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Womanhood, Hillary Clinton, and Structural Change
by Laura Flanders I wish I felt what Robin Morgan feels. "Our President Ourselves!" she cheers, in a rousing pitch for Hillary Clinton.
"We need to rise in furious energy -- as we did when courageous Anita Hill was so vilely treated in the US Senate, as we did when desperate Rosie Jimenez was butchered by an illegal abortion, as we did and do for women globally who are condemned for trying to break through."
Morgan asks, "Why should all women not be as justly proud of our womanhood and the centuries, even millennia of struggle that got us this far, as black Americans women and men are justly proud of their struggles?"
I wish I felt her poet's passion for Clinton as a player in the global women's movement, but I don't. Indeed, I'm reminded that there are parts to be proud of in this movement of ours, and less attractive parts, of which Hillary Clinton, I'm sad to say, constantly reminds me.
[Republished at PFP with express Agence Global permission.]
We need a movement that might someday build for structural change
-- and up to now, there's no hint of that kind of leadership in Hillary
Clinton's career.
Morgan recalls how Clinton defied the US State Department and the
Chinese Government to speak at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women. I
saw Hillary Clinton speak that rainy day in China and her defiance was
something of which to be rightly proud. But even as Clinton called for
the recognition of women's rights as human rights, the
rigged-for-profit trade policies that she supported then and continues
to endorse were encouraging a global sweatshop economy that has all but
eradicated the right to unionize in most of the world -- a working
woman's best protector. (It took her six years to get off the board of
the anti-union giant Wal-Mart.)
"For too long the history of
women has been a history of silence," Clinton told the World Conference
then. But almost exactly a year later, she supported her husband's
signing of the so-called Personal Responsibility Act, which
successfully shifted responsibility for poverty in an affluent society
off that society and onto the backs of poor mothers. Those moms barely
got to say a word, while DC pols slandered and steamrollered them.
Clinton
writes in her autobiography "Living History" that she would have
opposed her husband over welfare reform if she thought it would hurt
young children. (One wonders what she thinks happens to kids in poor
working and over-working families.) On the campaign trail, she recalls
her dedication to Marian Wright Edelman's Children's Defense Fund.
But
I can't forget Peter Edelman's resignation from the Department of
Health and Human Services in protest. In 1996, welfare "reform" cut
almost 800,000 legal immigrants off aid entirely and even denied them
food stamps, but no one denies that it helped get Bill Clinton
re-elected. "Welfare reform became a success for Bill" writes Hillary
in "Living History." It was all about politics, not poor people, said
Edelman.
And that's the saddening, shaming part of Clinton's
record -- and the part that reminds me just how often white middle
class women have advanced our own fortunes at the expense of other
women.
There is a heterogeneous, global, diverse women's
movement that has indeed raised women out of servitude and fought --
and fought again -- for reproductive, economic and social/sexual
self-determination as a human right.
But there is also a
history of some "womanhood" advancing apart, when the "we" of womanhood
became too burdensome. In 1976, when the Hyde Amendment banned most
public funding for poor women's abortions, too few of us rose up -- but
some of us rose in society thanks to obtaining abortions anyway. Today,
Senator Clinton calls abortion "tragic" and looks for "common ground"
with choice's enemies. Later, when every-woman's ERA failed, most of
today's politicians moved on. And then, as the "war on drugs" advanced,
most female lawyers (including Clinton) carried on rising up, even as
thousands of disproportionately poor and drug-addicted women were sent
down. Women -- as a whole -- didn't do much at all, when, in the name
of "defending marriage," our government (under President Clinton)
banned some women's marriages.
I'd like to believe a female
president would be good for the advancement of "womanhood" worldwide.
But so far Senator Clinton's votes have not been good for Iraqi, or
Palestinian, or a whole lot of global womanhood. One million dead in
Iraq alone. (US forces killed another nine civilians including a child
on the day I type this.) At what cost does one woman prove she's ready
for the White House?
The fact is, I'm ready for leadership
that means "we" now, not sometime when the wars on "terror" or "drugs"
or the "vast right-wing conspiracy" are over. (Or when there's a budget
surplus, or a woman in the White House, or maybe after she's won
re-election.) And so me and my womanhood are rooting for a movement
that might someday build for structural change -- and that kind of
leadership. Today, with fingers crossed, I'm voting for Barack and
Michelle Obama. At least we can call their community organizers' bluff.
Or we can go down -- or rise up -- trying.
Laura
Flanders, host of RadioNation on Air America, is the author of Blue
Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable and Inspirational Political Change
in America (Penguin).
Agence
Global is the exclusive syndication agency for The Nation, Le Monde
diplomatique, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Mona
Eltahawy, Rami G. Khouri, Peter Kwong, Patrick Seale and Immanuel
Wallerstein.
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Released: 06 February 2008
Word Count: 826
Rights & Permissions Contact: Agence Global, 1.336.686.9002, rights@agenceglobal.com
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Writings 
I wish I felt what Robin Morgan feels. "Our President Ourselves!" she cheers, in a rousing pitch for Hillary Clinton. 
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