"I Am Not for Hillary Because She is a Woman - it's Because I Am"

Robin Morgan wrote a compelling piece that I want to share with HuffPosters:

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT (#2)
by Robin Morgan

"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 the Fair Use blog).

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--the 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. Sen. 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 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 be alive 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 oppressions, 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 US 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 is 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: Reps. Doris Matsui and Mary Bono and Sala Burton; Sen. 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 US 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?

Older 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 child care 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 US 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 All Things 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 US State Department and the Chinese Government at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing (the full, stunning speech: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/hillaryclintonbeijingspeech.htm).

And this voice, age 22, in "Commencement Remarks of Hillary D. Rodham, President of Wellesley College Government Association, Class of 1969" (full speech: http://www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/Commencement/1969/053169hillary.html)

"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 courageous Anita Hill was so vilely treated in the US Senate, as we did when desperate 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'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, and 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.

RM
February 2, 2008

This piece by Robin Morgan first appeared on the Women's Media Center.
New York City

Comments

[Yurdelite]

Hillary Rosen if you are going to support Hillary Clinton then do not go on MSNBC and misrepresent yourself as a Democratic Strategist. Not only did you not identify yourself as a Clinton supporter but you went on to bash the Obama campaign and lie about what he said about the superdelegates. I will report this to everybody that will listen including MSNBC and Newsvine.

If Bill Bennett on CNN has to identify himself as a supporter of John McCain instead of a political analyst, you should do the same. Same old Clinton tricks. Win at any cost. Exactly why we do not need any more Clintons in the White House.

[DazedandConfused]

A lot of people don't like Hillary because they don't like HER. It's not sexism. But somehow we need to like Hillary BECAUSE she's a woman. Well, I'm a woman, and I don't really like Hillary. I don't HATE her. She just doesn't do it for me. This may not be a good analogy, but I think of Hillary and Obama as being two potential school teachers. They'd both teach you things you need to know, but they'd teach differently. Obama would try to inspire you to learn and Hillary would ask you to memorize your multiplication tables.

[ariuszme]

Hillary, check out this woman's great piece on voting for Hillary. I so admire insightful people who can put on paper (or blog) what represents so many.

http://www.womensmediacenter.com/ex/020108.html

There are so many comments and I don't know if you see all these but I think you will really like this post that woman made!

Hillary '08

..the other Hillary

...but you too!

[clr2]

Being a woman has nothing to do with why I won't vote for Hillary. She is a liar and is wrong on most of the issues. She doesn't have experience. What has she done on her own? Without Bill she wouldn't be where she is. The only reason she stayed with him was for this very moment - she is using him and she is trying to use us as women. She will never get my vote.

[snesich]

Ms. Rosen contradicts her own arguments throughout this post. Here's one glaring example: "Me, I still recall Marilyn Monroe's suicide, and a dead girl named Mary Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick."

Her next words read, "Goodbye to the toxic viciousness . . ."

Amazing. She decries "toxic viciousness" immediately after digging up old, discredited slanders about JFK and EMK, implying that they were responsible for the murder of two women. (Did Rush Limbaugh take over Ms. Rosen's brain at this moment?)

Circulating old right-wing, unhinged anti-Kennedy claptrap is actually stirring up "toxic viciousness". Or don't you see this?

For shame, indeed, Ms. Rosen.

[snesich]

Is is possible that there might be SUBSTANTIVE, policy based reasons for not backing Hillary Clinton? Does the writer understand this, or does she assume anyone not voting for Hillary must dislike the idea of women in power?

[BeyondGoodAndEvil]

I am disgusted with women blogging that other women need to support Hillary! I will support whomever is the best candidate and it is nothing to do with race or gender. It's about what each candidate represents and embodies.

I was an Edwards supporter because he is the first Democratic candidate who understood how much the Corporate Interests have infiltrated the political system, to the detriment of all Americans. He was the first candidate to champion the disenfranchised, the poor, the homeless, the forgotten. This is real humanity, and not just a populist message. Corporations literally write the legislation in this country! The political system has been corrupted, and this has ruptured the very fragment of our society.

Clinton is a Corporate sellout. She worked (for 6 yrs) on the board of WalMart - a notorious union buster, a destroyer of American manufacturing and businesses, and a company that still does not offer it's employees affordable health care.

Just tell me please, what is commendable about a woman who has used her own husband's brilliance, charisma and popularity, to piggyback herself a career in the senate and now a democratic nominee for President? It's opportunism. Hillary has many of the same corporate backers as Bush: big oil, military industrial complex, insurance companies, big pharma. How is this the position of any woman with integrity, or ethics? She gave Bush the authority to invade Iraq and voted again to give Bush the authority to use military force against Iran. She is a Neocon Republican in Liberal garb, and I think she is a shoddy example to young women thinking of entering into politics.

Now that Edwards is out of the race, I would rather vote for Obama, who hasn't has as many years to be corrupted by Washington, by lobbyists, and by special interests.

[mawrm]

What is purposefully omitted are the names of women leaders who achieved on their OWN merits, not being wives, daughters or mothers of popular politicians. I thought this was the purpose of the feminist movement - that women be rightly recognized and respected for their own innate talents, skills and intellect. I have far greater respect for the Condeleeza Rices of this world, who charted their own paths, than the Hillary Clintons who ride on the coattails of their husbands. It's a horrible example to give to young women with regards to leadership - "marry right and you too can become president". Fact is I've seen white male, SUV driving, red blood Republicans _in the Deep South_ with "Condi Rice 2008" stickers and that tells me that these folks are willing to put aside their own gender/race prejudicies to support a woman for president they believe has shown good leadership qualities and REAL experience - my bet is had the Iraq war turned out better and our foreign policy been more successful in the W years, she'd likely be the Republican front-runner right now. Then ask yourself, how in the hell would a Hillary Clinton run against a Condeleeza Rice? Why is Dr. Condi Rice not seen as strong as a feminist whereas a woman who routinely uses her husband's popularity and connections and stands by her philandering husband is? It's these kind of inconsistencies that cause the feminist movement ridicule.

[realpolitic]

Could it be because you are a woman and she is also a women? I only say this because I am a male.

Then as a white male, who can I vote for in the Democratic primary if we are all supposed to vote along gender or racial lines?

[LeeScho]

Sure. Let the women vote for Hillary because they are women; the men vote for Obama because he is a man; the young vote for Obama because he is young; the aging vote for Hillary because she is older; the white for white; the black for black; the long-haired for long-hairs; the tall for the lanky; the diminutive for the petites.

In 1997 I worked in an agency of 27 women and 2 males. At a staff meeting, the question was posed, "If stranded on a desert island, who is the one person you would want with you?" I, a male, chose Hillary Clinton and was roundly booed and hissed by all of the women there (all white and college educated). I did not understand their disaffection until she became an elected official.

Members of any historically oppressed group will forever retain the right to express that outrage however they see fit. Morgan chooses anger and bitterness and a quick reflex to any contemporary expression of disrespect and denigration to women. This 62 year-old, African American, heterosexual male who spent his high school graduation summer in Mississippi (1964), marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 (not on Bloddy Sunday, however), stood with demonstrators at countless pro-choice rallies, volunteered with his daughter for the Gay Men's Crisis center, etc., etc., has needed to find a lot more other reasons to vote for Barack Obama than because he and I are both males or black. I can think of no two reasons that are less important those that if the struggles of women and blacks, the working poor, the dwindling middle class, the lovers, the dreamers and me are to be realized in a world where Kermit need longer lament, "it ain't easy being green."

[BJG]

This was such a brilliant piece I forwarded to all my friends the moment it was published. Many of whom are male and agreed. It only further solidified just how ignorant today's media is that none of them are able to think outside the box. Every single article and post you read, every single newscast on TV all repeat the same things verbatim. Like NObama, no new voices no new thoughts just plagiarizing. It's mind boggling just how low the intellectual caliber of this Country has sunken or that Arianna herself has gotten so lazy she too has jumped on the Obama mania boat. I have two words for all the Obama sycophants: What experience?

[arielwire]

I have been passionately involved with women's rights for most of my adult life. All women have felt the scorching insidious negativity of sexism in our personal lives.
I have been intensely dismayed at the rhetoric I have been seeing- vote for Hillary because she is a woman? I would be the first to stand in line behind a strong woman leader.
I was angry at the Clinton campaign for sending out flyers that Barack wouldn't take a stand on women's rights. This was a plan conceived by Planned Parenthood to block pro- life legislation. I'm angry that the Clinton campaign essentially lied to manipulate women's votes in their direction. I don't see how any feminist worth her salt could be okay with this.
One of the worst aspects of sexism has been our treatment simply because we are women. Historically we have been on the bottom because of that. Voting for Hillary, because she is a woman- does give her special consideration- only this time it puts her on top of the heap rather than the bottom- but it still keeps that mechanism of treating women differently in place. Isn't the whole point to be judged on our integrity and character and ability, rather than our genitals?
If Hillary needs to resort to lies and manipulation to get votes- well, this is certainly not my vision of an empowered woman leader, and she does a disservice to all of us by these kind of tactics.

[Orikinla]

If any article on the American Presidential Campaign in 2008 deserves the Pulitzer Prize, yours has earned it truthfully.

There is nothing more to add.

I am 100% black African and a very proud HillRaiser, for the same reasons you have sincerely stated in your article.

I have been there supporting the Women's Wing of the African National Congress whilst Pa Nelson Mandela was still on Robben Island.
I have been on the task force on the control and prevention of traditional practices against women in Nigeria and I wrote on the consequences of rape on women in Nigeria.
I have seen how men see and treat women as sex objects and baby factories in Nigeria. But the most successful public official today is a woman, Dr. Dora Nkem Akuyili who can be the President of Nigeria one fine day.

America is the greatest democracy on earth and yet, the most sexist where the sexploitation of girls and women on TV and the Internet is the order of the day as illustrated by the sexploitation of "Obama Girl" on YouTube.

Enough is enough..
Sokwanele!

[karoleigh]

love it love it love it

this article encompasses everything i've been thinking/feeling the last few weeks. 1) hillary and barack are basically the same on the issues but HRC has more experience. 2) i will vote for hillary because i want to say goodbye to a world where even though i am more than qualified, as a woman i have to worry about being taken seriously and judged for choice of neckline or emotional depth. 3) BO has lost me on this whole 'unite not divide' thing. i mean, fighting for what is right is just part of the game. you can be assured that the GOP won't quit fighting for what they want- so in order to 'unite'- will he???

[Clinton]

Why goodbye to the double standard? It is the double standard that has served HRC so well. How about goodbye to excuses for moving lockstep with the republicans and then expecting a pass because of your gender. For women to continue blaming men for their own complete lack of courage and integrity is insulting to themselves.