Hillary's race against time

The cloud of feminist cant about Hillary's struggling candidacy has been noxious. "Media misogyny has reached an all-time high," screeched the National Organization for Women in a press release titled "Ignorance and Venom: The Media's Deeply Ingrained Sexism." Groan. If women are going to play in the geopolitical big league, they'd better toughen up and learn how to deal with all the curveballs. Never has the soppy emotionalism of old-guard feminist reasoning been on such open and embarrassing display. How has Hillary, who rode her husband's coattails to the top and who trashed every woman he seduced or assaulted, become such a feminist heroine? What has she ever achieved on her own -- aside from the fiasco of healthcare reform?

And if the media is treating Hillary in a gendered way, hasn't she herself constantly and cynically dramatized her embattled womanhood? It began with her snappish defense of her hangdog husband during the Gennifer Flowers imbroglio of 1992. Blame tail-chasing Bill, from Little Rock on, for sexualizing the popular perception of the Clintons. Nubile, exploited Monica Lewinsky will always hover around Hillary like ghostly baggage. Bill's serial abuses betray a profound ambivalence about and deep-seated hostility to women -- something the Clintons' giddy feminist flacks just don't see. Why was Hillary flying around the world to those 80 countries anyhow -- building her résumé while leaving her randy hubby unleashed? Anyone who thinks Bill's exploits are going to stop after Hillary is president has, well, a screw loose. New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's entrapment in a sex scandal is coming at a particularly inopportune moment for the Clintons, since it simply reminds everyone again of tawdry, furtive, high-placed adultery.

As a longtime listener, I was surprised and disappointed by Rush Limbaugh's call for Republicans to vote for Hillary in the Texas and Ohio primaries to keep the Democratic campaign in costly turmoil. Rush made an analogy to the New Hampshire primary, where independents and crossover Democrats gave victory to John McCain over Republican opponents who split the conservative vote. But McCain already had a long-standing high reputation among liberal Democrats (which I've never shared) and may indeed attract their support in the general election. In Texas and Ohio, in contrast, Rush was asking Republicans to vote for a candidate (variously called "Hitlery" or the "Hildebeast" on the Web) who was anathema to them.

I take the ballot very seriously, because it took women so long to win it. I am very unsettled by tactical voting -- that is, using one's vote as a stratagem in what Rush describes as "gamesmanship": "It's all about winning," he has repeatedly said to callers protesting the Hillary stunt. But hasn't Rush's massive appeal always been based on his adherence to core principles rather than to narrow partisanship? I believe that every vote one casts should be meaningful and should reflect one's considered judgment, even when a candidate doesn't fulfill all one's desires. Surely tactical voting across party lines is a form of tampering, a debasement of the ballot that will inevitably weaken the democratic process and the prestige of American institutions.

Back to feminism: I recently stumbled on a fascinating book at the public library, Peter Kurth's "American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson," published in 1990. Thompson was the world-famous journalist satirized in "Woman of the Year," the 1942 film where she was played by a lordly Katharine Hepburn. Both Thompson and Hepburn were brilliant examples of the many high-achieving women of the 1920s and '30s. In the early 1960s, as an adolescent in the throes of my Amelia Earhart craze, I madly researched that exhilarating period of feminism in old newspapers and magazines in the bowels of the Syracuse library. (This was before Betty Friedan, who may have given birth to Gloria Steinem but who sure didn't produce Germaine Greer or me.)

What an extraordinary life Thompson led -- a pinnacle of which was her loud disruption of a pro-Nazi rally of the German-American Bund in New York's Madison Square Garden, from which she was expelled. Kurth reproduces an astonishing photo of the defiant Thompson swamped by men in Nazi uniforms. (Swastika banners festooned the hall, which was packed with 22,000 people.) The book follows Thompson's rapid rise and stunning productivity as a journalist and broadcaster. Then there was Thompson's conflicted marriage to novelist Sinclair Lewis, her lesbian affairs (including with Christa Winsloe, the author of "Maedchen in Uniform") and her painful neglect of her son for her career.

The boldness of that generation of women, who were facing obstacles and prejudices far greater than today's, makes me impatient with the reactionary whining one hears from establishment feminists, including Steinem, about the supposedly still-crippling pervasiveness of sexism. As an equity feminist, I demand equal opportunities for women, but I strongly oppose intrusive special protections for women, which I regard as counterproductive and infantilizing. (My gender philosophy is fully detailed in "No Law in the Arena" in "Vamps & Tramps.")

One feminist issue that's still very much on the boil regards women in science. Has their career advancement been hindered by systemic institutional sexism? Complaints by women scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which received wide and sympathetic press coverage in 1999, resurfaced with a bang when Harvard president Larry Summers casually speculated at a 2005 conference about whether the low number of women in science and math could possibly be the result of, among other things, a lack of aptitude.

Next page: The immobilized faces and simpering smirks of Oscar's vapid glamazons