Hillary's Master Class should be called “Sh*t women go through.”
Hillary Rodham Clinton is a case study in what happens to women who dare to pursue their ambitions. Her life is a lesson for women everywhere about how to keep going despite all the hate.
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s undelivered acceptance speech, which she shared for the first time in her new Master Class released last week, made Hillary – and me – cry.
It took me back to that fateful night in November 2016 when the unthinkable happened. This communal trauma – when a superb, articulate, visionary, hard-working, experienced and trailblazing woman was beaten by a vulgar, narcissistic, violent, racist, pussy-grabbing, completely unqualified billionaire con-man, who was then given the keys to the White House, the nuclear codes, and the power to appoint judges – still feels raw. Many of us had been already celebrating Hillary’s anticipated shoe-in. The night before, I bought blue curacao and was preparing my Mazel Tov Cocktails. I was also dancing the Hillary Hora, jumping up and down in my kitchen in the belief that the world was finally becoming enlightened and changing for women. The shock of the 2016 election was not just that Hillary lost. It was that he lost to him. It was the unbearable realization that 60 million Americans would rather have a nobody-nothing-sexual predator for president instead of a supremely qualified woman. If she couldn’t make it, none of us would. That was all too clear. As some now-unfriended people wrote on my Facebook wall, “Anyone but Hillary,”, or the completely disingenuous, “I’m not sexist; I just don’t like her.” Hillary’s acceptance-speech-that-wasn’t took me back to those experiences. It still stings.
But it wasn’t just the trigger to the event that made me cry. It was also the content of the speech that was profoundly upsetting. She said, “The election sends a message to the whole world that our values endure, our democracy stands strong… [and] we will not be defined by our differences. We will not be an ‘us versus them’ country…..”
Wow. So apparently none of that is true. The speech was a jarring reminder of what America failed to become. In fact, the election led to exactly the opposite of what Hillary intended.
Democracy is currently under grave threat as Trumpists work to undermine the election process itself. A culture of hate rules as killers like Kyle Rittenhouse are celebrated. Women’s basic rights are under threat, as Roe v Wade is about to be overturned and in places like Texas women are already being sent to the dark ages. Guns are more cherished then people’s lives. The number of Americans who died from Covid and people are protesting about vaccine mandates. It is hard to even imagine that there is such a thing as an America. There are at least two Americas, completely disconnected in culture, values, and the ability to think for themselves. The photos of little kids holding guns on family Christmas cards while comparing life-saving vaccines to Hitler’s yellow stars is completely foreign and unrecognizable to over half the country.
Hillary’s speech-that-wasn’t is a description of an America that isn’t. It is a stirring reminder of a tragic moment in American history, and we’re not past it yet. .
Although this speech is jarring, this was not the most gripping part of her talk in my view. What captivated my attention more were her all-too-real descriptions of what it was like to be a woman in the public eye for over 40 years. She spent most of that time being polished and avoiding sharing her gendered experiences in order to avoid the ugly pushback (remember what happened when she said she would rather practice law than bake cookies? Cautionary tale….) But now, she has let down the curtain and shared the truth of what she went through. That was illuminating, infuriating, and also helpful for the rest of us.
The class is full of jaw-dropping moments for women looking for insight into how to navigate a misogynistic world. She described, for example, how she learned to get through people’s obsession with her clothes and hair. She told a story about the time she was stepping up to the podium to speak at a church in Arkansas when she heard someone on her right say, “What an ugly dress.” Deflated but not deterred, she kept walking and heard someone on her left say, “What a lovely dress.” That made her laugh. And it reminded her that whatever her sartorial choices, some will be pleased and others will not, she can just cancel out the noise.
She also discussed the infamous town hall in which male hecklers screamed out “Iron my shirts!” The footage kept running and offered us wonderful footage not only of the hecklers but of Hillary’s response. She laughed it off and said, “I’d be happy to teach you how to iron your own shirts” – and the crowd roared. That was a great example of using humor to disarm the haters. That was a major take-away for me.
There were many moments in which Hillary modeled how to deal with the hate. She talked about the very painful “Lock her up” chants from Trump crowds, and admitted that these were tough for her. But she also shared that when she heard these kinds of things, she thought to herself, “Get a life!” I wish she could have said that out loud. She shared that from her earliest years in school, she faced mocking boys who didn’t think she should lead student government. That morphed into abusive men, those who did not believe that she could or should aspire to work or become a lawyer. She described in some detail how she learned not to take “criticism” too much to heart.
It was refreshing to hear her get animated about dealing with the zillions of layers of sexism that she experienced throughout her life. Susan Bordo’s comprehensive book, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton, chronicles the very determined, purposeful, and relentless movement to crush Hillary, as an example to all other ambitious women in America. Hillary’s story of calculated and intentional misogyny is both unique in its scope but extremely familiar to most ambitious women trying to get things accomplished in this world. Even women at the highest levels of society are finally starting to talk about the incessant sexism they had to get through on their way to the top.
Hillary’s core message was about resilience: “Don’t let it pierce you”. That is much easier said than done. But her ideas are great reminders for women about how to get through some of the ugliness that is out there.
For me, the most important part of her talk was her description of the moment in the October 2016 presidential debate versus Trump in which he was actively, menacingly closing in on her when she was talking. Everything he did to her during that debate were models of emotional abuse that the world had never seen quite so blatantly. When he threatened her, he was threatening all of us in a way. Those of us who have lived out emotionally abusive relationships could feel the ominous attack on our own beings. We experienced the trigger of being assaulted on the national stage – by the future president no less – with nobody stepping in to protect Hillary or anyone else.
As she described that moment, she said that she was trying to figure out what to do about this, which she later said “made her skin crawl”, she was trying to stay calm and answer questions “about health care or climate change or whatever, I wanted to say, ‘Back up you creep!’ But I didn’t,” she says.
Her dilemma about this tells us everything we need to know about the lose-lose morass that women face in the world as we try to get things down.
Let me break it down.
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