SENECA FALLS — WHERE IT ALL BEGAN FOR CLINTON
FIRST FEMALE PRESIDENT WOULD HAVE HER FLAWS
One could argue Hillary Clinton’s race to the White House began here in a small, red-brick chapel on a sunny June morning 168 years ago.
It was 1848 — 99 years before the woman who could be America’s first female president was born in a leafy suburb of Chicago — and as many as 300 women and men were packed into the tiny building in upstate New York. The gathering would come to be known as the Seneca Falls Convention, the birthplace of the women’s rights movement.
After two days of speeches from luminaries such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass, 68 women and 32 men signed the Declaration of Sentiments, which borrowed language from America’s founding document to declare: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”
It took 72 more years for women to get the vote. A year later, in 1921, Margaret Sanger founded the precursor to Planned Parenthood. Another four decades would pass before birth control was fully legalized in the U.S. in 1960.
In 1982, while Clinton was the first and only partner in a female law firm in Arkansas, the Equal Rights Amendment died. This was an effort to enshrine in the U.S. Constitution the belief expressed in Seneca Falls — that men and women are equal under the law.
But at the same time as Clinton became a passionate advocate for women, critics say she worked against the most marginalized: she sat on the boards of or represented companies such as Walmart, took money from corporations that run prisons, gave $250,000 talks at Goldman Sachs, argued single-payer health care would be impossible in America and voted for the war in Iraq.
“I can’t really see her as the kind of feminist that I would like to embrace,” said Liza Featherstone, editor of the book, False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton. “I think it is kind of a faux victory.”
But Trump, with his misogynist — and worse — record, “would be an incredibly depressing development for feminism in the United States and around the globe.”
Hillary Rodham Clinton — she took her husband’s name over a decade into their marriage for the sole purpose of political expediency — is, in many ways, as imperfect a first female president as the women’s movement itself.
As much as she’s maligned on the left, Clinton is loathed on the right for her feminism.
“Feminism is no longer a term that’s used to enable or empower women,” Carly Fiorina said in June at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference after her failed bid for the Republican nomination.
“It turns out to be in so many people’s eyes, in Hillary Clinton’s eyes, kind of a way to bludgeon people into a leftwing litany of causes.”
Perhaps that’s why it’s taken 168 years to see a woman so close to the White House: even other women can’t agree on what a Madame President should look like.
As Eleanor Roosevelt, one of Clinton’s heroes, said: “Women do not want a woman to be president, nor would they have the slightest confidence in her abilities to fulfil the functions of that office. Every woman who fails in a public position confirms this, but every woman who succeeds creates confidence.”
Roosevelt was not saying women would never hold the highest offices in the land. Quite the contrary. Many interpret her comments as a criticism of the anti-suffrage, anti-women female politicians who campaigned and won races in the decades after the 19th Amendment that gave women the vote in 1920.
It’s yet another reason enthusiasm for Clinton remains so muted: few believe she will actually change that much, given how firmly she’s entrenched in the establishment.
“One of the reasons that we’re not having this conversation about historic firsts is because she’s tried to campaign on that in 2008 and failed,” said Leandra Zarnow, an assistant history professor at the University of Houston. Clinton’s campaign has been a lot more subtle about using the “gender card,” especially during the primaries and before Trump made it an obvious play.
If, however, there’s a “special place in hell” for women who don’t support other women, as former secretary of state Madeleine Albright put it, younger women aren’t buying in.
“Anecdotally, based on focus groups, older women were much more willing to say, ‘I want to see a female president in my lifetime; Hillary Clinton might not be perfect,’… but it would tip their decision,” said Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster with Echelon Insights.
“Younger women believe we will get there regardless. They want someone who believes in what they believe more than the symbolism of a woman.”
Of the many campaign moments, one of the most memorable was when Trump called Clinton “a nasty woman.” But much earlier, after he inaccurately described a third-term abortion, Clinton responded with a passionate defence, a heartbreaking story about lateterm abortions and a family who had to endure one because of medical necessity.
Even that — a first in presidential debate history — wasn’t feminist enough for some.
“Even when abortion is a tragic choice for women, it needs to be legal and it must never be apologized for,” said Yasmin Nair, an activist who is one of Clinton’s loudest critics on the left. She said true feminists support “abortion on demand.” Allowing the rhetoric of abortion-astragedy to creep into the discourse is just one of Clinton’s many sins against the sisterhood.
The debate about Clinton’s feminist cred is not quite as old as women’s rights themselves — those divisions emerged as Seneca Falls let out.
“In some ways you can’t remake people’s implicit attitudes … but the fact that a woman is in that role begins to recalibrate those expectations,” said Kim Campbell, Canada’s only female prime minister.
She was also the first woman to become federal justice minister and convened the country’s first and only National Symposium on Women, Law and the Administration of Justice. She stickhandled abortion and rape-shield laws and boldly declared she was a feminist.
“Feminism isn’t something just the left gets to have,” Campbell said. “Quite frankly, the more people who describe themselves as feminists, the better.”
Back at Seneca Falls, a woman with the same big brown eyes and soft face as a young Elizabeth Cady Stanton, with brown curls pressed under a 19th-century-style bonnet, worries some will think a Madame President means the dreams expressed on that hot July day in 1848 have all been realized.
“I would be cautious about the symbolism. In the 19th century, the idea was that once we achieved suffrage, all other problems would fall away,” said Melinda Grube, who dons the ancient garb about twice a month to act as Cady Stanton at the Women’s Rights National Historic Park in Seneca Falls.
“If we stop at the convention or if we stop at the 19th Amendment, or if we stop at a woman president, then we haven’t completed our journey.”
But maybe the hope lies in the very fact Clinton’s candidacy isn’t being touted as the end of the line.
“Hillary Clinton is not the democratic nominee as a token,” said Michelle Rempel, a Conservative MP and former cabinet minister. “She’s doing it in a way that’s blind to her gender. The population is saying, ‘ I’m going to measure you based on who you are.’
“And that’s something truly remarkable.”