What’s weirder, praising Donald Trump’s feminism or denouncing first-female-presidential nominee (it’s historic, haven’t you heard?) Hillary Clinton’s anti-feminist ways? Moreover, when both presidential nominees are evidently “gender neutral” in their self-serving blind ambition, who really cares?
Emboldened in their righteous rage by yet another email scandal, lefty activists at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia have taken to booing any mention of Clinton’s name. They booed her during the opening prayer, and during a speech by Elijah Cummings, and even during their beloved cranky leader Bernie Sanders’s speech. They did so much booing they incurred Sarah Silverman’s scolding.
With Gloria Steinem, Lena Dunham, and Beyonce all praising Clinton in the name of girl power, you might think anti-Hillary feminists need an acrobat’s fine-line finesse to denounce Hillary’s cred without tarnishing their own. Especially when Madeleine Albright, another high-profile Clinton clubbie, so quotably said “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t
help other women.” (Albright later apologized for consigning millions of American women to eternal damnation.)
Care to explain yourselves, ladies?
In op-eds from glossy magazines to the outer-reaches of the blogosphere, anti-Hillary feminists bare all. More mob mentality than fine-line finesse, they resent her choice of a center-left Democrat for veep—not just a non-radical but a Roman Catholic and, ugh, a white man to boot. On the day of the mid-June Clinton-Sanders detente, a hot pink book of anti-Clinton screeds hit the shelves (or some shelves anyway). The collection, edited by Liza Featherstone, the feminist writer and stalwart Walmart enemy, reflects 2016’s similarities to the fraught, a-changin’ times of the 1960s. Her forward-looking, movement-minded introduction and the heavy Bernie bias of the book’s contributors, but most of all its title, False Choices, recall Phyllis Schlafly’s conservative call for A Choice Not An Echo back in 1964. Hillary, like 1960s Republicans’ Nelson Rockefeller, whom Hillary once worked for, does not meaningfully diverge from a “rigged system” and does not speak for a movement.
“What we need is not a woman for president; what we need is a movement,” writes Megan Erickson in an emotive essay objecting to Clinton’s disingenuous embrace of childcare reform policy. Sure, Hillary will “get stuff done,” but only with corrupting corporate intervention, these ladies argue almost in unison. Hillary flirted with radical ideologies as a student but failed to commit, favoring the politically and diplomatically expedient “imperial feminism.” Medea Benjamin, co-founder of anti-war women’s group Code Pink, also the lone RNC press-box protester, condemns Hillary’s hawkishness as anti-feminist realpolitik.
And, like the smiling kids of color on the cover of any given college admissions view book, Hillary as “first female president” would be an inauthentic symbol—a “token.” Progressive feminists say they see right through this manipulative messaging, and aren’t falling for it.
So, for whom is Hillary an incorruptible feminist? Those who see the women’s movement more as a means to an end than an endless protest march.
Hillary is the most sacred of cows, among the sort of women who might have hummed Carly Simon’s anthemic theme to the 1988 movie Working Girl on their way to the office, where in their minds and in their soft-focus memories they played the Melanie Griffith character. Griffith, as ambitious secretary Tess McGill, bends the rules good-naturedly and works at least twice as hard as her male counterparts to win the day, and a new, much better job, despite the machinations of her boss Katharine Parker, a Wellesley (!) alumna played by Sigourney Weaver.
They put their activist spin on it, but anti-Hillary feminists resist her for the same reasons much of the electorate finds her so impossible to trust. For the majority of voters across the political spectrum who find Hillary unfavorable (let’s extrapolate: untrustworthy and unlikeable), Hillary Clinton is much more of a Katharine Parker—conniving, spoiled, manipulative—than she is an earnestly striving Tess McGill. Chalk it up to feminine intuition.
