February 2, 2008
Goodbye
To All That” was my (in)famous 1970 essay breaking free from a politics
of accommodation especially affecting women (for an online version, see
http://blog.fair-use.org/category/chicago/).
During
my decades in civil-rights, anti-war, and contemporary women’s
movements, I’ve avoided writing another specific “Goodbye . . .” But
not since the suffrage struggle have two communities—joint
conscience-keepers of this country—been so set in competition, as the
contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) and Barack Obama (BO)
unfurls. So.
Goodbye to the double standard . . .
—Hillary is too ballsy but too womanly, a Snow Maiden who’s emotional, and so much a politician as to be unfit for politics.
—She’s
“ambitious” but he shows “fire in the belly.” (Ever had labor
pains?)—When a sexist idiot screamed “Iron my shirt!” at HRC, it was
considered amusing; if a racist idiot shouted “Shine my shoes!” at BO,
it would’ve inspired hours of airtime and pages of newsprint analyzing
our national dishonor.
—Young
political Kennedys—Kathleen, Kerry, and Bobby Jr.—all endorsed Hillary.
Senator Ted, age 76, endorsed Obama. If the situation were reversed,
pundits would snort “See? Ted and establishment types back her, but the forward-looking generation backs him.”
(Personally, I’m unimpressed with Caroline’s longing for the Return of
the Fathers. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans have short
memories. Me, I still recall Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, and a dead girl
named Mary Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick.)
Goodbye to the toxic viciousness . . .
Carl Bernstein's disgust at Hillary’s “thick ankles.” Nixon-trickster Roger Stone’s new Hillary-hating 527 group, “Citizens United Not Timid”
(check the capital letters). John McCain answering “How do we beat the
bitch?" with “Excellent question!” Would he have dared reply similarly
to “How do we beat the black bastard?” For shame.
Goodbye to the HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs. If it was a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously outraged—and they would not be selling it in airports. Shame.
Goodbye
to the most intimately violent T-shirts in election history, including
one with the murderous slogan “If Only Hillary had married O.J.
Instead!” Shame.
Goodbye
to Comedy Central’s “Southpark” featuring a storyline in which
terrorists secrete a bomb in HRC’s vagina. I refuse to wrench my brain
down into the gutter far enough to find a race-based comparison. For shame.
Goodbye to the sick, malicious idea that this is funny. This is not “Clinton hating,” not “Hillary hating.” This is sociopathic woman-hating.
If it were about Jews, we would recognize it instantly as anti-Semitic
propaganda; if about race, as KKK poison. Hell, PETA would go
ballistic if such vomitous spew were directed at animals. Where is our sense of outrage—as citizens, voters, Americans?
Goodbye to the news-coverage target-practice . . .
The women’s movement and Media Matters wrung an apology from MSNBC’s Chris Matthews for relentless misogynistic comments (www.womensmediacenter.com).
But what about NBC’s Tim Russert’s continual sexist asides and his
all-white-male panels pontificating on race and gender? Or CNN’s Tony
Harris chuckling at “the chromosome thing” while interviewing a woman
from The White House Project? And that’s not even mentioning Fox News.
Goodbye to pretending the black community is entirely male and all women are white . . .
Surprise!
Women exist in all opinions, pigmentations, ethnicities, abilities,
sexual preferences, and ages—not only African American and European
American but Latina and Native American, Asian American and Pacific
Islanders, Arab American and—hey, every group, because a
group wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t given birth to it. A few non-racist
countries may exist—but sexism is everywhere. No matter how many ways a
woman breaks free from other discriminations, she remains a female
human being in a world still so patriarchal that it’s the “norm.”
So why should all women not be as justly proud of our womanhood and the centuries, even millennia, of struggle that got us this far, as black Americans, women and men, are justly proud of their struggles?
Goodbye
to a campaign where he has to pass as white (which whites—especially
wealthy ones—adore), while she has to pass as male (which both men and
women demanded of her, and then found unforgivable). If she were
blackor he were female we wouldn’t be having such problems, and I for
one would be in heaven. But at present such a candidate wouldn’t stand
a chance—even if she shared Condi Rice’s Bush-defending politics.
I
was celebrating the pivotal power at last focused on African American
women deciding on which of two candidates to bestow their vote—until a
number of Hillary-supporting black feminists told me they’re being
called “race traitors.”
So
goodbye to conversations about this nation’s deepest scar—slavery—which
fail to acknowledge that labor- and sexual-slavery exist today in the U.S. and elsewhere on this planet, and the majority of those enslaved are women.
Women have endured
sex/race/ethnic/religious hatred, rape and battery, invasion of spirit
and flesh, forced pregnancy; being the majority of the poor, the
illiterate, the disabled, of refugees, caregivers, the HIV/AIDS
afflicted, the powerless. We have survived invisibility,
ridicule, religious fundamentalisms, polygamy, teargas, forced
feedings, jails, asylums, sati, purdah, female genital mutilation,
witch burnings, stonings, and attempted gynocides. We have tried reason, persuasion, reassurances, and being extra-qualified, only to learn it never was about qualifications after all. We know that at this historical moment women experience the world differently from men—though not all the same as one another—and can govern differently, from Elizabeth Tudor to Michele Bachelet and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
We
remember when Shirley Chisholm and Patricia Schroeder ran for this high
office and barely got past the gate—they showed too much passion,
raised too little cash, were joke fodder. Goodbye to all that. (And
goodbye to some feminists so famished for a female president they were
even willing to abandon women’s rights in backing Elizabeth Dole.)
Goodbye, goodbye to . . .
—blaming
anything Bill Clinton does on Hillary (even including his womanizing
like the Kennedy guys—though unlike them, he got reported on). Let’s
get real. If he hadn’t campaigned strongly for her everyone would cluck over what that meant. Enough of Bill and Teddy Kennedy locking their alpha male horns while Hillary pays for it.
—an era when parts of the populace feel so disaffected by politics that a comparative lack of knowledge, experience, and skill is actually seen as attractive,
when celebrity-culture mania now infects our elections so that it’s
“cooler” to glow with marquee charisma than to understand the vast
global complexities of power on a nuclear, wounded planet.
—the
notion that it’s fun to elect a handsome, cocky president who feels he
can learn on the job, goodbye to George W. Bush and the destruction
brought by his inexperience, ignorance, and arrogance. Goodbye to the
accusation that HRC acts “entitled” when she’s worked intensely at
everything she’s done—including being a nose-to-the-grindstone,
first-rate senator from my state.
Goodbye
to her being exploited as a Rorschach test by women who reduce her to a
blank screen on which they project their own fears, failures,
fantasies.
Goodbye
to the phrase “polarizing figure” to describe someone who embodies the
transitions women have made in the last century and are poised to make
in this one. It was the women’s movement that quipped, “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry.” She heard us, and she has.
Goodbye
to some women letting history pass by while wringing their hands,
because Hillary isn’t as “likeable” as they’ve been warned they
must be, or because she didn’t leave him, couldn’t “control” him, kept
her family together and raised a smart, sane daughter. (Think
of the blame if Chelsea had ever acted in the alcoholic, neurotic
manner of the Bush twins!) Goodbye to some women pouting because she
didn’t bake cookies or she did, sniping because she learned the rules
and then bent or broke them. Grow the hell up. She
is not running for Ms.-perfect-pure-queen-icon of the feminist
movement. She’s running to be president of the United States.
Goodbye
to the shocking American ignorance of our own and other countries’
history. Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir rose through party ranks and
war, positioning themselves as proto-male leaders. Almost all other female heads of government so far have been related to men of power—granddaughters,
daughters, sisters, wives, widows: Gandhi, Bandaranike, Bhutto, Aquino,
Chamorro, Wazed, Macapagal-Arroyo, Johnson Sirleaf, Bachelet, Kirchner,
and more. Even in our “land of opportunity,” it’s mostly the first
pathway “in” permitted to women: Representatives Doris Matsui and Mary
Bono and Sala Burton; Senator Jean Carnahan . . . far too many to list
here.
Goodbye to a misrepresented generational divide . . .
Goodbye to the so-called spontaneous “Obama Girl” flaunting her bikini-clad ass online—then confessing Oh yeah it wasn’t her idea after all, some guys got her to do it and dictated the clothes, which she said “made me feel like a dork.”
Goodbye
to some young women eager to win male approval by showing they’re not
feminists (at least not the kind who actually threaten thestatus quo),
who can’t identify with a woman candidate because she is unafraid of eeueweeeu yucky power, who fear their boyfriends might look at them funny if they say something good about her. Goodbye to women of any age again
feeling unworthy, sulking “what if she’s not electable?” or “maybe it’s
post-feminism and whoooosh we’re already free.” Let a statement by the
magnificent Harriet Tubman stand as reply. When asked how she managed
to save hundreds of enslaved African Americans via the Underground
Railroad during the Civil War, she replied bitterly, “I could have
saved thousands—if only I’d been able to convince them they were
slaves.”
I’d rather say a joyful Hello to all the glorious young women who do identifywith Hillary, and all the brave, smart men—of all ethnicities and any age—who get that it’s in their self-interest, too. She’s better qualified. (D’uh.)
She’s a high-profile candidate with an enormous grasp of foreign- and
domestic-policy nuance, dedication to detail, ability to absorb
staggering insult and personal pain while retaining dignity, resolve,
even humor, and keep on keeping on. (Also, yes, dammit, let’s
hear it for her connections and funding and party-building background,
too. Obama was awfully glad about those when she raised dough and
campaigned for him to get to the Senate in the first place.)
I’d
rather look forward to what a good president he might make in eight
years, when his vision and spirit are seasoned by practical
know-how—and he’ll be all of 54. Meanwhile, goodbye to turning him into
a shining knight when actually he’s an astute, smooth pol with
speechwriters who’ve worked with the Kennedys’ own
speechwriter-courtier Ted Sorenson. If it’s only about ringing
rhetoric, let speechwriters run. But isn’t it about getting the policies we want enacted?
And goodbye to the ageism . . .
How dare anyone
unilaterally decide when to turn the page on history, papering over
real inequities and suffering constituencies in the promise of a
feel-good campaign? How dare anyone claim to unify while dividing, or
think that to rouse U.S. youth from torpor it’s useful to triage the single largest demographic in this country’s history: the boomer generation—the majority of which is female?
Old woman are the one group that doesn’t grow more conservative with age—and we are the generation of radicals who said “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” Goodbye to going gently into any goodnight any man prescribes for us. We are the women who changed the reality of the United States. And though we never went away, brace yourselves: we’re back!
We
are the women who brought this country equal credit, better pay,
affirmative action, the concept of a family-focused workplace; the
women who established rape-crisis centers and battery shelters,
marital-rape and date-rape laws; the women who defended lesbian custody
rights, who fought for prison reform, founded the peace and
environmental movements; who insisted that medical research include
female anatomy; who inspired men to become more nurturing parents; who
created women’s studies and Title IX so we all could cheer the WNBA
stars and Mia Hamm. We are the women who reclaimed sexuality from
violent pornography, who put childcare on the national agenda, who
transformed demographics, artistic expression, language itself. We are
the women who forged a worldwide movement. We are the proud successors
of women who, though it took more than 50 years, won us the vote.
We are the women who now comprise the majority of U.S. voters.
Hillary
said she found her own voice in New Hampshire. There’s not a woman
alive who, if she’s honest, doesn’t recognize what she means. Then HRC
got drowned out by campaign experts, Bill, and media’s obsession with
everything Bill.
So listen to her voice:
“For too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words.
“It is a violation of human
rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their
spines broken, simply because they are born girls. It is a violation of
human rights when woman and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution. It is a violation of human
rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to
death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small. It is a
violation of human rights when individual women are raped in
their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape
as a tactic or prize of war. It is a violation of human
rights when a leading cause of death worldwide along women ages 14 to
44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes. It is a
violation of human rights when women are denied the right to
plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have
abortions or being sterilized against their will.
“Women’s rights are human rights. Among those rights are the right to speak freely—and the right to be heard.”
That
was Hillary Rodham Clinton defying the U.S. State Department and the
Chinese Government at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing
(look here for the full, stunning speech).
And this voice, age 21, in “Commencement Remarks of Hillary D. Rodham, President of Wellesley College Government Association, Class of 1969.”
“We
are, all of us, exploring a world none of us understands. . . .
searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of
living. . . . [for the] integrity, the courage to be whole, living in
relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. The struggle
for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and
respect is one with desperately important political and social
consequences. . . . Fear is always with us, but we just don't have time
for it.”
She ended with the commitment “to practice, with all the skill of our being: the art of making possible.”
And for decades, she’s been learning how.
So goodbye to Hillary’s second-guessing herself. The real question is deeper than her re-finding her voice. Can we women find ours? Can we do this for ourselves?
“Our President, Ourselves!”
Time
is short and the contest tightening. We need to rise in furious
energy—as we did when Anita Hill was so vilely treated in the U.S.
Senate, as we did when Rosie Jiminez was butchered by an illegal
abortion, as we did and do for women globally who are condemned for
trying to break through. We need to win, this time. Goodbye
to supporting HRC tepidly, with ambivalent caveats and apologetic
smiles. Time to volunteer, make phone calls, send emails, donate money,
argue, rally, march, shout, vote.
Me? I support Hillary Rodham because she’s the best qualified of all candidates running in both
parties. I support her because her progressive politics are as strong
as her proven ability to withstand what will be a massive right-wing
assault in the general election. I support her because she knows how to
get us out of Iraq. I support her because she’s refreshingly
thoughtful, and I’m bloodied from eight years of a jolly “uniter” with
ejaculatory politics. I needn’t agree with her on every point. I agree
with the 97 percent of her positions that are identical with Obama’s—and
the few where hers are both more practical and to the left of his (like
health care). I support her because she’s already smashed the
first-lady stereotype and made history as a fine senator, because I
believe she will continue to make history not only as the first US
woman president, but as a great US president.
As for the “woman thing”?
Me, I’m voting for Hillary not because she’s a woman—but because I am.
Dear People for the American Way:
Other: pierlight.blogspot.com
