As a former Hillary Clinton fan (back before Bush), and a person that has just spent way too much time in the frozen, uniform gray rainy liberal feminist mecca of stumptown, I can’t help but weigh in.
Some have already noted that in the 25-30 minutes she spoke, Clinton spent only 4.5-6 minutes directly addressing Obama, using the rest of the time to talk about her own place in history, mainstream feminism,
and the Democratic Party. As a historian, I was struck by the way she acknowledged the Suffragettes and white female abolitionist and wrote herself into this herstory absent of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and so many other suffragettes and abolitionists of color. Though I was less surprised about how she avoided the similarities between her own frustration with Obama and Stanton & Anthony’s with Douglass right down to the race baiting. (Stanton once said she would not stand for “the n—–s and the paddys getting the vote before women” and Anthony wrote a scathing letter when black men got the vote before women stating “the negro question and the woman question are now and forever two separate questions” refusing to ever support another black person again; much like some of Hillary Clinton’s supporters now.) I was also struck by the length of the speech dedicated to speaking for women, rallying women, and placing herself at the head of women’s history as the woman who made it possible to believe “women can run for president.” These are the women who have run before her (taken directly from wikipedia up to 2000 election & the World Wide Guide to Women and Leadership):
U.S. Presidential candidates:
Year |
Name |
Party |
Running Mate |
|
1872 |
Victoria Woodhull[1] |
Equal Rights Party |
Frederick Douglass |
|
1884 |
Belva Ann Lockwood |
National Equal Rights Party |
Marietta Stow[3] |
|
1888 |
Belva Ann Lockwood |
National Equal Rights Party |
Alfred Love |
|
1940 |
Grace Allen |
Surprise Party |
N.A. |
|
1968 |
Charlene Mitchell |
Communist Party |
Michael Zagarell |
|
1972 |
Linda Jenness |
Socialist Workers Party |
Andrew Pulley |
|
1972 |
Evelyn Reed |
Socialist Workers Party |
|
|
1972
1972
1972
|
Shirley Chisholm
Patsy Takamoto Mink
Bella Abdzug
|
Democrat”Independent/feminist party”
Democrat
Democrat
|
|
|
1976
1976
|
Margaret Wright
Ellen McCormack
|
People’s Party
Democrat
|
Benjamin Spock |
|
1980 |
Ellen McCormack |
Right to Life Party
|
Carroll Driscoll |
|
1980 |
Maureen Smith |
Peace and Freedom Party |
Elizabeth Cervantes Barron |
|
1980 |
Deirdre Griswold |
Workers World Party |
Gavrielle Holmes[5]. |
|
1984 |
Sonia Johnson |
Citizens Party |
Emma Wong Mar |
1984
1984
|
Gabriella Holmes
Patricia Scott Shroeder
|
Workers World Party
Democrat
|
|
|
1988 |
Lenora Fulani |
New Alliance Party |
Joyce Dattner |
|
1988 |
Willa Kenoyer |
Socialist Party |
Ron Ehrenreich |
|
1992 |
Lenora Fulani |
New Alliance Party |
Maria Elizabeth Munoz |
|
1992 |
Helen Halyard |
Workers League/Socialist Equality Party |
Fred Mazelis |
|
19921992 |
Isabell MastersSusan Block |
Looking Back Party? |
|
|
1992
1992
|
Gloria LaRiva
Millie Howard
|
Workers World Party
Independent
|
Larry Holmes |
|
1996 |
Monica Moorehead |
Workers World Party |
Gloria LaRiva |
|
1996 |
Marsha Feinland |
Peace and Freedom Party |
Kate McClatchy |
|
1996 |
Mary Cal Hollis |
Socialist Party |
Eric Chester |
|
1996
1996
1996
|
Diane Beall Templin
Elevina Hoyd Duffy
Georgina H Doerschuck
|
American Party
Republican
Republican
|
Gary Van Horn
|
|
1996
1996
1996
|
Isabell MastersS
usan Duncan
Ann Jennings
|
Looking Back
PartyRepublican
Republican
|
Shirley Jean Masters |
|
2000
2000
|
Monica Moorehead
Millie Howard
|
Workers World Party
Independent
|
Gloria LaRiva |
|
2000
2004
2004
2008
|
Cathy Gordon Brown
Carol Moseley Braun
Millie Howard
Cynthia McKenny
|
Independent
Democrat
Republican
Green Party
|
unnamed?
unnamed
unknown
Rosa Clemente
|
|
Hillary is the first woman to garner slightly less than 18 million votes but she is not the first woman to assume she had the right to be President nor to test that assumption at the polls. The most famous of these women: Shirley Chisholm. Chisholm was also a Democratic Senator from NY when she ran and endured endless sexism, as well as racism, from the media and other sources. When the media announced her running they said she had “thrown her bonnet into the race.” Rather than point to the similarities in their historic races and write Chisholm back into our herstory/history, Clinton and the media’s insistence that she is the first has largely eclipsed Chisholm’s legacy. Chisholm also refused special interest money a full 36 years before Obama did. It is likely that while Clinton will be added to the history textbooks, Chisolm still will not.
Clinton was not the first woman running as a member of a major party either. That distinction goes to three women running in 1972: Bela Abdzug, Patsy Takamoto Mink, and Shirley Chisholm. Hawaiian candidate Mink and mainland white female candidate Abzug both dropped out well before the convention. However,
Chisholm won 150+ delegates at the DNC. All three candidates received some support from the “feminist party” a group of high profile feminists working to get women on the ballot. They threw their full support behind Chisholm, including Gloria Steinem who later referred to this support when trying to get out of her “gender over race” comments during the current campaign.
Clinton is not the only woman running for president in 2008. Former Panther Elaine Brown was in the running before splitting with Green Party over Radical politics. Mckinney is still running, currently beating Nader for the nominee by 130+ votes, tho completely ignored. No one has mentioned the gender dynamics of the media attention to Nader’s Green Party bid vs. its complete inattention to McKinney’s.
Yet Clinton’s historic place cannot be forgotten nor slighted. Her legacy while inspiring to many also left many more wary of a woman who would reference assassination and white rural voters “who will never vote for a black man” as reasons she should triumph. Still she brought older women, first time female voters, and many more to the polls (as did Obama). She called out politicians and reporters alike on their real sexism: from the cleavage comments, to the “take out the trash” and “nagging wife” comments, to the “shrew”
and “witch” labels she endured. She stood up for her daughter as a mother and as a public figure throughout the campaign, and long before it. And yes, her candidacy no doubt opened the doors for white women to be more often featured as pundits; ensuring Rachel Maddow a particularly unprecedented amount of air time despite not being on the Clinton bus for too long. Together with Obama’s campaign, she forced the door open for women of color, since people brought them in to act as foil or “traitors” to whichever id. they were trying to discredit or undermine. Sadly, such tokenism of all women does not sit well with the idea that women should be sought out for their opinions as thinkers and experienced analysts which is what we feminists should champion. The failure of the media to do so is the fault of neither campaign; Hillary’s camp certainly demanded women be taken seriously.
As the dust settles for the moment, and I believe it to be only a moment, I am left to wonder what the election would have looked like if we had talked about multiplicative and intersecting oppressions and not
false hierarchies and binaries? What if Hillary Clinton had shown herself to be as quick to stop racism as she was to confront sexism by saying to any of her supporters who disparaged the realities of race in N. America that she disavowed them, their support, and their tactics? What if she had pointed to the intersection of racism and sexism by demanding Bill O’Reilly be fired for supporting the lynching of Michelle Obama, the same way she demanded other reporters be fired for saying she had “pimped out Chelsea”? Such stands might have made Hillary Clinton seem like the legacy of camelot that she and Bill appeared to be during their campaign. They might have reminded people that the educational attainment, home ownership, and general wealth of African American families went up for the first time in decades under the Clinton administration.
And what would have happened if the media actually dealt with the statistics that show Hillary only swept women 50 and above? She was equal or only slightly higher in demographics amongst women 30-50. Obama
swept women in the 18-25 year old category. While she garnered a slightly larger percentage of white women and Latina votes, she did so poorly amongst black women that in some states she only got 20% or less. Stats on Asian women were not available but there were Asian women’s caucuses for Obama. Would a discussion about race and age polarization have led to a re-evaluation of how we all do feminism and potentially reinvigorated the movement through new commitments from the presidential candidate down? Would we have been able to move past the oft disproved suffragette assumption that “women vote as a class” to actually addressing how class, education, age, location, race, sexuality, etc. impact women’s voting? Would we have been able to develop nuanced ways of talking about “women’s interests” that showed how understanding our differences can turn into strengths for female candidates and for issues we all hold in common instead of opening up the world to comments that we were “mindlessly voting id,” invested in essentialism that “proves feminism does not work,” or worse “hopelessly divided” none of which is or has to be true.
If Hillary Clinton had owned her part in NAFTA instead of having it exposed by The Nation and then made a commitment to stop trade policies that exploit women and exacerbate existing gender inequality in other
countries, would she have won over immigrant women and college aged Latinas, Asians, etc.? And would such ownership have led Clinton to also renounce her work defending Tyson chicken whose subsidiaries have been exposed for human trafficking to staff their chicken processing plants? If so would she have set a precedent in which being “the voice of women” as she claimed today, would mean that we were finally talking about all women? Or even better that the men who ushered in those policies and perpetuate them would finally be held accountable for the way their economic policies are in fact engendered?
Think of the possibilities available for women globally if the top contenders for the Democratic nomination had owned up to their part in economic oppression of women in order to shine a light on a myriad of disastrous policies for women. Would Clinton’s ownership of her continued legal work for Monsanto have
opened the way to confronting the global food crisis that is disproportionately impacting women, girls, and people of color globally? Could such a discussion about the connections between corporations and women’s rights have opened the door for talking about femicides, war and genocide related trafficking of women and girls, and the sanctioned mass rapes and bodily mutilations of women that go on so that we can have cheap computers, access to oil, and rainforest wood furniture? If Clinton had been so brave as “to speak for [all] women” as she claimed, could all of this had led to the Democrats mapping out a way to bolster our failing industries, struggling farmers, and growing working class as well as the women of the world instead of both candidates talking about “outsourcing” as some invisible evil untied to trade policy and trafficking?
How could the support of working class women have been built into the election if Hillary Clinton’s lawyering for Walmart was not countered with Obama’s taking funds from a convicted slum Lord? What if
both of them had owned what they did and then outlined how they would support working women in the future? What if Hillary had said she knows working to protect the heads of Walmart at the expense of female workers and her husband’s passing of welfare reform has set working class and rural women so far back economically that she knows she has to center them in her campaign to make things right? And if such a commitment moved beyond rhetoric to concrete policy how many women would have benefited and/or been drawn into the fold? It certainly would have rang more true than her quick reference to supporting unions in the speech today, given that the previous Clinton administration helped break up unions and continue Reagen inspired monopolies.
And if Hillary had stood up for all of these things, how would it have shifted the way we were and are able to talk about Obama’s sexist comments like “sweetie” and calling Florida a “beauty pageant”? Afterall, these
criticism were largely eclipsed by the gender over race arguments that ensued or were embedded in these arguments. But if the precedent had been set that we would talk about gender AND race, and that everyone has both, then could we have forced the Obama campaign to own these moments and promise not to engage in them in the future? Could we have been more diligent and effective in raising awareness about his voting record on reproductive choice? He has several policy papers on women and large support from a female base of especially young, college educated, women regardless of race but what precedent would have been set if we had forced him to talk about women’s rights more often and more throughly by making them part of a democrat agenda rather than a gender over race discussion?
And what if the queer community had spent less time claiming Hillary Clinton had a better record because of the one time support of Melissa Ethridge, who along with other high profile members of the queer community, including former Clinton Administration members, are actually voting for Obama, and Clinton’s historic march in the NY Pride parade (the only first lady to do so) and actually demanded that the democratic candidate support equal rights for GLBTQ folk? Currently neither Obama nor Clinton supported gay marriage. Only Obama has detailed GLBTQ policies up on his site, Clitnon does/did not. Would putting an end to vilifying Obama for beliefs they both hold have led to discussions of Obama’s support for gay immigrants
rights? And if so would we have written queer back into immigration debates and forced discussion of EVERYONE’s rights in policies in which they are absent? Would such discussions have led us to talk about the ways families are being broken up, women and queer people are abused by border patrol and non-governmental border watches, and how the immigration debate has been framed in such a way as discourage equality, women’s safety, queer and straight family unity, and workers rights? Could this have opened up a larger discussion about basic civil and human rights in the same way the film pictured to the right was able to do when discussing queer immigration in the U.S.? Again imagine the possibilities for moving across and within intersections to build an platform that really did support ALL women AND showed us all how we are intimately tied together in loss when anyone is discriminated against.
Like it or not, Obama is our candidate. He is, as Hillary put it, our only hope to turn the tide against Republicans and their policies that harm ALL women. If she had represented all of us, I believe she might
have been the chosen candidate. And even if she had still lost, because of sexism and the fear of “legacies” or something else, such a stand would have forced the Obama campaign to publicly address women’s issues and policies impacting women. If both candidates has been forced to constantly center all women in their platform the face of the democratic party would have surely changed no matter who the democratic candidate was or will be in the future. It would have forced feminists to do better on addressing the needs of all women and stopping the cycle of erasing or abusing the many for the “universal” few. And it would have forced an ongoing discussion about sexism that will be silent in many corners because of the oppressive binaries so many involved in that discussion continue to use. The insistence on hierarchies clouded the moments when sexism should have been crystal clear as surely as it clouded the racist ones.
So while m
any cry over the loss of “the women’s vote” and the “only female presidential candidate,” I cry over a history littered with women candidates and marginalized women and queers thrown under many a
campaign bus at one time or another during the primaries. Like others I do not have the luxury of choosing gender over race, nor do I subscribe to a politik that would ask me to put anyone’s suffering over anyone else’s and erase those whose suffering lies in multiple identities. Nor are all my hopes lost nor won in the campaign of a single woman because I know the history of all of the women who built the road she walks on. I also have faith in all the women who will come after Clinton, faith enough to know that not all of them will be in her shadow but rather locked arm in arm with the multitude who paved the way. And maybe they will be globally minded enough to have been inspired by other feminist female presidents and prime ministers around the world as well as all of the feminist female candidates in N. America (and no I’m not saying all female leaders are feminist, far from it).
For me, the strongest moment in Hillary Clinton’s speech will likely be one that was missed by most. When she said that she hoped her campaign had not discouraged any young women or any women at all from
running, I like to think that for that moment she was talking to all of us. She was not just saying to the women who were disappointed by her loss that they should keep trying, which is a powerful message in itself, but also to the women her supporters have wronged, her policies have left behind, and who shuddered when she said she could rock the racist vote, that they too should know they have a place in the Democratic Party. For that apology, Senator Clinton, you have earned back a small piece of my respect which you so sorely lost and tossed away most of this campaign.
And for the record, Obama’s campaign does inspire me to tell my girl children they can be president just as
much as my boy children not because we share a racial history but because I know what happens to black men who “over step there place” especially vis-a-vis white women’s desires in America. More importantly, unlike Clinton my history of the path both she and he took today goes all the way back to the “real dream ticket” in 1872 when a white woman and a black man ran on the same ticket to show their understanding that our oppressions are ultimately and intimately tied together.
No amount of rhetoric will make me forget that part of Obama’s historic place is in the candidacy is the struggle of Shirley Chisholm, Winona LaDuke (VP), Carol Moseley Braun, and most of the women listed above (not including the Republican ones), and all of the women who fought at the DNC for or against the Michigan
and Florida votes to ensure that representation was fair and equal and who now fight to unite the party. Just as my hopes are not dashed by Ferraro, who took what many felt was Jesse Jackson’s hard earned place as the VP on the ticket (the same feeling that now permeates the Clinton camp), and spouting ever increasingly racist nonesense to anyone who will listen; nor is it dashed by Harriet Christian (youtubed in the previous post) who called Obama “an inadequate black male” and whose claim to vote for McCain in the name of disgruntled women and Americans is echoed by far too many other women using more “polite” language. While I can empathize with women who genuinely thought Clinton was the better candidate, I cannot empathize with those who ignore racism, champion gender over race, mean “white women” when they say women, or who are so bigoted that they would vote for a Republican who is anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, anti-social programs that benefit women and people of color, anti-ERA, etc. all women’s issues that Obama has committed to supporting accept the equal marriage initiatives and we have to call him on that at every turn.
For me Obama’s white mother, Asian sister, and black wife who through modeling their own strength and
abilities as successful women told him he could do anything he wanted, stand out far more than those showing how clearly dominant race intersects gender in this campaign. Like Kennedy and Chisholm, Obama’s insistence on being honest about race, consistent in his message regardless of the cost, refusal to play dirty, compassion in the face of others loss, and consistent support of the troops by refusing to authorize an unjust war, inspire me to vote and to encourage anyone who wants to run to do so. I don’t need him to be a woman for that. I am old enough to know that what matters is not what is between his legs but what lies in his heart. Not all women are feminists and sadly, not all feminists understand what it means to support all women.
Lets hope Obama becomes and proves to be the kind of feminist who supports all women, or at the very least is influenced enough by them that women’s rights are not just rhetoric in his campaign in the coming years and that Clinton finally gets what it means to represent all women in her next endeavor.
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