"Whatever happens, we're going to be fine. You know, we have strong support from our families and our friends. I just hope that we'll be able to say the same thing about the American people, and that's what this election should be about."
Hillary, honey, back in the day feminists faced a fork in the road of their story. Our stories made the news then, every day. You were there, you made your choice. We could have celebrated womanness, explored what it meant to be female, torn down patriarchy and the whole system of undeserved advantage and power. I rose out of my eighth-grade chair and, at the stroke of 10:00 a.m., marched out of my classroom for the right to wear pants to school. Then, you, Gloria, and so many others took the path from International Women's Year to the Year of the Woman just a decade and a half later, to flaunt five women who made it into the Senate and mainstream politicking. Back in 1977, Betty commanded us, "This year is not the time to cheer the visible few, but to work for the invisible many, whose lives are still restricted by custom and code." Do you remember? Little has changed, Hillary, except that Betty's words weren't part of your platform. Between then and now, you and the rest of my middle-class elder sisters dropped the ball on the ERA but rushed to shatter corporate glass ceilings. Those on the bottom rungs felt the rain of shards as a handful of you scrambled into the board rooms, but little else changed. We all got jobs. A single-income household became a luxury of the elite and a prison for poor single mothers, and we have nothing to show for our labor except less time with our children, less time for ourselves. I didn't walk out of school to wear pants or to dress for success--I didn't want anyone to tell me I had to wear skirts. My body, my self, remember?
That 13-year-old looked up to her 21-year-old big sister. She couldn't guess that someday her big sister would be flaunting designer slacks, corporate slacks, hundreds of dollars for a suit with a jewel neckline where the tie ought to go. The 13-year-old in me screamed, "That's not what I meant!" And I voted for a man.
So it's no wonder, I suppose, that your campaign headquarters sometimes wafts the putrid odor of the century of tension between white women and African-Americans. It's the noxious scent of the seething rivalry for the largesse of affirmative action. It's the stench of those white women who, a hundred years ago, called out rape and pointed out Black men for lynching. It's the battle for power at any cost, undeserved, unearned, the clear, crystalline jangling rain of shattering glass that pierces us all.
You could have had my vote, but you bet on the system. And the system said that being the first female President means that you're measured against some man, and you're never going to be quite as good, except maybe if that man is a Black man. You didn't have to join them, sweetie. Really, you didn't.
When your campaign's second-greatest asset, your husband, started stumping for you, you pulled him back at the first whispers that you were merely riding his coattails. You could have moved him to your side, and dared anyone to say to your face that you're the lesser person. But instead, he retreated into the backrooms.
They told you that eight years as First Lady doesn't count as experience. Of course it does, but you won't claim it. You met world leaders, you kept mortal enemies chatting over dinner, you answered constituents, and you heard and saw the responsibility, the loneliness, the burden of being President as only a spouse can. When you don't claim it as your experience, then you deny that same experience to every wife who's played the hostess for her corporate-aspiring husband, to every secretary who will never get an interview for her boss's job, to every nurse with twenty years in who's told by someone half her age that offering a diagnosis is not her job. No words, no claim to the painfully earned knowledge and authority of the mother and wife.
You lost something along the way, didn't you? You calculate when those tears very nearly bubble over, and you win another state. Some guy on TV suggests you're a pimp and your daughter's your whore, so you refuse to debate on his network, but you refuse, too, the obvious discussion about johns and your husband and how the objectification of sex has stained so many women's lives, surely including yours and maybe Chelsea's. You bit your tongue, held back the anger, just like we always have.
You could have claimed our issues and set the agenda. You didn't fail at health care: you put it on the table. You could have said that a system that routinely locks up young Black men leaves young Black women and their children to fail. You could have told us that a deportation policy that rips mothers away from their children on their walk to school is inhuman, beneath us, that we can and must do better than that, not just with a "path to legalization" but with common human decency. You could have told us that privacy is a woman's issue, that we know that privacy is part of being human, the privacy to control my body and the privacy of my phone calls. You could have told us that all the killing in Iraq must stop, reminded us that rockets and planes and mushroom clouds are monstrous phallic perversions, not a "last resort" but no resort at all. You could have told us that we must care for the earth as we would care for our mother, with love and tenderness and all the healing we can give her. You could have told your stories, our stories, the stories in the news, and you would have told us all of this.
Instead, here you are, ramming at the last of the glass ceilings, and I'm waiting for cuts and scars and bright red blood from the broken glass. Like so many others, I waited a lifetime for a woman President, but my ink dauber fell on a man's name. I wanted a woman who would dare me to put away violence, who would tear down false hierarchies, who would help me build a village. In your finest moment, Hillary, you promised me a village to raise children in, but not in this campaign, no assurances, no stories, of a village for the children.
I wish you had taken the other path. I will vote for the woman who has. I will vote for the woman who tells me that I don't have to live in a world that creates the dual insanities of a mass murderer and some liberal jackass who calls on the government to monitor urine. I want a world where aborting a fetus is not a greater crime than killing the mother. I want a President who will so move the world that boys can wear makeup without fearing for their lives. I want a woman who will speak of the news and the stories behind them, and change the world.
The cover of one of the grocery store rags is saying that if you don't win, you'll divorce Bill. Do it, either way, Hillary. You owe it to yourself. And I, for one, will applaud you.
But I voted for a man, and I'll go on scouring the news for a story about an authentic movement for women and the woman who can lead it.
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