Interestingly, many would say that my tears turned out to be a good thing for me. Dozens if not hundreds of pundits have commented about how that moment “humanized” me. Maybe that’s true. If so, I’m both fine with that and a little beleaguered at the reminder that, yet again, I—a human—required “humanizing” at all.
Still, some sought to capitalize on my perceived vulnerability in the press and on the campaign trail. When he was asked about my tears, former Democratic Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, who was still in the presidential race at the time, jumped at the chance to call me weak. “I think what we need in a Commander in Chief is strength and resolve,” he said. “Presidential campaigns are a tough business, but being President of the United States is also a very tough business. And the President of the United States is faced with very, very difficult challenges every single day and difficult judgments every single day. What I know is that I’m prepared for that.” Shortly after, he dropped out.
In any case, this whole topic of “being real” can feel very silly. I wish we could just dismiss it and go about our business, whoever we are, without worrying about whether we are satisfying some indefinable standard of realness. As the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes, “It’s not your job to be likable. It’s your job to be yourself.”
Yet the issues of authenticity and likability had an impact on the most consequential election of our lifetimes, and it will have an impact on future ones. So there’s something extremely serious going on here, too—especially since crude, abusive, fact-free rhetoric was characterized as authentic in 2016.
I’ve tried to adjust. After hearing repeatedly that some people didn’t like my voice, I enlisted the help of a linguistic expert. He said I needed to focus on my deep breathing and try to keep something happy and peaceful in mind when I went onstage. That way, when the crowd got energized and started shouting—as crowds at rallies tend to do—I could resist doing the normal thing, which is to shout back. Men get to shout back to their heart’s content but not women. Okay, I told this expert, I’m game to try. But out of curiosity, can you give me an example of a woman in public life who has pulled this off successfully—who has met the energy of a crowd while keeping her voice soft and low? He could not.
I’m not sure how to solve all this. My gender is my gender. My voice is my voice. To quote Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in the U.S. Cabinet, under FDR, “The accusation that I’m a woman is incontrovertible.” Other women will run for President, and they will be women, and they will have women’s voices. Maybe that will be less unusual by then. Maybe my campaign will have helped make it that way, and other women will have an easier time. I hope so.
Near the start of my campaign, I met with my friend Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, who has thought about these issues a great deal. She told me that if there was one thing she wanted everyone to know from her book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, it’s this: the data show that for men, likability and professional success are correlated. The more successful a man is, the more people like him. With women, it’s the exact opposite. The more professionally successful we are, the less people like us. Hearing it put that simply, with data behind it, felt like a lightbulb turning on. Here was proof of something so many women have felt intuitively throughout our lives.
Sheryl shared another insight: that women are seen favorably when they advocate for others, but unfavorably when they advocate for themselves. For example, there’s virtually no downside to asking for a raise if you’re a man. You’ll either get it or you won’t, but either way, you won’t be penalized for trying. A woman who does the same is more likely to pay a price. Even if she gets a salary bump, she’ll lose a measure of goodwill. The exception is when a woman asks for a raise on someone else’s behalf. Then she’s seen as generous and a team player. This, too, resonated with me. People like me when I’m in a supporting role: campaigning for my husband, serving as a member of President Obama’s Cabinet. It’s okay for me to be a fierce advocate in those capacities. But when I stand up and say, “Now I’d like a chance to lead,” everything changes.
You have a steep mountain to climb, Sheryl warned that day. “They will have no empathy for you.”
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It’s not easy for any woman in politics, but I think it’s safe to say that I got a whole other level of vitriol flung my way. Crowds at Trump rallies called for my imprisonment more times than I can count. They shouted, “Guilty! Guilty!” like the religious zealots in Game of Thrones chanting “Shame! Shame!” while Cersei Lannister walked back to the Red Keep. As Susan Bordo, a Pulitzer Prize–nominated gender studies professor, put it in her book The Destruction of Hillary Clinton, “It was almost medieval.” Mary Beard, the Classics professor at the University of Cambridge, observed that this venom harkened back to an even earlier time. One popular image among Trump supporters, found on everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs, depicted Trump holding up my severed head, like Perseus from ancient Greek mythology, lifting high the head of Medusa.
What in the world was this? I’ve been in politics for a long time, but I was taken aback by the flood of hatred that seemed only to grow as we got closer to Election Day. I had left the State Department one of the most admired public servants in America. Now people seemed to think I was evil. Not just “not my cup of tea” but evil. It was flabbergasting and frightening.
Was this all because I’m a woman? No. But I believe it was motivation for some of those chanters and some of that bile.
Later I read an interview with Margaret Atwood, the prescient author of The Handmaid’s Tale, which put the campaign into yet another historical light. “You can find websites that say Hillary was actually a Satanist with demonic powers,” she said. “It’s so seventeenth century that you can hardly believe it.” The Puritan witch hunts may be long over, but something fanatical about unruly women still lurks in our national subconscious.
That doesn’t just affect me and other candidates. It affects our supporters. Nearly four million people joined a Facebook group supporting my campaign, fittingly called Pantsuit Nation. It was a secret group. It had to be. Otherwise its members were exposing themselves to vicious sexist online harassment, from both the right and the left.
You can hardly open a newspaper these days without reading another grim story: female engineers reporting blatant harassment in Silicon Valley; women entrepreneurs making pitches to investment firms and being propositioned in response; a new study finding that women are given a harder time than men in job interviews; another finding that women are penalized when they decline to reveal their salary history, while men end up making more when they do the same.
That’s why it’s so maddening that the basic fact that sexism is alive and well should still be up for debate. I can’t count the number of times that good-hearted men who should know better dismiss the notion that sexism and outright misogyny are still potent forces in our national life. “But things have changed,” they say, as Donald Trump brags about groping women and a few weeks later wins the presidency, as his rally-goers chant “Trump that bitch,” as the White House proudly releases photos of old white men gleefully deciding which health services to take away from women.
And on that fundamental question of whether it would be good to see a woman—any woman, not just me—become President, the electorate is deeply, depressingly divided. A 2014 Pew Research Center poll found that 69 percent of Democratic women and 46 percent of Democratic men (not terrible, but you can do better than that, Democratic men!) said they hoped to see a female President in their lifetime, but only 20 percent of Republican women and only 16 percent of Republican men did. In 2008, researchers found that more than a quarter of the population expressed anger or upset feelings at the mere thought of a female President. And after the 2016 election, the Diane D. Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society at the University of Arkansas put out a report on the impact o
f sexism on the race. Researchers asked people to respond to five statements that reflect sexist thinking, including “Feminists are seeking for women to have more power than men” and “Discrimination against women is no longer a problem in the United States.” In results that surprised no one, more than a third of respondents gave answers that were sexist. Trump voters were more sexist than Clinton voters. Republicans were far more sexist than Democrats. And not just men; women were quite sexist, too.
On that note, beginning even before I ran, political commentators wondered whether I’d inspire an unbeatable wave of women to come out and vote for me, in the same way President Obama inspired record-breaking black turnout. I hoped I would, of course, but I had my doubts. Gender hasn’t proven to be the motivating force for women voters that some hope it might be. If it were, we’d probably have had a woman president or two by now, don’t you think? In the end, I won an overwhelming majority of the votes of black women (94 percent) and Latino women (68 percent), and I won women overall by a safe margin (54 percent). But I failed to win a majority of white women, although I did better with them than Obama did in 2012.
So yes, things have changed. Some things are a lot better. But many are still bad. And they are connected—the bad is the backlash to the good. Women’s advancement has set into motion vast changes that inspire intense feelings of all kinds. Some of us are exhilarated. Others feel a whole lot of rage.
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The good news—and there is good news—is that there’s another side to all of this. It can also be deeply rewarding to be a woman in politics. You know that just by being in the room, you’re making government more representative of the people. You’re bringing a vital perspective that would otherwise go unheard. That always made me stand up a little straighter. It’s why I love the song “The Room Where It Happens” from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s brilliant musical Hamilton:
No one really knows how the game is played
The art of the trade
How the sausage gets made
We just assume that it happens
But no one else is in the room where it happens.
It felt really good to be in rooms where things happen—the Oval Office, the Senate chamber—as an advocate for issues that mattered to me: education, equal pay, health care, women’s rights. Maybe those issues would have been close to my heart even if I were a man, but maybe not. Life naturally pushed me in their direction. A young mom interested in policy often ends up working on kids’ issues. A First Lady is often involved with women’s issues. That was okay with me. Some might have found it limiting, but I consider these real-life issues that affect us all.
Later, I moved into different realms: working to rebuild New York after 9/11 as a hometown Senator, supporting our troops and caring for our wounded warriors and all our vets as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, keeping our country and world safe as U.S. Secretary of State. I moved into different rooms: the Situation Room, foreign ministries, the United Nations. And I found that the decades of work I had done on women and families served me well in all those places, because it meant that I understood the intricacies of people’s lives. I knew how governments could help or hurt families. I knew how to marshal resources and support to the people who needed them most. It turned out that my work on so-called women’s and children’s issues prepared me well for nearly everything else I’ve ever done.
I also believe the fact that I’m a woman is one reason why so many people open up to me about the details of their lives and families. They tell me about their children’s medical diagnoses, their caregiving of aging parents, troubles in their marriages and family’s finances, painful experiences with sexual harassment and discrimination. Warmhearted male politicians also receive these confessionals, but from what I can see, women hear them more often. Maybe it’s easier to cry in front of us. Maybe it feels like talking to a girlfriend. All I know is that a lot of people have grabbed my hand and told me their worries and dreams, and that’s been a unique privilege.
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There’s another thing that women confide in me about, and that’s stories of their reproductive health. No essay about women in politics could be complete without talking about this. It is such a central part of women’s lives: whether we become mothers and at what age and under what circumstances. Reproductive health in all its complexity—pregnancy, fertility, birth control, miscarriage, abortion, labor, birth—can comprise some of the most joyful and terrifying moments we will ever experience. But a lot of the time, we process these moments in silence. These stories go unspoken, even among women. Then I meet women at rallies or dinners or fund-raisers, or just taking a walk, and they take a deep breath and let it all out.
At this moment in America, more than forty-four years since Roe v. Wade, women’s access to birth control and abortion is still under constant threat. I saw the effect of this in the 2016 election. Reproductive health was rarely mentioned in any of the primary debates, and when it was mentioned, it was often because I brought it up. I was dismayed when Bernie Sanders dismissed Planned Parenthood as just another part of “the establishment” when they endorsed me over him. Few organizations are as intimately connected to the day-to-day lives of Americans from all classes and backgrounds as Planned Parenthood, and few are under more persistent attack. I’m not sure what’s “establishment” about that, and I don’t know why someone running to be the Democratic nominee for President would say so.
After the election, Bernie suggested that Democrats should be open to nominating and supporting candidates who are anti-choice. Other topics, such as economic justice, are sacrosanct, but apparently women’s health is not. I don’t mean to criticize only Bernie here—a lot of progressives join him in thinking that reproductive rights are negotiable. And to be clear, I believe there’s room in our party for a wide range of personal views on abortion. I’ve been working for a quarter century with Democrats and Republicans alike to reduce the number of abortions, in part by expanding access to birth control and family planning, and we’ve made progress. And I picked as my running mate Tim Kaine, a Democrat personally opposed to abortion because of his Catholic faith but supportive of women’s rights as a matter of law and policy.
But when personal views on abortion become public actions—votes on legislation or judges or funding that erode women’s rights—that’s a different matter. We have to remain a big tent, but a big tent is only as strong as the poles that hold it up. Reproductive rights is central to women’s rights and women’s health, and it’s one of the most important tent poles we’ve got. And remember: it’s a constitutional right as defined in Roe v. Wade.
There’s overwhelming evidence about what happens when these rights are denied. Texas has defunded Planned Parenthood and refused to expand Medicaid, and maternal mortality doubled between 2010 and 2014. That’s the worst in the nation, and it’s higher than the rate in many developing countries. Six hundred women have died in Texas—not from abortions, but from trying to give birth. The number of Texas teenagers having abortions actually increased when support for family planning was cut. In one county, Gregg, it went up 191 percent between 2012 and 2014.
Ultimately, I’m pro-choice, pro-family, and pro-faith because I believe that our ability to decide whether and when to become mothers is intrinsic to our liberty. When government gets involved in this intimate realm—whether in places like China, which forced women to have abortions, or in Communist Romania, which forced women to bear children—it is horrific. I’ve visited hospitals in countries where poor women have no access to safe and legal abortion. I’ve seen what happens when desperate women take matters into their own hands.
As I see it, this issue comes down to the question: Who decides? We can debate the morality of abortion forever—and I have spent many hours engaged in such debates and surely will spend many more—but at the end of the day, who decides whether a woman gets or stays pregnant? A Congressman who ha
s never met her? A judge who has spoken with her for maybe a few minutes? Or should the woman be able to make this momentous decision about her life, her body, her future, for herself?
Someone’s got to decide. I say let women decide.
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I’m not sure what we call our current era of feminism—I’ve lost count of which wave we’re in. But there’s a lot that feels new. There are all these new words. Mansplaining. The second I heard it, I thought, “Yes! We needed a word for that!” Intersectionality: an academic term for that vital idea that feminism must engage race and class. Revenge porn Trolls. Modern twists on ancient harms.
While we’re defining things, let’s take a moment for feminism: “the advocacy of women’s rights on the basis of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” Not domination. Not oppression. Equality. Or as the English writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft put it 225 years ago, “I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves.”
Then there’s emotional labor. Now, that’s a good one. It describes all the unpaid, uncounted, often unseen work that people—overwhelmingly women—perform to keep their families and workplaces humming along. Organizing office birthday parties. Arranging the kids’ summer camp. Coordinating visits with in-laws. Helping the new employee feel welcome and included. The list is endless: all the little details without which life would devolve into chaos and misery. Not all women take on these tasks, and that’s fine, and some men do, and I salute them—but it’s largely women’s work. Finally, someone thought to name it.
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