teaching, or other historically female careers. Even if they entered more typically male careers, like law, they had to spend the first 15 years or so battling sexism. This sets them behind several years. I suspect that in the next 10-15 years, we will see more women in roles of power because those women began their careers on more equal footing.

I also think that many women still have subconscious notions of their gender role, especially in some parts of the country, the south in particular. Even in my generation, which was reared after the whole ERA movement, many women still hold unvoiced ideas about what a woman's role is. For example, I know many other stay-at-home moms who still feel obligated to iron their husband's shirts, cook dinner ever night, and try to change out of the sweats we wear all day for when our husbands come home. I fall into this mindset myself, and I was raised to believe I am an equal to any man. When I catch myself thinking these types of thoughts or feeling obligated to perform some typically female role in my home, I try to remind myself that my job is to take care of my children and that is a full-time job for me. It is every bit as taxing as my husband's job, just in an entirely different way. My job at home does not necessarily entail performing services for my husband which he could very well do for himself. I often go ahead and do it, because it is easier for me sometimes and because I am grateful to him for being able to provide enough for me to stay home with our children. My point is, though, that many women still have some degree of gender programming in them, whether they admit it or not and this programming influences the roles they take in their homes and in their workplaces.

When I was around 11 years old, I was told I could never be President. I was at a church camp in a group of children being lead by a middle-aged male and we were discussing what we wanted to be when we grew up. A lover of politics even at a young age, I said that I wanted to be President one day. The man in charge laughed said, "Honey, you can't be President, you're a girl. Only men are Presidents." Honest to God, that is exactly what he said to me and I will never forget it. Girls are fed messages all the time about what they can or can't be. Every time our society values a supermodel or sexy pop star more than an a female engineer, scientist, or elected official, they hear this message. Every time they are laughed at and made fun of at school for having the correct answers, they are fed this message. Every time they are spoken down to by an older male, they are fed this message. Every time they turn on MTV and see scantily clad women gyrating on male rap stars and being referred to as bitches and ho's, they are feed this message. In American pop culture, our face and body are valued more than our brains. Until this changes, many young women may not make the effort to strive for greatness.


Hillary Clinton's presidential bid is an interesting thing to watch. I absolutely believe that one reason she is so hated by so many people is that she defies our ideas of what a woman should be. She is brilliant, shrewd, calculating, and (sorry Hillary) not pretty in a conventional way. If a male leader, a military leader for example, exemplified these traits, he would be exalted. Because she is a woman, it turns people off. This is the reason she got a boost for her tears in New Hampshire. Conventional wisdom would tell you that crying is a death sentence for a female candidate, but for her, because she is seen as being so cold and masculine, it helped. It will be interesting to see what happens with her in the rest of the election.


Thanks for your comment, Will! I was kind of getting tired writing about fluff! What does everyone else out there think?