If the ad nauseum projections we have been hearing are accurate, by the time this editorial has been printed Hillary Clinton will have reluctantly stepped down in the Democratic race and delivered the mandatory, "I'm now backing Mr. Obama to unify the party," speech.
But even if by some miracle she did snag the nomination, why wasn't Hillary the shoo-in many expected at the outset of the race? And, more interestingly, why wasn't she a shoo-in amongst feminists, who have been turning against Clinton in droves as the country has become more familiar with her?
According to a Huffington Post article which ran this past February, more than 100 prominent feminist leaders (including Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times writer Margo Jefferson and award-winning women's rights historians Alice Kessler Harris and Linda Gordon) submitted a joint statement endorsing Barak Obama, citing Hillary's support for the Iraq war as their foremost problem with the New York senator's presidential platform.
According to the statement, the Iraq war (which costs a revolting $341.4 million each day according to The National Priorities Project) has been unnecessarily siphoning funds from domestic issues like education, healthcare, and infrastructure. But, Hillary's problem with attracting and keeping the support of women, especially feminists, doesn't just lie in her stance on the issues, it lies in the character traits that inform the political decisions she makes.
The heart of Hillary's problem is that she lacks female-ness, and feminism isn't about being the hardest woman on the block who can hang with the big boys strictly on their terms. And it certainly isn't about hating men. It's about balancing femininity with ferocity (which sometimes requires a nice tube of lip gloss and gooing over babies). It's about challenging the oppressive and violent political practices like imperialism and materialism, and injecting some compassion and humanism into this nation's relationship with the earth, with other nations, and with its own citizens.
Of course, we don't want a soft-around-the-edges leader who's going to sit around baking cakes all day. If a woman is going to run this county, she is going to have a backbone. Hillary has got the strength, no doubt about it, but she doesn't embody the spirit of a female, and, because of this, falls short of being a role model for any woman. Voting for Hillary is, in other words, like voting for the model of government that has been around for ages: ultra-machismo with tendencies towards violence and sexual polarization.
The good news is that as much as Hillary Clinton is not a true representative of the essence of women, her success as a presidential candidate reflects the undeniable fact that this nation is moving towards the election of a female leader who will embody true feminism, hopefully without letting the pendulum swing too far in the other direction and attempting to blot out the masculine (which many pseudo-feminist "man-haters" tend to get caught up in).
Because, the truth of the matter is that men and women will never be equals. We may have equal pay, equal opportunities and so on, but there are biological, physical, and emotional differences that aren't going away anytime soon.
So Hillary is, in a way, warming the country up to the idea of a female president and setting the stage for the political revolution feminists like Jefferson, Harris and Gordon want. She just doesn't represent male or female very well, which is part of why the victory that once seemed so certain has most likely eluded her, and mostly why feminists don't have her back. |
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