I really like this.
Clinton’s Next Campaign
By ANNA HOLMES
RACISM. Sexism. Say what you will about the Democratic primaries, they have at the very least provoked a national dialogue about those two shameful scourges of American society. Just as the furor over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright drove Senator Barack Obama to make a widely admired speech on race, the growing outrage on the part of her supporters offers an opportunity for Senator Hillary Clinton to speak out on sexism in American life.
The idea of such a speech has been brought up and then shot down by unimaginative pundits as merely playing the gender card, an assertion both patronizing and offensive. But with her campaign apparently on the cusp of defeat, Senator Clinton is now free to speak with courage and conviction, two qualities not ascribed to her lately.
Watching Barack Obama speak in Philadelphia in March, I was uncomfortable (race is a sticky subject, to say the least) but exultant because, as a woman of color, I saw a man from a similar multiracial background speak openly and honestly about race in a way that was inclusive and enlightening, that gave credit to the intelligence of his audience. He avoided trotting out a laundry list of affronts.
But from my vantage as the daughter of a ’70s feminist who grew up in a house littered with Ms. magazines, E.R.A. buttons and other detritus of gender activism, I see many of my feminist forebears focusing too much on the cataloguing of slights, and not enough on solving the problem. Of course there’s been sexism throughout this campaign. (Remember “Iron my shirt”?) But at this point, keeping track of every tone-deaf criticism matters less than delivering an active, impassioned response.
Senator Clinton is the one woman in America right now who has the perspective, and the responsibility, to give that response. And history shows that she is more than capable of speaking definitively and honestly about the issue: Take the passion of her 1995 address at the United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing; or the personal touch of her tableside chat with voters in New Hampshire in early January; or the intelligence and wisdom she displayed in her 1969 commencement speech at Wellesley College. A gender speech combining these elements would be revelatory, historic and, yes, humanizing.
The question is when, and how, she could do it. The when: after she bows out of the presidential race, so that it couldn’t be painted as a last-ditch effort to win. The where: a public university, or perhaps a private women’s college like her alma mater, would be fitting. The how: she could speak from a place of pride and passion, pride for how far she and other women have come; passion for how far we have to go, including the sad fact that sexism is so pervasive as to be almost invisible and so accepted that to mention it is to risk being accused of hypersensitivity.
She could talk openly about the tug of war between the personal and the political, between the armor women wear in public and what they expose in private. Lastly, she could recognize the occasion for what it is: an opportunity to heal the rifts between women in the Democratic Party and to bring new female voters into the fold.
Addressing as broad an audience as possible is key, because as much as Senator Clinton serves as a symbol of the quintessential career woman, she has been preaching mainly to a choir of like-minded baby boomers, most of whom have markedly different experiences and interpretations of the world than their younger, poorer or darker-skinned sisters. The gender discrimination experienced by a first lady and the first viable female presidential candidate (or even, say, a corporation’s first female executive) is not the same as the gender discrimination experienced by a single mother in Wichita or a high school student in Watts.
She also needs to be honest in a way that she hasn’t been lately: about the uncommon privileges she has been given and, more important, the much more common struggles, disappointments and frustrations she has weathered despite those opportunities.
After all, if she can’t break the country’s highest glass ceiling this election season, the least she can do is take a good hard crack at other, no less important ones: the ones we all construct ourselves. As she said during that speech in Beijing 13 years ago, “For too long, the history of women has been a history of silence.” It’s time for Senator Clinton to start making some noise already.
Anna Holmes is the managing editor of the blog Jezebel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/o...s Next Campaign&st=nyt&scp=1&pagewanted=print
Clinton’s Next Campaign
By ANNA HOLMES
RACISM. Sexism. Say what you will about the Democratic primaries, they have at the very least provoked a national dialogue about those two shameful scourges of American society. Just as the furor over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright drove Senator Barack Obama to make a widely admired speech on race, the growing outrage on the part of her supporters offers an opportunity for Senator Hillary Clinton to speak out on sexism in American life.
The idea of such a speech has been brought up and then shot down by unimaginative pundits as merely playing the gender card, an assertion both patronizing and offensive. But with her campaign apparently on the cusp of defeat, Senator Clinton is now free to speak with courage and conviction, two qualities not ascribed to her lately.
Watching Barack Obama speak in Philadelphia in March, I was uncomfortable (race is a sticky subject, to say the least) but exultant because, as a woman of color, I saw a man from a similar multiracial background speak openly and honestly about race in a way that was inclusive and enlightening, that gave credit to the intelligence of his audience. He avoided trotting out a laundry list of affronts.
But from my vantage as the daughter of a ’70s feminist who grew up in a house littered with Ms. magazines, E.R.A. buttons and other detritus of gender activism, I see many of my feminist forebears focusing too much on the cataloguing of slights, and not enough on solving the problem. Of course there’s been sexism throughout this campaign. (Remember “Iron my shirt”?) But at this point, keeping track of every tone-deaf criticism matters less than delivering an active, impassioned response.
Senator Clinton is the one woman in America right now who has the perspective, and the responsibility, to give that response. And history shows that she is more than capable of speaking definitively and honestly about the issue: Take the passion of her 1995 address at the United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing; or the personal touch of her tableside chat with voters in New Hampshire in early January; or the intelligence and wisdom she displayed in her 1969 commencement speech at Wellesley College. A gender speech combining these elements would be revelatory, historic and, yes, humanizing.
The question is when, and how, she could do it. The when: after she bows out of the presidential race, so that it couldn’t be painted as a last-ditch effort to win. The where: a public university, or perhaps a private women’s college like her alma mater, would be fitting. The how: she could speak from a place of pride and passion, pride for how far she and other women have come; passion for how far we have to go, including the sad fact that sexism is so pervasive as to be almost invisible and so accepted that to mention it is to risk being accused of hypersensitivity.
She could talk openly about the tug of war between the personal and the political, between the armor women wear in public and what they expose in private. Lastly, she could recognize the occasion for what it is: an opportunity to heal the rifts between women in the Democratic Party and to bring new female voters into the fold.
Addressing as broad an audience as possible is key, because as much as Senator Clinton serves as a symbol of the quintessential career woman, she has been preaching mainly to a choir of like-minded baby boomers, most of whom have markedly different experiences and interpretations of the world than their younger, poorer or darker-skinned sisters. The gender discrimination experienced by a first lady and the first viable female presidential candidate (or even, say, a corporation’s first female executive) is not the same as the gender discrimination experienced by a single mother in Wichita or a high school student in Watts.
She also needs to be honest in a way that she hasn’t been lately: about the uncommon privileges she has been given and, more important, the much more common struggles, disappointments and frustrations she has weathered despite those opportunities.
After all, if she can’t break the country’s highest glass ceiling this election season, the least she can do is take a good hard crack at other, no less important ones: the ones we all construct ourselves. As she said during that speech in Beijing 13 years ago, “For too long, the history of women has been a history of silence.” It’s time for Senator Clinton to start making some noise already.
Anna Holmes is the managing editor of the blog Jezebel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/o...s Next Campaign&st=nyt&scp=1&pagewanted=print
