by Tera W. Hunter
In the history of the U. S. Senate, the number of women who have been elected in their own right rather than appointed to fill vacancies of deceased husbands or appointed (some by gubernatorial husbands) as place holders for other deceased men is close to half of all the women ever elected. Margaret Chase Smith was chosen to fill her husband’s seat in the House after a special election in 1940, but in 1948 won election to the Senate. In 1978, Nancy Landon Kassebaum became the first woman elected to the Senate without a prior spousal connection in either chamber, though her father had been a governor. In 1981, Paula Hawkins became the first woman elected without close family political ties. Interestingly, Smith, Kassebaum, and Hawkins are all Republicans. Since the 1980s, most of the women in the Senate have broken with earlier traditions. Their rise to the Senate has been built on their service as city council members, mayors, state legislators, and Congress women.
During the time when this new generation of women was working its way up and through local, state, and federal political arenas, Hillary Clinton’s official title was “First Lady” of Arkansas and then the United States between 1979 and 2001. When Hillary Clinton was elected as Senator of New York state in 2001, she arrived at that position not simply because of her intelligence and hard work, but aided by her marriage to a popular U. S. President and his ample political machine. Let’s be real, no other woman who had never lived in this state previous to her decision to run for public office could have been so elected. Few men could pull that off-- aside from Bill Clinton himself.
None of this disqualifies Hillary Clinton for president. But it is necessary to put into perspective the route by which she has arrived as a serious contender for the presidency and how this colors the conduct of her campaign.
Senator Clinton stands at the cusp of the old and new generation of women senators, those who have achieved their place largely by spousal affiliation and those who have made it on their own. This accounts for the slippery slope she has relied upon, at times unabashedly playing on a plural two-for-one candidacy riding on the coattails of her husband, building a family political dynasty, and other times insisting on her singularity. This is not exactly the ideal route to breaking the glass ceiling for commander in chief. Yet there are those who insist on ranking gender above all other considerations in increasingly divisive ways.
Many of Hillary Clinton’s supporters have painted her as the universal woman victimized by gender bias that is holding up her rightful ascendance to the highest public office in the land. Universal she is not, but the misogyny directed against her has been unmistakably ugly. Many have pushed the envelope to argue that it would be more path-breaking to elect her as a woman, as opposed to Barack Obama, as an African American. But this is a perverse reckoning of history and logic that declares being a black man is an advantage in American society.
While there has been much talk about Hillary Clinton’s gender there has been utter silence from these same quarters surrounding the race and class privileges that have catapulted and sustained her political career. How ironic it is that some of the strongest advocates and beneficiaries of the “second wave” feminist movement have been so willing to diminish decades of progress and risk an atavistic turn using racial antipathy more often associated with the other political party in the name of electing a woman.
Can we at least be honest about Clinton’s contradictory place at the intersection of these vexing issues of race, class, and gender? To do otherwise is to disregard the relative advances of elite white women as a result of the struggles and gains of both the Civil Rights and Women’s movements. Casting the campaign as another epochal battle over who goes first using “kitchen sink” tactics could put a white woman in the white house or damage the prospects of a black man. But at what costs?
