A Woman Of Her Time: Hillary Rodham Clinton
Paul Alexander
July 3, 2016 5:30 am
In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, the groundbreaking study of the role women were then playing in American society. She identified “the problem that has no name” — a discontent widespread among women whose duties as homemaker left them feeling frustrated and unfulfilled. The women’s movement that emerged in the wake of Friedan’s book created two primary opposing models: the left-leaning feminist who wanted to revolutionize society’s patriarchy through whatever means necessary and the centrist advocate who hoped to affect change by entering the patriarchy and altering it from within. Friedan chose the latter. It promised to be long-term and difficult, but she believed it stood a greater chance of success.
The most prominent woman to emerge from the women’s movement in America is Hillary Rodham Clinton, yet, because of her stature as a historic figure and the events that made her one, she is often misunderstood, especially on the issue of gender politics. She is not a bra-burning feminist willing to embrace radical methods to advance her cause, but a descendant of Betty Friedan, who broke from the National Organization For Women, which she helped found, because it became too extreme for her taste. Understanding where Clinton falls in the spectrum of the women’s movement explains who she is as a woman, why she has been successful at creating change in the United States and abroad, and why she is often misread by third-wave feminists and millennials, many of whom call themselves fourth-wave feminists. To show just how high the level of misunderstanding can be, during the Democratic presidential primary one young Instagram user wrote, “Bernie Sanders has done more for feminism than Hillary Clinton has.”
How could this young feminist be so far off the mark? To understand Hillary Clinton you have to understand where she came from. She was born in Chicago in 1947 but, after the age of three, lived in nearby suburban Park Ridge. A dye-in-the-wool Midwesterner coming of age in the tranquilized fifties, she grew up, as she would say, “in the middle class in the middle of the country in the middle of the century.” Her mother, Dorothy, was a housewife; her father, Hugh, a small business owner with a bedrock conservative soul. In 1964, the Rodhams supported Barry Goldwater, and Hillary was a “Goldwater Girl.” Her family attended the Methodist Church, providing a religious foundation Hillary would rely on throughout her life. “It is the core of who I am,” she has said.
When she considered colleges, Hillary chose Wellesley College, one of the Seven Sisters schools, and its all-women environment left a lasting impression on her. Significantly, it changed her political persuasion. By 1968, because of her admiration of Eugene McCarthy, who opposed the Vietnam War, she became a Democrat. At Wellesley, she was so popular her fellow seniors chose her to deliver the student address at commencement. It was a stinging antiwar speech that attacked positions held by that year’s keynote speaker, Edward Brooke, the first African-American senator from Massachusetts, a rebuke that horrified the college administration but landed her in Life magazine — her first taste of the national media.
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