Hillary’s speech was like watching the moon landing. I don’t remember anyone ever telling me that a woman could never be president. But that’s how deeply sexism and “less-than” are woven into American culture. My culture. The understanding that women matter less, that we’re capable of less, and that all our achievements can be calculated in husbands, babies, hotness or bra size – it’s everywhere. It’s what we breathe.
And suddenly last night, right there on our screens: we breathed new air. I couldn’t know before I witnessed this moment of political theater, in which Clinton even quoted Hamilton, how the presence of a woman on stage would lift up a part of me that has always been downtrodden. Seeing this fellow woman, with whom I share the experience of surviving a culture, a government and an economy that treats women as 70 cents to a man’s dollar … it felt like something broken inside me spontaneously mended.
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Men, you can’t know what it’s like to always navigate the world knowing that your ability to navigate the world means, in part, charming or pleasing or deferring to or avoiding sexual inappropriateness from men. The countless little invisible slights, the horrible attacks, the 30 cents missing from every earned dollar. We all know about all of that, not that the world cares, but Thursday night a spotlight shone on something so powerful that it was invisible. The understanding that only men are American presidents. Perhaps no longer.
Hillary Clinton’s speech was a powerful, primal first – and it blew me away.
My friend, Xeni, wrote a column that clearly and powerfully explains what Hillary Clinton’s nomination means for a lot of women, including women like her who didn’t expect to feel this way.
Hillary Clinton’s speech was a powerful, primal first – and it blew me away.
My friend, Xeni, wrote a column that clearly and powerfully explains what Hillary Clinton’s nomination means for a lot of women, including women like her who didn’t expect to feel this way.
