{"id":529,"date":"2008-02-02T23:09:01","date_gmt":"2008-02-03T04:09:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/2008\/02\/02\/goodbye-to-all-that\/"},"modified":"2008-02-03T10:46:37","modified_gmt":"2008-02-03T15:46:37","slug":"goodbye-to-all-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/2008\/02\/02\/goodbye-to-all-that\/","title":{"rendered":"Goodbye to all that – deconstructing the double standard against Hillary Clinton"},"content":{"rendered":"

By \u00a0Robin Morgan<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cGoodbye To All That\u201d was my (in)famous 1970 essay breaking free from a politics of accommodation especially affecting women (for an online version, click here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

During my decades in civil-rights, anti-war, and contemporary women\u2019s movements, I\u2019ve avoided writing another specific \u201cGoodbye . . .\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n

Goodbye to the double standard . . .<\/strong><\/p>\n

* Hillary is too ballsy but too womanly, a Snow Maiden who\u2019s emotional, and so much a politician as to be unfit for politics.<\/p>\n

* She\u2019s \u201cambitious\u201d but he shows \u201cfire in the belly.\u201d<\/p>\n

* When a sexist idiot screamed \u201cIron my shirt!\u201d at HRC, it was considered amusing; if a racist idiot shouted \u201cShine my shoes!\u201d at BO, it would\u2019ve inspired hours of airtime and pages of newsprint analyzing our national dishonor.<\/p>\n

* 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 \u201cSee? Ted and establishment types back her, but the forward-looking generation backs him.\u201d (Personally, I\u2019m unimpressed with Caroline\u2019s longing for the Return of the Fathers. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans have short memories. Me, I still recall Marilyn Monroe\u2019s suicide, and a dead girl named Mary Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick.)<\/p>\n

Goodbye to the toxic viciousness . . .<\/strong><\/p>\n

Carl Bernstein’s disgust at Hillary\u2019s \u201cthick ankles.\u201d Nixon-trickster Roger Stone\u2019s new Hillary-hating 527 group Citizens United Not Timid\u201d (check the capital letters). John McCain answering \u201cHow do we beat the bitch?” with \u201cExcellent question!\u201d Would he have dared reply similarly to \u201cHow do we beat the black bastard?\u201d For shame.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Goodbye to the HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs. If it was a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously outraged\u2014and they would not be selling it in airports. Shame.<\/p>\n

Goodbye to the most intimately violent T-shirts in election history, including one with the murderous slogan \u201cIf Only Hillary had married O.J. Instead!\u201d Shame.<\/p>\n

Goodbye to Comedy Central\u2019s \u201cSouthpark\u201d featuring a storyline in which terrorists secrete a bomb in HRC\u2019s vagina. I refuse to wrench my brain down into the gutter far enough to find a race-based comparison. For shame.<\/p>\n

Goodbye to the sick, malicious idea that this is funny. This is not \u201cClinton hating,\u201d not \u201cHillary hating.\u201d 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\u2014as citizens, voters, Americans?<\/p>\n

Goodbye to the news-coverage target-practice . . .<\/strong><\/p>\n

The women\u2019s movement and Media Matters wrung an apology from MSNBC\u2019s Chris Matthews for relentless misogynistic comments. But what about NBC\u2019s Tim Russert\u2019s continual sexist asides and his all-white-male panels pontificating on race and gender? Or CNN\u2019s Tony Harris chuckling at \u201cthe chromosome thing\u201d while interviewing a woman from The White House Project? And that\u2019s not even mentioning Fox News.<\/p>\n

Goodbye to pretending the black community is entirely male and all women are white . . .<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2014hey, every group, because a group wouldn\u2019t be alive if we hadn\u2019t 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\u2019s the \u201cnorm.\u201d<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

Goodbye to a campaign where he has to pass as white (which whites\u2014especially 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\u2019t be having such problems, and I for one would be in heaven. But at present such a candidate wouldn\u2019t stand a chance\u2014even if she shared Condi Rice\u2019s Bush-defending politics.<\/p>\n

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\u2019re being called \u201crace traitors.\u201d<\/p>\n

So goodbye to conversations about this nation\u2019s deepest scar\u2014slavery\u2014which 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.
\nWomen 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.<\/p>\n

We remember when Shirley Chisholm and Patricia Schroeder ran for this high office and barely got past the gate\u2014they 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\u2019s rights in backing Elizabeth Dole.)<\/p>\n

Goodbye, goodbye to . . .<\/strong><\/p>\n

* blaming anything Bill Clinton does on Hillary (even including his womanizing like the Kennedy guys–though unlike them, he got reported on). Let\u2019s get real. If he hadn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

* 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\u2019s \u201ccooler\u201d to glow with marquee charisma than to understand the vast global complexities of power on a nuclear, wounded planet.<\/p>\n

* the notion that it\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Goodbye to the accusation that HRC acts \u201centitled\u201d when she\u2019s worked intensely at everything she\u2019s done\u2014including being a nose-to-the-grindstone, first-rate senator from my state.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Goodbye to the phrase \u201cpolarizing figure\u201d 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\u2019s movement that quipped, \u201cWe are becoming the men we wanted to marry.\u201d She heard us, and she has.<\/p>\n

Goodbye to some women letting history pass by while wringing their hands, because Hillary isn\u2019t as \u201clikeable\u201d as they\u2019ve been warned they must be, or because she didn\u2019t leave him, couldn\u2019t \u201ccontrol\u201d 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Goodbye to the shocking American ignorance of our own and other countries\u2019 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\u2014granddaughters, daughters, sisters, wives, widows: Gandhi, Bandaranike, Bhutto, Aquino, Chamorro, Wazed, Macapagal-Arroyo, Johnson Sirleaf, Bachelet, Kirchner, and more. Even in our \u201cland of opportunity,\u201d it\u2019s mostly the first pathway \u201cin\u201d permitted to women: Reps. Doris Matsui and Mary Bono and Sala Burton; Sen. Jean Carnahan . . . far too many to list here.<\/p>\n

Goodbye to a misrepresented generational divide . . .<\/strong><\/p>\n

Goodbye to the so-called spontaneous \u201cObama Girl\u201d flaunting her bikini-clad ass online\u2014then confessing: Oh yeah it wasn\u2019t her idea after all, some guys got her to do it and dictated the clothes, which she said \u201cmade me feel like a dork.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goodbye to some young women eager to win male approval by showing they\u2019re not feminists (at least not the kind who actually threaten the status quo), who can\u2019t 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 \u201cwhat if she\u2019s not electable?\u201d or \u201cmaybe it\u2019s post-feminism and whoooosh we\u2019re already free.\u201d 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, \u201cI could have saved thousands\u2014if only I\u2019d been able to convince them they were slaves.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019d rather say a joyful Hello to all the glorious young women who do identify with Hillary, and all the brave, smart men\u2014of all ethnicities and any age–who get that it\u2019s in their self-interest, too. She\u2019s better qualified. She\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n

I\u2019d 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\u2019ll be all of 54. Meanwhile, goodbye to turning him into a shining knight when actually he\u2019s an astute, smooth pol with speechwriters who\u2019ve worked with the Kennedys\u2019 own speechwriter-courtier Ted Sorenson. If it\u2019s only about ringing rhetoric, let speechwriters run. But isn\u2019t it about getting the policies we want enacted?<\/p>\n

And goodbye to the ageism . . .<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s useful to triage the single largest demographic in this country\u2019s history: the boomer generation–the majority of which is female?<\/p>\n

Older woman are the one group that doesn\u2019t grow more conservative with age\u2014and we are the generation of radicals who said \u201cWell-behaved women seldom make history.\u201d 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\u2019re back!\u00a0
\nWe 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

We are the women who now comprise the majority of US voters.
\nHillary said she found her own voice in New Hampshire. There\u2019s not a woman alive who, if she\u2019s honest, doesn\u2019t recognize what she means. Then HRC got drowned out by campaign experts, Bill, and media\u2019s obsession with All Things Bill.<\/p>\n

So listen to her voice: \u201cFor too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words.
\n\u201cIt 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.
\n\u201cWomen\u2019s rights are human rights. Among those rights are the right to speak freely–and the right to be heard.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was Hillary Rodham Clinton defying the US State Department and the Chinese Government at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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.\u201d
\nShe ended with the commitment \u201cto practice, with all the skill of our being: the art of making possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

And for decades, she\u2019s been learning how.<\/p>\n

So goodbye to Hillary\u2019s 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?\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Me? I support Hillary Rodham because she\u2019s 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\u2019s refreshingly thoughtful, and I\u2019m bloodied from eight years of a jolly \u201cuniter\u201d with ejaculatory politics. I needn\u2019t agree with her on every point. I agree with the 97 percent of her positions that are identical with Obama\u2019s\u2014and the few where hers are both more practical and to the left of his (like health care). I support her because she\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

As for the \u201cwoman thing\u201d?<\/p>\n

Me, I\u2019m voting for Hillary not because she\u2019s a woman–but because I am.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By \u00a0Robin Morgan \u201cGoodbye To All That\u201d was my (in)famous 1970 essay breaking free from a politics of accommodation especially affecting women (for an online version, click here.) During my decades in civil-rights, anti-war, and contemporary women\u2019s movements, I\u2019ve avoided … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national-newscommentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}