In my marriage, I’ve definitely been the one to perform the bulk of the emotional labor. I’m the one who schedules family visits, vacations, and dinners with friends. Bill has many positive qualities, but managing the logistical details of a household is not one of them. Of course, our situation is unique. For years, he was a Governor, then the President. He wasn’t going to be the parent keeping track of the SAT registration deadline, although he always knew exactly what Chelsea was studying in school. We’ve also been privileged, since moving into the Governor’s mansion years ago, to have people helping ensure that we’re well fed and taken care of. Neither of us has had to make an emergency run to the store to pick up milk in decades. Still, even our privileged lives require a lot of small but vital actions and decisions to keep rolling along, and I’m the one who tends to handle them.
That labor extends to my friendships. In March 2017, a few of my close girlfriends came to New York for the weekend. A new friend joined us and asked, “How do you all know each other?” That led to my friends going around the table explaining in great detail how I have lovingly interfered in their lives over the years. “When I got sick, Hillary hounded me until I went to her doctor and called me immediately after for a full report.” “That’s nothing! When my little girl cut her face, Hillary insisted I get a plastic surgeon and then called back ten minutes later with the best one in Washington on the phone.” They knew me well.
It happens at work, too. I make sure everyone has eaten, that my staff is wearing sunscreen if we’re at an event in the baking sun. When reporters who traveled abroad with us got sick or injured, I made sure they had ginger ale and crackers and would send the State Department doctor to their room with Cipro and antinausea drugs.
None of this is unusual. I’ve seen women CEOs serve coffee at meetings, women heads of state walk tissues over to a sneezing staffer. It’s also not new. It was women like Dr. Dorothy Height who did a lot of the unglamorous work of the civil rights movement, recruiting volunteers and organizing workshops and coordinating sit-ins and freedom rides. It is women who do a lot of the daily knitting in Congress, identifying problems, bringing together stakeholders, building effective coalitions. It’s often women who handle constituent outreach, answering phones and responding to letters and emails. And in my experience, a lot of women make those calls and write those letters to Congress. We’re not just the designated worriers in our families; we’re also the designated worriers for our country.
I think all this may help explain why women leaders around the world tend to rise higher in parliamentary systems, rather than presidential ones like ours. Prime ministers are chosen by their colleagues—people they’ve worked with day in and day out, who’ve seen firsthand their talents and competence. It’s a system designed to reward women’s skill at building relationships, which requires emotional labor.
Presidential systems aren’t like that. They reward different talents: speaking to large crowds, looking commanding on camera, dominating in debates, galvanizing mass movements, and in America, raising a billion dollars. You’ve got to give it to Trump—he’s hateful, but it’s hard to look away from him. He uses his size to project power: he looms over the podium, gets in interviewers’ faces, glowers, threatens to punch people. I watched a video of one of our debates with the sound off and discovered that, between his theatrical arm waving and face making and his sheer size and aggressiveness, I watched him a lot more than I watched me. I’m guessing a lot of voters did the same thing. I also suspect that if a woman was as aggressive or melodramatic as he is, she’d be laughed or booed off the stage. In the end, even though I was judged to have won all three of our debates, his supporters awarded him points for his hypermasculine, aggressive behavior.
As for me, when it comes to politics, my style can be viewed as female. I’ve always focused on listening over speaking. I like town hall meetings because I get to hear from people and ask follow-up questions to my heart’s content. I prefer one-on-one or small group conversations to big speeches and finding common ground over battling it out.
When I was a Senator, I spent a lot of time getting to know my colleagues, including gruff Republicans who wanted nothing to do with me at first. In 2000, Trent Lott, the Republican Leader, wistfully wondered if lightning would strike and I wouldn’t take the oath of office. By 2016, he was telling people I was a very capable lady who did a good job—and he told my husband that I had done more to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina than anyone outside the Gulf Coast. A number of other conservative Republicans also came to like me when I was their colleague in the Senate, helping them pass bills, refilling their coffee cups in the Senate Dining Room, or sitting beside them in the Senate’s private prayer meeting. One ultraconservative Senator came to see me to apologize for having hated me and saying terrible things about me over the years. He asked, “Mrs. Clinton, will you forgive me?” I know that might sound incredible now, but it’s true. I told him that of course I would.
Dramatic spiritual conversions aside, emotional labor isn’t particularly thrilling as far as the political media or some of the electorate is concerned. I’ve been dinged for being too interested in the details of policy (boring!), too practical (not inspiring!), too willing to compromise (sellout!), too focused on smaller, achievable steps rather than sweeping changes that have little to no chance of ever coming true (establishment candidate!).
But just as a household falls apart without emotional labor, so does politics grind to a halt if no one is actually listening to one another or reading the briefings or making plans that have a chance of working. I guess that might be considered boring. I don’t find it boring, but you might. But here’s the thing: someone has to do it.
In my experience, a lot of the time, it’s women. A lot of the time, it’s dismissed as not that important. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
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“This is not okay,” I thought.
It was the second presidential debate, and Donald Trump was looming behind me. Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage, and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces. It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled.
It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit Pause and ask everyone watching, “Well? What would you do?”
Do you stay calm, keep smiling, and carry on as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your space?
Or do you turn, look him in the eye, and say loudly and clearly, “Back up, you creep, get away from me, I know you love to intimidate women but you can’t intimidate me, so back up.”
I chose option A. I kept my cool, aided by a lifetime of dealing with difficult men trying to throw me off. I did, however, grip the microphone extra hard.
I wonder, though, whether I should have chosen option B. It certainly would have been better TV. Maybe I have overlearned the lesson of staying calm—biting my tongue, digging my fingernails into a clenched fist, smiling all the while, determined to present a composed face to the world.
Of course, had I told Trump off, he surely would have capitalized on it gleefully. A lot of people recoil from an angry woman, or even just a direct one. Look at what happened to Elizabeth Warren, silenced in the Senate chamber for reading a letter from Coretta Scott King because it was critical of Jeff Sessions, a male Senator, during his confirmation hearing for Attorney General. (Moments later, Jeff Merkley, a male Senator, was allowed to read the letter. Funny how that worked.) Senator Kamala Harris was derided as “hysterical” for her entirely coolheaded and professional questioning of Jeff Sessions (him again) during a Senate hearing. As one writer put it, she was being “Hillary’d.” Arianna Huffington was recently interrupted in a meeting of the Uber board of directors when she was making a point about—of all things—how important it was to increase the number of women on the board! And the man who talked over her did so to say that increasing women would
only mean more talking! You can’t make this up.
In other words, this isn’t something that only happens to me. Not even close.
It also doesn’t just happen to women on the Democratic side of politics. Trump made fun of Carly Fiorina’s face because she competed against him for President. He lashed out against Megyn Kelly and Mika Brzezinski in gross, physical terms because they challenged him. Maybe that’s why Nicolle Wallace, White House Communications Director for George W. Bush, has warned that the Republican Party is in danger of being “permanently associated with misogyny” if leaders don’t stand up to Trump’s treatment of women.
This hearkens back to a powerful ad we ran during the campaign called “Mirrors.” It shows adolescent girls looking tentatively at themselves in the mirror—tucking their hair behind their ears, evaluating their profile, trying to decide if they are okay-looking, like so many girls do when they see themselves. Over their images, we ran a tape of cruel things Trump has said on the record about women over the years: “She’s a slob.” “She ate like a pig.” “I’d look her right in that fat, ugly face of hers.” Was this the voice we wanted in our daughters’ heads? Our granddaughters’? Our nieces’? Or our sons’ or grandsons’ or nephews’ heads for that matter? They deserve better than the toxic masculinity Trump embodies.
Well, he’s in their heads now. His voice resounds far and wide.
Now it’s on all of us to make sure his ugly words don’t damage our girls—and boys—forever.
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Two days before the debate, my team and I had finished a grueling morning debate prep session. We had taken a break for lunch. The television was on in the room, with no volume. Then a commentator came on to warn viewers that they were about to hear something vulgar. Boy, was that true.
I don’t have a lot to say about the Access Hollywood tape that hasn’t been said. I will just note that Donald Trump is gleefully describing committing sexual assault. That got somewhat lost in the shock of it all. Too many people focused on his boorishness—such a crude man, so vulgar. True. But even if he were the height of elegance and graciousness, it wouldn’t make it okay that he’s describing sexual assault.
For many, hearing the Donald Trump tape was literally sickening. As for me, it made me sad—for women and girls, for men and boys, for all of us. It was . . . horrible, just horrible. It still is. And it always will be, because that tape is never going away. It’s part of our history now.
To divert attention from his own ugliness, Trump brought to our second debate three women who had accused my husband of bad acts decades ago, plus a woman whose accused rapist I had been ordered by a judge to represent back in Arkansas. It was an awful stunt.
I don’t know what the Trump campaign was hoping to accomplish other than the obvious: dredge up old allegations that had been litigated years before, divert attention from the Access Hollywood tape, throw me off my game, and distract voters from the election’s unbelievably high stakes. He wasn’t trying to make a stand for these women. He was just using them.
This was a presidential debate. That’s a big deal. We were supposed to talk about issues that mattered to people’s lives. Instead, Trump used this moment to get back in his comfort zone. He loves to humiliate women, loves to talk about how disgusting we are. He was hoping to rattle me. I was determined not to give him that satisfaction.
Before I stepped onstage, Ron Klain said to me, “He’s trying to get in your head.” I said, “Ya think?” Then I went out there and won the debate.
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Something I wish every man across America understood is how much fear accompanies women throughout our lives. So many of us have been threatened or harmed. So many of us have helped friends recover from a traumatic incident. It’s difficult to convey what all this violence does to us. It adds up in our hearts and our nervous systems.
A few years ago, the hashtag #yesallwomen was trending for a while. It spoke to me, like it did to so many others. In college and law school, we had a million defensive habits: hold your keys like a weapon when you’re out alone at night, walk one another home no matter what. Many women I know have been groped, grabbed, or worse. It even happens to members of Congress. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has written frankly about how Congressmen have leered at her and grabbed her waist in the congressional gym.
I’m very lucky that nothing too bad ever happened to me. One time in college, I went on a blind date with a young man who wouldn’t take repeated nos for an answer, and I had to slap him to get him away from me. But he did back off, and I went to bed that night shaken but not traumatized. And when I was twenty-nine, working for Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign in Indiana, I had dinner one night with a group of older men who were in charge of the Democratic Party’s get-out-the-vote operation in the state. I had been pestering them for a while for information about their Election Day plans, and they were annoyed with me. I started explaining once again what I needed to know from them and why. Suddenly one of the men reached across the table, grabbed me by my turtleneck, and yanked me toward him. He hissed in my face, “Just shut up.” I froze, then managed to pull his hand from my neck, tell him to never touch me again, and walk out of the room on shaking legs. The whole incident probably lasted thirty seconds. I’ll never forget it.
Yet that’s nothing compared to the violence that millions of women and girls across our country endure on a regular basis.
About four months before Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood tape was released, a very different message went viral. An unnamed woman known as Emily Doe who had been sexually assaulted while unconscious wrote a letter about her ordeal and read it in court to her attacker, a Stanford athlete. A friend forwarded the letter to me. I read it once, then immediately went back to the beginning and read it again. I hope I can meet the author someday and tell her how brave I think she is.
“To girls everywhere,” she wrote, “I am with you . . .
On nights when you feel alone, I am with you. When people doubt you or dismiss you, I am with you. I fought every day for you. So never stop fighting, I believe you. As the author Anne Lamott once wrote, “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.” Although I can’t save every boat, I hope that by speaking today, you absorbed a small amount of light, a small knowing that you can’t be silenced, a small satisfaction that justice was served, a small assurance that we are getting somewhere, and a big, big knowing that you are important, unquestionably, you are untouchable, you are beautiful, you are to be valued, respected, undeniably, every minute of every day, you are powerful, and nobody can take that away from you.
Early on the morning of November 9, when it came time to decide on what I’d say in my concession speech, I remembered those words. Inspired by them, I wrote these:
“To all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.”
Wherever she is, I hope Emily Doe knows how much her words and her strength meant to so many.
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There’s yet another side to the matter of women in politics. It’s not just that politics can be rewarding for those women who choose to enter it. In the long run, it also makes our politics better for everyone. I believe this as strongly as I believe anything. We need our politics to resemble our people. When the people who run our cities, states, and country overwhelmingly look a certain way (say, white and male) and overwhelmingly have a shared background (wealthy, privileged) we end up with laws and policies that don’t come close to addressing the realities of Americans’ lives. And since that’s a basic requirement of government, it’s a pretty big thing to get wrong.
In other words, representation matters.
Is representation everything? Of course not. Just because I’m a woman, it doesn’t mean I’d be a good
President for women. (I would have been, but not only because of my gender.)
But it does matter, and often in concrete ways. I remember when I was pregnant with Chelsea, working at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, and repeatedly went to my superiors to ask about their maternity leave policy. They avoided the question until there was no longer any way to avoid it, then stammered that they didn’t have a policy. “No woman who’s worked here has ever come back after having a baby.” So I wrote my own. I was a new partner and had the power to do that. But what about more junior lawyers or support staff? Would they have been expected to come in a few days after giving birth, or not come back to work at all? It took a woman in the room to notice a huge hole in the firm’s policies and care enough to fix it.
Representation matters in less visible but no less valuable ways, too. I remember being riveted as a little girl whenever a woman appeared in our history lessons: Abigail Adams, Sojourner Truth, Ida Tarbell, Amelia Earhart. Even if it just amounted to a sentence in a dusty book—and often that’s all they got—it thrilled me. The great men in our history books thrilled me too, but it meant something different, something quietly momentous, to learn that a woman had done something important. It opened the world up a little more. It made me dream a little bigger. I remember coming home from school and opening Life magazine to read about Margaret Chase Smith, the gutsy Republican Senator from Maine who stood up to Joe McCarthy. Years later, when I became First Lady, I wrote her a fan letter.
As a young woman, I was moved and inspired watching Barbara Jordan speak out eloquently for the rule of law on the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings; Geraldine Ferraro stand onstage as the vice presidential candidate for my party; Barbara Mikulski shake up the U.S. Senate; Dianne Feinstein take on the NRA; and Shirley Chisholm run for President. What hadn’t felt possible suddenly was.
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