In Praise of Difficult Women

by Karen Karbo

  *Answers: More than you might expect; I should hope he would leave me for a younger woman. If he left me for someone my age, I’d kill him.

  CHAPTER 26

  HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON

  Ambitious

  I HAVE A WHITE HOUSE STORY that involves First Lady Hillary Clinton—or more accurately, her office in the West Wing. I was parked there for a spell on the morning of January 24, 2000—the same day the president unveiled a $27 million equal pay initiative for American women. I was there for a magazine story. President Clinton’s announcement was set for 11 a.m., and I was very early.

  The tiny, swingy-haired page couldn’t figure out what to do with me in the meantime, so she invited me to hang out in the first lady’s office. Hillary wasn’t there, but I remember being struck by how friendly her office seemed, filled with presents from her travels and an energetic staff. A young aide wearing pearls offered me a glass of water. To pass the time, I asked her whether she enjoyed working for the first lady, and she said she loved it. I then asked what the best part of working for her was, and her face opened in a grin. “She makes me feel smart!” Then I asked what the first lady did for fun, and she said, “the StairMaster.”

  During the 2016 presidential campaign, when people hated Hillary with the sort of loathing reserved for the world’s evil despots, I remembered this day. I don’t think the young assisant wearing pearls had any idea what I was doing there. I don’t think she told me that she loved her job because her boss made her feel smart for any nefarious reason. She could have said the job was just okay, and that the great thing about working for Hillary was the benefits. I felt as if this gave me a secret glimpse of Hillary, who took the time to make a young staff member feel her intelligence was appreciated. I carried this memory throughout the campaign—even when I felt she was making mistakes, counting her chickens, and failing to show us the woman I thought, based on this tiny experience, I knew her to be.

  Hillary Diane Rodham was born on October 26, 1947. From what I can tell, she was difficult straight out of the gate—by which I mean she was a brilliant overachiever. She was a straight-A student, and both a Brownie and a Girl Scout. (I have no evidence of this, but I feel as if I can safely say she was one of those Girl Scouts who earned more badges than anyone else in the troop.) In high school, she was elected vice president of the student council her junior year. In 1964, her senior year, she ran for president—and in a bit of foreshadowing that would never be permitted in a cheesy novel, lost to a boy who allegedly told her she was stupid if she thought a girl could ever be elected. It was one thing to collect merit badges and excellent grades—those are plentiful. But whenever there’s a single position up for grabs—an important one that confers both power and prestige—only a very confident, ambitious girl will go for it.

  After she graduated from Wellesley in 1969 (honors, commencement speech that drew a standing ovation, and so on), she entered Yale Law. “I was taking a law school admissions test in a big classroom at Harvard,” Clinton told the Humans of New York blog in 2016. “My friend and I were some of the only women in the room. I was feeling nervous. I was a senior in college. I wasn’t sure how well I’d do. And while we’re waiting for the exam to start, a group of men began to yell things like: ‘You don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.’ It turned into a real ‘pile on.’ One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around. It was intense.”

  Hillary was rattled but controlled herself—something she would be criticized for later—did well, and was admitted. She continued her focused, disciplined, high-achieving work while also being pursued by fellow student Bill Clinton. There’s a picture of the two of them in 1971 or so. He’s got a lot of hair and an unfortunate beard. She is rocking an excellent Gloria Steinem look, with straight center-parted hair and wire-rimmed aviator glasses. Their coats are ill fitting and their pant legs too short. They shine with smarts and optimism. As everyone who watched the 2016 Democratic Convention by now knows, he asked her to marry him. She said no.

  After they graduated in 1973, Bill Clinton flunked the District of Columbia bar exam but passed the test in his home state of Arkansas. Hillary, who could have stayed in the Northeast and launched a stellar career, then betrayed her difficult-woman heritage and followed him there. She, who was so independent—who already aspired to be a senator, or even the president—followed her man. And it wasn’t as if she was following him to an elite place like New York City, where she might more easily satisfy her ambition to become the Darth Vader of American politics. With respect to her boyfriend’s home state (Arkansas brought us the first Wal-Mart), the opportunities for an outspoken Yankee woman to make her mark were less certain. And still she followed her heart.

  I remain mystified as to why Hillary never gets points for that decision from the folks who wish she were a more traditional woman. Hillary haters are happy to reach back decades to collect evidence that she’s an evil, radical feminist but fail to acknowledge that changing your own plans to support your man is as traditional as it gets. Still, when Bill and Hillary did get married on October 11, 1975, she kept her own name. That created a stir, even though it was an era when women all over the country were doing it.*1

  Bill was elected governor of Arkansas in 1978. While she was first lady, Hillary worked as a patent and intellectual property attorney. She co-founded a children’s advocacy group, and served as the chair for the Rural Health Advisory Committee.

  If you squint, you can see the seeds of Hillary’s problem sprouting right here. She improved health care for the poorest rural Arkansans, but the committee appointment that allowed her to do so was made by her husband. She did a good thing, but it was a good thing done by the wife of the governor, a female who had not been elected. I can easily imagine some unemployed man’s man from Huntsville scoring free checkups and vaccines for the entire family, cussing out the uppity first lady as he rolls down his sleeve.

  On February 27, 1980, Chelsea was born; in November, Bill Clinton lost his bid for reelection. Suddenly, Hillary was both a new mom and the breadwinner. She continued to work. She took care of her baby (and probably a mopey husband). When Bill Clinton ran for governor again in 1982, she quit her job to devote herself to the campaign full time, and started calling herself Mrs. Bill Clinton. In 1983, she was named Arkansas Woman of the Year, and in 1984 she was even named Arkansas Mother of the Year. Now we’re talking. This is all good, all wifely. All first lady–conforming.

  And yet, again, no points given. Instead, she would earn the moniker “the Lady Macbeth of Little Rock.” Shakespeare’s iconic antiheroine, as you may recall, was famous for suppressing her femininity in favor of ambition and the pursuit of power. Dozens of media outlets adopted the name and ran with it. Hillary Clinton had given up a lot for her marriage and family. But she didn’t give up everything, and that fact made her suspect. In other words, difficult.

  When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, Hillary, who was now 45, had not yet figured out that anything she said could and would be held against her until the zombie apocalypse. Nevertheless, feeling a little spicy during an interview that same year on 60 Minutes, she said this: “I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.”*2

  I remember watching the coverage on TV. Hillary was so confident, so frank and sassy. She wasn’t smiling when she said it. She was serious. I cannot believe that after 12 years of first ladying in a southern state, she still didn’t realize that she must smile at all times. (She may have been forgiven for reasoning that because the only men who smile when they talk are serial killers about to start in on the ritual torture, there was no reason for her to do so. Or maybe she was already figuring out that she would never be forgiven for anything, so what the hell.)
Anyway, over time Hillary trained herself not to be frank and sassy, but to be measured, careful, and tapped down. Which would lead to accusations of being phony and untrustworthy.

  WHAT PEOPLE CAME TO DESPISE so thoroughly about Hillary Clinton is that she simply would not quit. Her ambition couldn’t be knocked out of her by Bill’s affairs. It couldn’t be knocked out of her by the public humiliation of the Monica Lewinsky scandal; by her husband’s circus of an impeachment; by the never-ending Whitewater investigation; or by that thing involving cattle futures. She just kept going. And yet when it appeared as if she’d been felled by traditional “woman matters”—her man cheated, her man lied—her approval ratings rose like the sun. Analyze that!

  Hillary was elected senator of New York State in 2000, was reelected in 2006, and ran for president against Barack Obama in 2008, losing in a vicious and heavily covered primary campaign. In 2016 she was the first woman to run for president on a major party ticket. She lost the electoral college (232 to 306) but won the popular vote by a count of almost three million.*3 This brings us to a distressing moment in American history, where the least experienced person to ever run for president prevailed over the most experienced person to ever run for president.

  Hillary’s many enemies aren’t all the misogynists who during the election sported T-shirts and pins saying “Life’s a bitch: don’t vote for one.” Many are intelligent and worldly. Some actually followed the cattle futures thing and know why it was shady. Still, their hatred for her was and is off the charts. Seriously, it was a presidential election, folks, not an arranged marriage. Citizens of the Republic were merely being encouraged to vote for her, not accept one of her kidneys for transplant.

  In October 2016, a month before the election, the Atlantic ran a feature headlined “Fear of a Female President.” It cited the power of the “precarious manhood” theory, which “posits that while womanhood is typically viewed as natural and permanent, manhood must be ‘earned and maintained.’ ” Because manhood is won, it can also be lost. Scholars at the University of South Florida and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reported that when asked how someone might lose his manhood, college students rattled off social failures like “losing a job.” When asked how someone might lose her womanhood, by contrast, they mostly came up with physical examples like “a sex-change operation” or “having a hysterectomy.”

  Among the emasculations men fear most is subordination to women. This fear isn’t entirely irrational. A 2011 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that men who have female supervisors enjoy less prestige than men whose bosses are male. Given this, it’s cause for celebration that there are any woman bosses anywhere. As a wise friend says, “Yes, things can be better, but they can always be worse.”

  Hillary was a woman who did the natural woman things (have a baby), and also wanted to do the earned and maintained man things (run a country). She wanted the most powerful job in the world, which stirred up something terrifying in the lizard brains of a large part of the population.

  Which brings us to the lunacy over her private email server—possibly the most boring scandal in the history of mankind, yet one that would not go away. Briefly, when Hillary was secretary of state, rather than using her state.gov email address, she used a private server and a personal account. When her unusual setup was discovered—the New York Times broke the story—she turned over roughly 30,000 emails to the State Department, and destroyed another 30,000 more, deemed to be personal. She didn’t violate the letter of the law, but it does seem either sloppy or underhanded, depending on your point of view. Naturally, the point of view of her detractors was that she should be stoned in the public square.

  During the campaign I conducted a little impromptu experiment in my neighborhood Starbucks. I went table to table and asked people if they knew what a server was, as in private email server. I live in Portland, Oregon, one of the nation’s most tech-savvy cities. Out of the dozen or so people I queried, half of them thought it was, like, an extra computer under your desk. One woman laughed and said for a long time she thought the server was a person, as in “I’m Todd, I’ll be your email server.”

  One guy turned out to be a network engineer and gave me a mini TED talk on the matter. In his opinion, if Hillary was using a private email system, it would have been set up by a professional IT firm. Any modern email “server” (actually a service) on a privately hosted server is years ahead of government-managed systems in its security. He was pro–private email server.

  I LIKE HILLARY, have always liked Hillary. She was the first first lady with a postgraduate degree, and I liked that about her. Because I hail from the solid middle class and made my way in the world under my own steam, I feel solidarity with her. I think she made some missteps during her campaign. (Did she really have to come out with “basket of deplorables,” the ready-made Internet meme and campaign slogan for the opposition?) It’s a natural impulse to try to parse what went wrong—but the bottom line is that Hillary Clinton is the most difficult kind of difficult woman: one who loudly and proudly possesses the ambition of a man. During the third debate she looked radiant in a white pantsuit, a slash of red lipstick. She looked energized and fully alive. She whipped out stats like a rap star on speed. She talked back, sassed a little. She was in her element, being difficult. She didn’t win, but survived being this difficult. She thrived being this difficult. She showed all of us that difficulty is a power that doesn’t desert us when we suffer—even the defeat of a lifetime. Which inspires millions of the rest of us to step up.

  *1I’ve been married twice and have never changed my name. Lucky I don’t intend to run for president.

  *2You know, like millions of other college-educated women of that time.

  *3She won a total of 65,844,610 votes—48.2 percent–compared with Trump’s 62,979,636 votes–46.1 percent–according to David Wasserman of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Other candidates took about 5.7 percent of the popular vote.

  CHAPTER 27

  JANIS JOPLIN

  Defiant

  WHEN I WAS IN GRADE SCHOOL in the late 1960s, a gang of older teenage girls in the neighborhood adopted me as their mascot. They were 16 years old and smoked pot and longed to flee our Southern Californian suburb for San Francisco, where it was all happening. They could not possibly be more cool. One day, hanging out at the mall, we spied a rack of albums for sale at, of all places, the Singer Sewing store (in a bid to lure young people into the store, they’d started selling records). The ringleader sent me in to pinch a copy of Cheap Thrills, the new album by Big Brother and the Holding Company. Inside the store, the salesperson was nowhere to be seen, so I grabbed two. As a reward, they let me keep one. I played it over and over again on my record player in my bedroom, screeching and moaning “Piece of My Heart” into my salt-shaker microphone, pinching my eyebrows together and throwing my hair around. Janis Joplin was a revelation.

  My mom worked tirelessly to impress upon me that girls should be polite and soft-spoken. They should be good listeners. They should be careful not to be too expressive, or risk startling the rest of the human race and sending it into a panic. Complaining was very unattractive, and should be indulged in only with my best friend. Crying in particular tended to upset people, and should be done in private, if at all; no one looked good doing it. And the other thing girls should be was as pretty as possible at all times.

  Then came Janis, who not only refused to hide her feelings; she refused to even dial them down a notch. She flaunted them. She owned them with every cell in her body. She moaned and crooned and groaned and panted and screeched and shrieked. I just loved her.

  JANIS JOPLIN WAS THE FIRST CERTIFIED female rock star. She was the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company, one of a handful of bands making up the psychedelic music scene in San Francisco during the late 1960s. For a few early months in 1965, they were the psychedelic music s
cene.*1 When Big Brother played the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, they left everyone in the dust. Or rather, Janis did. Her yowling, howling, crooning, broken-hearted rendition of the classic blues song “Ball and Chain” was raw, aggressive, and sexy. It was unlike anything anyone had ever heard from the lungs and heart of a middle-class white female. The most popular girl singers of the age were safely feminine. Joan Baez and Judy Collins come to mind, with their silky hair and dulcet tones.*2 They were graceful fawns in the forest, dipping a dainty hoof in a clear pond of sweet water, while Janis was a monster truck with a broken muffler hauling ass down a rutted, pot-holed southern road.

  Janis Lyn Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1943, two years before the end of World War II and the official beginning of the baby boom. She was an agreeable child and excellent student, but in her senior year of high school discovered booze, the Beats, the blues, teenage rebellion, and the joy of shooting her mouth off. In 1962, after a halfhearted attempt at college, she drifted between Austin, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco before finally settling in Haight-Ashbury, where she joined Big Brother, already a well-established Bay Area band. Her performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival caught the eye of the music industry brass in attendance that day; within a year, she would be a star. Big Brother’s first major recording was the psychedelic masterpiece Cheap Thrills, certified gold on release in August 1968, selling more than a million copies (and shoplifted by many enterprising preteens).

  With hot pink and purple feather boas pinned in her hair, long beaded necklaces, bracelets stacked up to her elbows, skimpy tops, satin bell-bottoms, macramé vests, and a bottle of Southern Comfort at her side, Janis was for a brief time the undisputed queen of rock-and-roll. Still, she was often troubled, and didn’t care who knew it. She yearned for love, took up with people who couldn’t love her, and turned away people who would. She fretted that the world would discover she was a fraud. She was heartbroken when people didn’t recognize her on the street. She worried that she was ugly. She drank a staggering amount and struggled with a moderate heroin habit until her accidental overdose on October 4, 1970, at the age of 27.