There is no denying that the possibility of a female president -- or even a female candidate -- is a big deal. It may not make sense, it may be irrational, but it would mean something serious to have a woman leading this country for the first time in America's history. No matter who the woman is.
Pat Schroeder, the former Democratic Colorado congresswoman who tried to run for president in 1988, but couldn't raise the money and famously dropped out of the race in tears, told me that she was excited about the prospect of a run by Clinton or even Republican Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Regardless of politics, Schroeder said, it was time to storm the White House, "the ultimate tree house with a sign that says, 'No Girls Allowed.'" Schroeder added that the slogan for either woman's campaign could be, "We couldn't mess it up any more!" and speculated that "an awful lot of us would quit what we're doing and go work to make it happen."
To many women, making that happen means cutting Clinton some slack and realizing that she is navigating a labyrinthine political maze. Literary agent Sarah Burnes, who saw Clinton speak in 2003 and found her "masterful," said hearing liberal women rip Clinton is disheartening. Burnes said she feels like "the days of believing in any leader with your whole heart are over," but given that rather grim limitation, it is "a political responsibility" for left-leaning ladies to support Clinton. "That's why I was so pissed off at Susan Sarandon," said Burnes. "It doesn't help."
In the online magazine Sirens, journalist Allison Hantschel expressed her own guilt about the fact that while she is "unexcited," "uninspired" and "indifferent" about Clinton, she is "nagged by the feeling that this makes me a bad feminist. After all, a woman president, any woman president, is a victory for womankind, right?"
"That will probably be true for some," Michelman told me. "If she runs, it will have been a long journey to having a woman candidate finally taken seriously as a presidential hopeful." But, she added, "even though it will be historic, women want to be assured that they have a candidate who will represent them."
Writer Ellen Chesler is assured. Chesler, who called herself a "longtime friend and supporter of Clinton," argued that if Clinton ran and were elected, she "would be one of the first women who has been true to feminist values" without "in any way ignoring the issue of choice and balance in women's lives, and certainly without ignoring the rights of men." Clinton understands, Chesler maintained, that "women's rights are only an avenue toward enjoying a better democracy. She has clearly shown herself to be a candidate who can carry the banner of women without making it offensive."
But it's the "without making it offensive" part that tends to stick in the craw. Faye Wattleton, former Planned Parenthood president, who now heads the Center for the Advancement of Women, told me, "It is my fondest hope that Mrs. Clinton, if she is the presidential candidate, does not try to" -- Wattleton paused, searching for le mot juste -- "triangulate on the issues of reproductive rights." Wattleton wants Clinton to advance the notion that "unintended pregnancy should be rare and that abortion should be safe and legal," a deliberate variation on the Bill Clinton chestnut, long attributed to his wife, that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare."
Recently, Hillary regained some political ground with feminists by pushing over-the-counter emergency contraception Plan B through the glutinous (and possibly corrupt) bureaucracy at the FDA. Then last week, she appeased those disgusted by her refusal to support gay marriage by lending her support to a bill that would provide insurance benefits for same-sex partnerships. These moves -- late and somewhat limp, but good for women, good for civil liberties, good for underrepresented Americans -- may represent the best of what Hillary Clinton can offer the American left: unreliable, occasional, but intermittently effective action on behalf of the good guys.
Compromise may also be the best Clinton can offer American feminists. Her brand of inoffensive feminism has been a savvy move to distance herself from the hoary, hairy phantasm of 1970s women's rights activism. After all, the right has long dangled the hirsute succubus of stereotyped feminism in front of the American people like some kind of bogeywoman. The specter has so cowed the left that it has retreated behind a Disneyfied facsimile of a feminist: someone who is easy on the eyes and synapses, who is well groomed and strikes a careful balance between threatening and demure, who doesn't object to sliding right, possibly taking a macho stand on the war, possibly making basic abortion-rights activists feel like Andrea Dworkin radicals.
Clinton clearly made a decision some time ago to meet those specifications. Her vision of female and feminine leadership may be expansive enough to include cookies and spongy-soft listening tours in which she cuddles up to conservatives, but it will not include the radical politics on which she was weaned.
Many pragmatic feminists believe that's a smart move. "Hillary most certainly was a feminist, when the label and identity could be used strategically to her benefit," said Rebecca Walker, author and co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation, an organization of young feminists, via e-mail. But identifying herself as a feminist today "would be divisive and undermining to her cause of representing, or seeming to represent, all Americans." Walker continued that although Clinton "voted for the war and made sympathetic antiabortion statements, my sense is that she stands for a 'feminist' agenda." To Walker, that agenda includes reproductive freedom, pay equity, increased family leave, universal healthcare, environmental preservation and education reform.
Walker broke a big-time taboo by coming out and saying one of those things that is impolite to mention. "I have to be totally honest and say that I would vote for Hillary because of her husband," she said. "Real partnership, with its mammoth requirements of negotiating power and taking turns, is the next feminist frontier," and "President Hillary and first gentleman Bill would give the world one hell of a demo."
To others, Clinton is all the feminist they need right now. "I am wild about her as a person, and I am definitely a liberal feminist," said comedian Janeane Garofalo, a host on liberal radio station Air America. "I like her very much for who she is -- when she doesn't pander to right-wing constituencies." As for troubling Clinton stands like the flag-burning conflagration, Garofalo said, "There's no way she could fully believe in that. Having said that, this woman has been so browbeaten, so picked-on, so ridiculously maligned that I don't blame her for having these spurts of post-traumatic stress disorder."
Even the Hillary-skeptical Ephron had to agree. "No question, women are hard on women, and men are hard on women too," she told me in an e-mail. "And women are especially hard on Hillary because she's such a Rorschach and we all want her to be exactly like us, whoever we are."
Where women are now is a hell of a lot closer to political equity, or at least to the executive branch of government, than we've ever been before. That's good news. But it's painful, too. Fourteen years with Hillary Clinton has shown us exactly how much easier it is to hold fast to our politics when we're on the outside looking in. Get within striking distance of the center of power, we face a paralysis of political idealism: What do we give up to get inside? Do we have to bastardize our beliefs to do it? If Clinton is balancing her political ambitions with the principles that motivated her to enter politics in the first place, then perhaps she still does have something in common with feminists: We are balancing our ambitions for her, and ourselves, with the ideals that motivated us to first invest in her.
The reality is we are probably going to vote for her if she is the Democratic nominee, even if we have to hold our noses. Ephron told me she remains lukewarm on the former first lady, but added that "if she comes around on the war, I'm there. And if she gets the nomination, of course I'll vote for her. And I'll give her money. I'm a Democrat."
So maybe that's it. She's a Democrat. She's a woman. So she's not exactly what we thought she could have been, or as Tony Curtis might have said, what we thought we could have been. But in the end, Clinton may just beat the alternative. By a hair.
About the writer
Rebecca Traister is a staff writer for Salon Life.
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