Robin Morgan on Hillary Clinton
long but worth it. Read it.
and vote (for whomever you choose, just vote)
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 black or 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 the status 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 identify with 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 among 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:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/hillaryclintonbeijingspeech.htm
).
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.
---
Robin Morgan, an award-winning writer, feminist
leader, political analyst, journalist, editor, and
co-founder of the Women's Media Center, has published
21 books, including six of poetry, four of fiction,
and the now-classic anthologies Sisterhood Is
Powerful, Sisterhood Is Global, and Sisterhood Is
Forever.
and vote (for whomever you choose, just vote)
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 black or 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 the status 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 identify with 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 among 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:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/hillaryclintonbeijingspeech.htm
).
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.
---
Robin Morgan, an award-winning writer, feminist
leader, political analyst, journalist, editor, and
co-founder of the Women's Media Center, has published
21 books, including six of poetry, four of fiction,
and the now-classic anthologies Sisterhood Is
Powerful, Sisterhood Is Global, and Sisterhood Is
Forever.