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Magazine
THE OTHER HALF
Being Hillary
KALPANA SHARMA
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Women are viewed through a magnifying glass, men through ordinary lenses. The former first lady of the U.S. is no exception.
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AP PHOTO
Her race ends: Hillary Rodham Clinton
Hillary Clinton is now off the front pages. But she is still simmering on the back burner. The woman who would be President of the United States of America, by any measure the most powerful job in the world, is not going to slink away into anonymity. Someone who managed to get 18 million voters to support her attempt to claim the nomination of the Democratic Party is not a person you can brush off lightly. She has proved that she is someone to be reckoned with, to be taken
seriously.
Yet, despite her determined and tireless campaign over seven months, there were many in the US who refused to take her seriously. Or rather they tried to ensure that no one would take her seriously by concentrating their criticism of her on things that have no relevance when it comes to holding political office.
TV anchors mimicked her laugh – or “cackle” as they called it --, spoofed her dress sense, railed against her for acting tough, chastised her if she showed any emotion, and made the most unmentionable personal comments and jokes about her. If anything like this had been said about the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, Barack Obama, all hell would have broken loose. In the land of political correctness, you cannot make jokes about colour or about religion.
But apparently women are fair game, particularly women who dare to enter an arena that has historically been the exclusive reserve of men.
One can find many faults with Hillary Clinton, as one can with Barack Obama. But these criticisms should be centred on the policies they advocate, the positions they have taken or not taken, their inconsistency, their lack of experience, their ethics, their world view. But surely in a race that is for the highest office, neither should have to face cheap personal attacks of the kind Hillary Clinton faced at the hands of America’s “free” press.
Which brings us to the central question that must be asked now that the dust has settled: Is America ready to have a woman as President? Yes, if one counts the popular vote for Hillary Clinton that matched the votes that Obama managed to get. No, if you read some of the writing and watch some of the television comments made about Hillary. All of them were personal. All of them were in bad taste. And all of them were anti-women.
Tough fighter?
Has she paved the way for other women to aim for this high office? Once again, the answer is mixed. Yes, because she has shown that a woman can fight on equal terms with a man, can raise funds, has the stamina to keep a gruelling schedule, and can win a huge amount of popular support.
No, because ultimately a woman candidate will be judged on issues that have nothing to do with the qualities needed in a leader. She can be neither tough nor soft. If she tries to project toughness, as Hillary did, she’ll be lambasted for trying to be like men. If she reveals her softer side, she’ll be criticised for using womanly wiles to get popular sympathy. No matter what she does, she cannot escape unscathed. It would be perfectly fair if both men and women were put to the same scrutiny. But as the race for the Democratic nomination has clearly shown, they are not. Women are viewed through a magnifying glass, men through ordinary lenses.
Is the treatment that Hillary received specific to the peculiar way the campaign for presidency is run in the U.S.? In some ways it is nation specific.
The press in the US is not constrained the way we are in India where rarely are personal comments made about our men and women in public life.
Indeed, barring the occasional cartoon, we take ourselves far too seriously and cannot tolerate even humour leave alone sarcasm.
In fact, for being sarcastic about the Maharashtra government’s plan to erect a huge statue of Shivaji off Mumbai’s coastline, the editor of the Marathi daily Loksatta, Kumar Ketkar had to suffer a band of men attacking his house and smearing black paint over his door earlier this month.
But in the U.S., nothing seems to be outside the realm of the possible when it comes to criticising people in public office. So while cartoons routinely lampoon everyone from the President downwards, and no one attacks these newspaper offices, the low-end of this is the kind of personal attacks that Hillary Clinton had to withstand in the last seven months.
High demands
Hillary’s campaign illustrates for women everywhere the challenges of reaching for high office. As women professionals know only too well, survival in the rat race demands toughness and being prepared for hurtful scrutiny. It means swallowing unjust criticism, it means watching incompetence succeed just because it is dressed in a suit, and it means accepting that it is a man’s world out there. As a result, women who aspire to reach the top often cannot be true to their own selves and perhaps even forget who they are in the course of running the race. But the choices they make are virtually pre-determined by rules that they did not make.
Hillary Clinton ran a race of which she did not invent the rules. Her campaign made many mistakes. Not all of it was ethical. But she also had to face much more hostile scrutiny because she was a woman, and because her husband is a former President. In the end, Hillary could not escape either shadow, of her gender or that of Bill Clinton. Of course, everyone rejoices that America has a chance now to have a non-white male as President for the first time. But for the moment it has lost the chance of proving that it is not against a woman holding highest office.
Email the writer: sharma.kalpana@yahoo.com
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