Hillary comes to the sisterhood a little too late

I was on a flight out of Delhi when the results started coming in. But I wasn’t breaking out into a sweat: My column was ready; Hillary Rodham Clinton was taking the White House. As soon as I landed, I realized I would be rewriting that column. It had taken 240 years for a major American party to nominate a woman to run, but the victor was Donald Trump, a man who had boasted of sexual assault.

How did Hillary lose, and to such a man? It’s this question that Hillary addresses in What Happened.

Conceding that the book isn’t a comprehensive account of the elections, Hillary admits, “I couldn’t get the job done, and I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life.”

And yet, there is a lack of both candour and insight. Hillary says she didn’t want to be seen as a “woman candidate” but “rather as the best candidate whose experience as a woman in a male-dominated cul- ture made her sharper, tougher, and more competent.” Fair enough.

And so, like so many women politicians, Hillary plunged into a campaign that was highly sexist and misogynist, making light of her gender or not mentioning it at all.

There’s her fatal error in the second presidential debate where, just days earlier, the world had heard Trump bragging about groping women. Yet, far from being apologetic, Trump follows Hillary menacingly on the small stage. Instead of calling him out, what does Hillary do? Nothing (her explanation: “a lot of people recoil from an angry woman”).

If a woman vying for the world’s most powerful job cannot tell a man to back off, what do we teach our daughters about claiming safe public spaces? It’s a defeat that is strategic as well as moral.

Hillary comes to the sisterhood too late. Partly this is because, she writes, the American electorate is not receptive to the idea of the women’s liberation movement. And so, it might be perfectly understandable for a feminist candidate intent on winning to downplay her gender simply as political strategy. To now claim common cause with female engineers battling harassment in Silicon Valley seems a bit opportunistic. The fact that sexism is alive should have been a rallying cry, not a belated woe-is-me realisation.

The book has its moments. Hillary is incandescent when talking about her daughter Chelsea. About her marriage she writes, “we’ve certainly had our dark days” where there were times where she’d ask if the marriage “could or should survive”.

But to be a woman in politics can be “excruciating”. The moment she steps forward, “it begins: the analysis of her face, her body, her voice, her demeanor; the diminishment of her stature, her ideas, her accomplishments, her integrity. It can be unbelievably cruel.”

Writing What Happened, Hillary says, was “cathartic”. Unfortunately, there is little to learn from it for future generations of women leaders that will inevitably follow, and win.