[from Martha]
I’m a feminist, and I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton. To me, this is a statement of fact, or rather, two facts. To some people, including Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan, both hugely influential Second Wave feminists, it’s an oxymoron, an impossible conjunction. Maybe I’m a bad feminist? A former feminist? Someone who’s fallen prey to the pervasive normalized anti-feminist, anti-woman discourse and hasn’t even noticed it? I don’t think so, but it’s not impossible. I live in this world. I struggle with ambition, with wondering if I can be smart and funny and not perfectly skinny and still reasonably expect that a man might want to date me. If these seem like personal issues rather than political ones, well, it was feminists who taught us that the two are inseparable. I dont feel guilty about my vote, but I do feel obligated to think about it.
I’ve been a card carrying feminist since I was 10, 12, tops. Granted, they didn’t have cards, but trust me, I would have carried one. Through 8th, 9th, and 10th grade, I proudly wore the t-shirt with the famous Steinem quote "a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”" on it. Feminists were my heroes, because they were right, because they were tough, and because as Robin Morgan, one of the founders of Second Wave feminism, puts it in her recent pro-Hillary essay, "Goodbye to All That (#2)", they were and "are the women who changed the reality of the United States.”"
I think Title Nine was one of the greatest things ever. Whenever its relevant (and sometimes when its not), I drop historical factoids on my students that make them goggle. Really, they say, women couldn’t open a bank account in their own names? The New York Times had separate want ads for men and women? As late as 1968? No way. Way, I say. I am not a post-feminist: I don’t understand what’s "post" about it. I’ve done my share of ranting about young women who’ve benefited from feminism while insisting they aren’t feminists; and I really don’t get why Girls Gone Wild is somehow an expression of feminist options and not a buy-in to good old fashioned consumerist chauvinism. I don’t think sexism is something we’ve advanced beyond, like, say polio. I work with sexists. I think sexism is alive and well and living most everywhere.
Whats more, I don’t for a second doubt that there’s sexism in the discourse about Hillary. There are the Hillary nutcrackers and the t-shirts that say "The Bitch is Back"” or "I already Have a Mother."” And its not just nasty right wingers either. See Rebecca Traister’s article in Salon for a discussion about how progressive men might love Barack in part because they just plain don’t like Hillary, and how this shows in the way they talk about her, how often the word bitch comes up, not to mention the desire to punch her in the face. See above re: sexism everywhere.
Sure, it’s depressing to find out (again) that progressive guys sometimes have trouble getting their feelings about women in sync with their political ideas, but is it shocking? After all, the point of the first "Goodbye to All That,"” a foundational essay by that same Robin Morgan, was that the Weathermen and Students for a Democratic Society and the Chicago Seven and lots and lots of other parts of the New Left were sexist, and that it was time for women to stop accommodating it. She was right then, and Traister’s probably right now. But does that mean that you can’t be against Hillary without being secretly sexist? Morgan seems to think so. In her essay, she decries the fact that pro-Hillary Black women have been called race traitors, while essentially calling anti-Hillary women gender traitors. Or simps who don’t want to irritate their Barack Obama loving boyfriends. Or the metaphorical equivalent of the slaves that Harriet Tubman said she couldn’t save because they didn’t understand they were slaves.
Surely it’s possible to dislike Hillary without being accused of false consciousness or having my feminist card revoked. I don’t like how she voted on Iraq, and I don’t like how reluctant she’s been to admit she was wrong. I don’t like her recent comment that if necessary, she would "totally obliterate” Iran." And I don’t like how she’s campaigned, the who-do-you-want-picking-up-that-phone ad, the rhetoric of being ready on day one and battle-hardened enough to take whatever the Republicans dish out, all of which are clearly meant to suggest that Barack’s a delicate flower who’ll wilt in the face of Kim Jong Il, not to mention John McCain. She’s tested and realistic; Barack’s callow and inexperienced. Hillary, the candidate feminists are assumed to support, is running a campaign that says in many ways, direct and indirect, don’t send a boy to do a man’s job, and then insists that she’s the right, the only, man for that job. Wasn’t it Audre Lorde, another feminist foremother, who said that you can’t take down the master’s house with the master’s tools?
Why are my feminist credentials in jeopardy when she’s working so hard to out-tough and out-man Barack Obama? Morgan nods toward this question by saying the public demanded that Hillary "pass as a male,”" and she might argue that I’m blaming the victim, but thats not how it feels to me. These aren’t just moments here and there– they’re crucial components of her campaign. And problematic ones, to say the least. Theres the practical problem: If the issue in November is who’s more of a man, the answer’s obvious: McCain. McCain wins that one with one hand tied behind his POW, admiral’s son and grandson, Service Academy graduate, flyboy, famously almost last in his class, straight-talking, hell-raising back.
Another problem, another thing that sticks in my craw, relates to class. Why is Hillary, who grew up in middle class Park Ridge, Illinois and went to Wellesley and Yale working so hard to out working-class, out regular guy, Barack, a Columbia and Harvard grad, true, but also the son of a single mother who at times was on food stamps, and why is regularity and guyness exemplified by the ability to talk tough, bowl, and do whiskey shots? We have a regular guy (also rich, also pretty good at making bank on his notional everyman-hood) in the White House right now. It hasn’t gone so well. And there’s the ontological problem, the idea that because of what you are at heart, because of points earned a long time ago, you can tack as far from that as necessary and still get credit for it. Remember how Bill Clinton decided that the way to beat the Republicans was to move to the center? Remember Ricky Ray Rector and ending welfare as we know it? Come on& he’d worked for McGovern! And where were liberal Democrats going to go, anyway? Hillary seems to be counting on the idea that women will (or should) vote for her because she’s a woman, even as she goes ahead and does whatever she needs to do. Real liberals, true feminists, will forgive the compromises she’s had to make because at heart she’s one of them, especially if them are women. I don’t think I’m asking Hillary to be better then the men (another version of the old double standard); what I want is for her be a little less calculating and calculated and to actually speak to me in a way that makes me want to vote for her.
Morgan points out, rightly, that Hillary’s running for president, not "Ms.-perfect-pure-queen-icon of the feminist movement."” And perfect or not, theres no doubt that for some people, many even, Hillary Clinton is a feminist icon. But, and its worth saying again, that’s not what we’re voting on. Morgan ends her essay with this: "Me, I’m voting for Hillary not because shes a woman — but because I am.”" Me, I didn’t vote for her, not because she’s a woman, and despite the fact that I (still) am, but because given the choice, I didn’t want her to be my president. I’ll vote for her in November if she’s the Democratic nominee (I’ll vote for your Uncle Fred if he’s the Democratic nominee), and if she wins, her being a woman will be a bonus, but it won’t make me like her any better. And it won’t really have much to do with my feminist credentials or hers.
