Friday, June 6, 2008

Hillary Crisis in Women's Movement?

It's a bit of a long read, contrariennes, but worth it. Some think Obama should give a speech about sexism, just as he did about race. I think so, too.

What might have been:
One of the central premises of the movement was that women had been artificially set against each other, and that, if they could unite behind their common interests, they could revolutionize their roles in the world. In the mid-'70s, elite young women were already pondering who could break the ultimate glass ceiling, and among their candidates was an impassioned young lawyer, Hillary Rodham, deemed an icon of her generation by Life magazine after her 1969 Wellesley commencement speech. In his biography of Hillary Clinton, Carl Bernstein describes Betsey Wright, later Bill Clinton's gubernatorial chief of staff, imploring Bill not to marry Hillary, take her off to Arkansas, and thus spoil her chance at becoming the first female president. "I really started in on how he couldn't do that. He shouldn't do that," Wright said. "That he could find anybody he wanted to be a political wife, but we'd . . . never find anyone like her" to run for office.


Good Lord, she might have run against Bill. And beaten him. Heh.

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