Sen. Hillary Clinton and her supporters are absolutely correct when they claim sexism has played a role in this campaign. So has racism. Both are rampant in our society, although incidents of racism and sexism tend to be far more covert than they were in the 1960s. Clinton has been quite willing to complain about sexist treatment by the media, by debate moderators, and others. However, one of my many disappointments with her is that she did not give a speech about gender comparable to the one Barack Obama gave in Philadelphia to raise awareness of the racial divide in this country.
My hope, as Clinton continued to campaign when the electoral math turned against her, was that, having nothing to lose, she would talk about how being a woman would inform her presidency, or about why women feel it is so important to have a woman break this particular glass ceiling. Instead, she talked about the importance of having someone who knows how to "clean house" after the Bush administration. The failure of her candidacy will not be that a woman was not elected president, but that she did not use the long, closely watched primary campaign to raise awareness about the gender divide in this society in such a way as to help all women, regardless of who is in the White House.
For much of the campaign, Clinton seemed bent on ignoring gender. Like many women who came of age in the 1960s, she entered a world in which women could only succeed by learning the rules the men played by and then playing twice as hard and twice as well. She has run her campaign that way, and while that resonated with many women, especially those over 60, she has had as an opponent someone who suggested we should scrap those rules. I am not alone in supporting Obama over Clinton because I think he is a better feminist.
But I may be judging her too harshly. Again, women Clinton's age had to learn to hide their feminism lest they be too threatening. They had a poor choice: they could conform to sexist stereotypes and risk being marginalized as a result or they could be overt in their opposition to sexist behavior and risk being marginalized as a result. Many women tried to negotiate that quicksand by ignoring overt sexism, minimizing gender differences, and simply trying to prove they were tough and competent.
It is not enough to value having a woman as president because she looks different, just as it is not enough to value having an African American as president because he looks different. Because racism and sexism are rampant in our society, the experiences of nonwhites and nonmales, and how they have interpreted those experiences, are an integral part of those individuals. The failure of Clinton to talk about gender in a real, personal, way is probably the single factor that has made us question whether we really know her, and that has probably hurt her more than anything else.
Clinton has treated her candidacy as historic, which it is, yet has failed to explain the deeper implications of a woman in the White House.