Hillary Rodham Clinton as Feminist Heroine
By Lynne V. Cheney, Christina Hoff Sommers, Karen Burstein, Phyllis Schlafly, Laura Ingraham, Betty Friedan

Hillary Clinton has obviously become a female icon, of a very controversial sort. Our final panel considers what type of example she sets for women. Participants include:

• Christina Hoff Sommers, Brady Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Who Stole Feminism?

• Karen Burstein, former New York state senator, New York Family Court Judge, New York City Auditor General, and chair of the State Consumer Protection Board under Mario Cuomo

• Phyllis Schlafly, author of 16 books, columnist and radio commentator, and president of Eagle Forum

• Laura Ingraham, MSNBC host and author of the book The Hillary Trap: Looking for Power in All the Wrong Places

• Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique

• Lynne Cheney, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS: A few years ago, I attended a feminist conference in New York City that included a session entitled “Anger and Struggle.” The moderator, literature professor Jane Marcus, introduced herself as “an expert on anger.” She urged the assembled women to “use your rage in your writing!” The other panelists were a Harvard University instructor described as “angry and struggling”; Catharine Stimpson, until recently director of the MacArthur Fellows program, introduced as “enraged and engaged”; and Brenda Silver of Dartmouth (“angry since 1972”). Each speaker recited a tale of outrage, and warnings of male backlash to come.

I believe Hillary Rodham Clinton would have been very much at home at that “anger and struggle” gathering. Why do I believe that, and why is that worrisome?

Feminists can be roughly divided into two camps: equity feminists and gender feminists. Equity feminists want fair treatment for women and no discrimination. From the point of view of equity feminists (and I count myself among them) most of the major battles in the U.S. have been won. Women are not merely doing as well as men in this society, in many ways they are now doing better.

But gender feminists are not celebrating. Gender feminists see women as a subordinate class, routinely tyrannized and victimized by men. Many live in a chronically offended state.

Why do I count the First Lady with the gender feminists? After all, she never speaks these days as a professed feminist. She is a careful politician; so you will not hear her mention “patriarchal hegemony” or the “gender system.” But you will find her practicing what the gender feminists preach. Like other gender feminists, she constantly exaggerates women’s victim status and routinely backs up her claims with misleading or false statistics. I will give a couple examples.

  Here is a passage from a speech Mrs. Clinton gave about a year ago on “Pay Equity Day”: “We know that women who walk into the grocery store are not asked to pay 25 percent less for milk. They’re not asked by their landlords to pay 25 percent less for rent. And they should no longer be asked to try to make their ends meet…. It is not just a gap in wages, it’s a gap in our nation’s principles and promises.”

I have rarely heard the wage gap presented in a more artful and inflammatory way. Mrs. Clinton is saying that women are being cheated out of 25 percent of their wages. How true is that?

Most economists who have studied the gap will tell you that it has little to do with discrimination. Wage differences between males and female are mainly the effect of characteristically different priorities that men and women express in their work and home lives. Women devote more time to children than men do. They are far more likely than men to drop out of the workplace, or cut down on work once they have a family. This results in lower earnings. Moreover, women and men follow different career paths. College women, for example, are far more likely to pursue degrees in fields like psychology and journalism than in more lucrative fields such as engineering and computer science. There is still wage discrimination in some workplaces; it is illegal, and those who practice it deservedly find themselves in court. But the First Lady is not talking about sporadic injustices. She is asserting widespread, sexist discrimination.

A second example comes from a 1997 speech Mrs. Clinton delivered at the United Nations: “Domestic and sexual violence remains the most serious, underreported, and widespread human rights violation in the world. In almost every nation of the world, domestic violence is one of the leading causes of injury to women. In my country, 30 percent of female murder victims are killed by current or former partners.”

She makes it sound like there is an epidemic of murderous domestic violence in the United States. But what are the numbers? We have approximately 100 million adult women in the U.S. Each year about 1,300 women (and 500 men) are murdered by an intimate. All of these deaths are tragic. But in so vast a population, death by violence is actually rather rare. To give the impression of a crisis of sexist murders is irresponsible and inflammatory. Again, this is classic gender feminism.

Gender feminists are always telling us that history is one long conspiracy against women. Does Hillary believe that? Here is how Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward describes the First Lady’s relationship with feminist Jean Houston:  “Hillary Clinton and Houston clicked…. Houston said the first lady was carrying the burden of 5,000 years of history, when women were subservient. The rising of women to equal partnership with men was the biggest event in history, Houston  said. Hillary Clinton represented the ‘new story.’ She was reversing thousands of years of expectation and was there up front, probably more than virtually any woman in human history—apart from Joan of Arc.”

Jean Houston became so close a confidant of Hillary’s she at one point moved in to the White House. Those around the First Lady commented on how animated she became after a session with Houston. I have no way of knowing whether the First Lady believes it to be her unique destiny to overthrow 5,000 years of patriarchy. But she was clearly inspired and exhilarated by Houston’s ideas. It is impossible to imagine Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kay Bailey Hutchison, or Governor Christine Todd Whitman, forging this kind of bond with someone like Jean Houston.

Another of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s muses is radical feminist Eve Ensler, author of the New York City hit play The Vagina Monologues. Ensler claims to have discovered that “women secretly love to talk about their vaginas.” Such stories became the basis for her play, a celebration of what Ensler calls women’s “vagina brain.” Interestingly, there are no good men in Ensler’s raunchy comedy. There are only rapists, brutes, insensitive louts, and one vile little boy.

One admirer of Eve Ensler is actress Glenn Close, who told the New York Times, “You don’t just hook-up with Eve. You become part of her crusade. There’s a core of us who are Eve’s army.” One member of Eve’s army is Hillary Clinton. The First Lady chose Ensler to serve on the exploratory committee that advised her on whether to run for the Senate in New York. Hillary Clinton has agreed to write the foreword for Ensler’s next play, called Necessary Targets. The work is a look at rape victims in Bosnia, but, Ensler explained to the Hartford Courant, it is really about the spiritual poverty of consumer-obsessed Americans, and how much we need to learn from the Bosnians. “Coming from America, we really don’t know how to be with each other…we know how to consume.”  

Hillary Clinton has read enough polls to know that gender feminism is not a winning platform. She does not explicitly write or speak as a gender warrior. So we have to read between the lines, and when we do we quickly find a zealous and committed gender feminist who enjoys the company of some rather loony sexual ideologues. And if she enters the Senate, I expect she will forcefully promote their agenda.  

KAREN BURSTEIN: Hillary Clinton is the kind of person who offers little girls a model for their lives, and little boys an understanding of the promises and opportunities that exist for women. She is a woman of considerable intelligence. She’s a person who has failed big and in public. And she has managed, having failed, not to be so horrified or embarrassed as to retreat into silence. Hillary has also managed to have a marriage, a child, and a career.

For me, the great contribution of feminism has been the notion of choice. And what Mrs. Clinton has vindicated over and over in her life is the notion that you do have choices, and that even if you make them and they turn out to be wrong, you can step back and go somewhere else.

Hillary Clinton has led a life of great accomplishment. She was one of few women staffers on the Senate Watergate Committee. She began Arkansas programs that taught poor women how to be good parents. She encouraged legislation that changed adoption and foster care in this country. This is a woman whose commencement speech at Wellesley College was quoted in Life.

Hillary Clinton’s experiences are also useful for us to understand where women are at the present moment. Let me talk about the issue of her marriage. In New York I frequently hear people say, “I like her a great deal, but she stays with that disgusting man. How could she do it? There must be something wrong with her.”

But what she might respond is, “How do you know what’s inside of my marriage, and how do you know what my relationship is to this man?” There are some places in politicians’ lives where you don’t enter. And we must give Hillary Clinton credit and respect for the choices she makes.

I asked a young African-American woman who works for me, who is a third-generation welfare recipient, “Tatiana, what do you think of Hillary Clinton?”

“Well,” she said, “I like her a lot.”

 And I said, “Why is that?”

She said, “Well, because she does brave, hard things, and she’s not afraid to go out there and speak up, and I think she cares about people like me, and I think she cares about her daughter.”

I said, “Do you really mean that?”

She said, “Yes. But I wish she were black.”

I asked, “So, is she your hero?”

She thought to herself and said, “I guess so.”

For me, heroes are people who are not larger than life. They’re human beings who step out with a measure of grace, take pain. They’re people who risk themselves to magnify our voices.

So as Tatiana said, Hillary is her hero, and I’ll tell you, she’s mine.  

PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY: Hillary Rodham Clinton is not an interesting person. She hasn’t accomplished anything of note in business or profession or politics. Her speeches are a bore. And she isn’t even a likeable person.

But of course she is a feminist heroine, because she saw to it that her husband never betrayed the feminist political agenda (though he betrayed everybody else, including Hillary). For that, the feminists can thank Hillary, which is why she is their favorite.

Hillary’s most famous soundbites were calculated to reassure the feminists that she is their soul sister. On that famous “60 Minutes” interview when she covered for Bill Clinton in his liaison with Gennifer Flowers, Hillary stated defiantly, “I’m not some little woman standing by her man like Tammy Wynette.” Even as she was assuming the role of long-suffering wife in denial, Hillary was broadcasting a feminist message.

During the year we suffered through the Monica soap opera, Hillary proved in spades that she was exactly what she denied being: “some little woman standing by her man.” That wasn’t feminist behavior. But apparently the end justified the means. The goal was to keep Bill Clinton from being ousted from office.

Hillary’s personality and ideology came through even more clearly during the 1992 campaign when she responded to a reporter’s question about conflicts of interest between her law firm and Governor Bill Clinton’s office. She replied, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas.” That was perfectly descriptive of the feminist worldview, which is based on a cultural and economic putdown of devoted mothers and homemakers.

Hillary’s views on marriage were spelled out back in 1974 in an article she wrote for the Harvard Educational Review: “The basic rationale for depriving people of rights in a dependency relationship [i.e., wives and children] is that certain individuals are incapable or undeserving of the right to take care of themselves and consequently need social institutions specifically designed to safeguard their position. Along with the family, past and present examples of such arrangements include marriage, slavery, and the Indian reservation system.”

That’s vintage 1970s feminism, the ideology which teaches that non-employed wives are second-class citizens, that marriage leaves women as servants bogged down in dirty diapers and dirty dishes, and that women need out-of-the-home careers to have real fulfillment.

Hillary displayed this same mindset when she sounded off on her notion that children should be raised and regulated by the “village” rather than by their own mothers, who are presumably not educated enough to do anything more stimulating than baking cookies.

So, a feminist heroine Hillary truly is, but a feminist role model she is not. In fact she is (pardon the expression) just a housewife. She is the topic of today’s discussion only because she is the wife of President Bill Clinton. She made her money and built her so-called career the old-fashioned way: She married it.

Hillary tried hard to pretend she was a feminist career woman. Campaigning with Bill in 1992, they both promised us a “co-presidency.” As she put it, “If you vote for my husband, you get me; it’s a two-for-one, blue plate special.”

Hillary started her adult life sputtering the campus drivel of the 1960s. In her graduation speech at Wellesley College in 1969, Hillary Rodham said she was searching for “more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living,” so that she could come “to terms with our humanness” and “talk about reality, authentic reality, inauthentic reality.”

She still had not come to terms with reality by the time she made a speech, as First Lady, at the University of Texas on April 6, 1993. Hillary’s rambling discourse there sounded like an all-night bull session in a co-ed college dorm. “We are in a crisis of meaning,” she declaimed. “What do our governmental institutions mean? What do our lives in today’s world mean? …What does it mean in today’s world…to be human?”

We’re inclined to respond, “Speak for yourself, Hillary.” Lacking meaning in life is an individual, not a societal, problem. Most of us have no trouble finding meaning in our lives, and it would seem she should have been able to as well before moving into the White House.

Despite her inability to cope with life’s meaning, Hillary has never outgrown the adolescent arrogance of the campus radicals of the 1960s and the bra-burning feminists of the 1970s. That’s the arrogance that led her in 1993 to try to redesign and take over the $850 billion U.S. health care industry.

After Hillary assumed control of the health care issue, we saw typical feminist behavior in action. She accepted deference and chivalry from the middle-aged Congressmen who refrained from asking her any tough questions, and then she used her First Lady’s authority to flout the law. The lawsuit filed by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons proved that she deliberately violated federal law by running her Health Care Task Force and Working Group in secret, in order to conceal the identities of persons who had provable conflicts of interest. If she hadn’t had the First Lady’s skirts to hide behind, she would have followed Webster Hubbell and others out of Washington.

When the Monica scandal broke, Hillary affected the role of victim while at the same time she was quarterbacking the coverup, manning the battle stations, and manufacturing the spin about a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” In feminist lingo, she became a “macho feminist.”

Macho feminism was first modeled in the movie Thelma and Louise.  And maybe the ending of that film was prophetic, when Thelma and Louise got in their automobile and drove off a cliff to their death. That was their supreme act of women’s liberation, because they made the decision themselves: No man told them to commit suicide.

Maybe New York will be Hillary’s cliff, just as it was Geraldine Ferraro’s. If so, hers will be an act of authentic macho feminism: No man told her to run. 

LAURA INGRAHAM: I don’t think Hillary Clinton is evil, I just think she is wrong—on everything from family politics to gun control to teachers’ unions.

Certainly she is not a good role model for women. Her personal life has turned into a bizarre, sad relationship where both husband and wife depend in desperate and unhealthy ways on each other at different times of their lives. If you walked around Washington and asked mothers of all political persuasions whether her life and her choices are ones they’d want for their daughters, I think an overwhelming number of people would say no. In many ways, Hillary is a road map on how not to lead your life as a young woman today.

Hillary Clinton represents a lot of the conflicts all women have. Many of us, like Hillary, have to choose at some point between dependency and the risky business of going forward on our own. We all have to decide whether we’re going to be accountable, whether we’re going to stand up for what we believe.

The most dangerous thing about Hillary isn’t what she did in Whitewater or the billing records or any of the various scandals. It’s her seeming inability not to be self-reflective, not to look back on some of the things she’s done in her own life, see mistakes, come clean, and make changes.

Give us a forthright answer about whether welfare was really good for poor people. How about an honest reflection on whether women were really better off after the sexual revolution ran its course. Why can’t she be honest about the undeniable facts out there?

That’s what I think the Hillary trap is:  An unhealthy dependency—in both your personal life and in the political realm—on old solutions that have failed. In that sense, Hillary has squandered her smarts, squandered her education.

Women are doing well today. You only have to spend some time in high schools to see how confident many young women are now. They’re succeeding in school. They’re playing sports. I played three sports in high school, two in college. I must say I don’t ever feel like I’ve been discriminated against for being a woman. But none of this reality shows up in Mrs. Clinton’s worldview.

Hillary is mostly the product of her marriage, and her main work has been to prop up her husband’s political life, to cling to him no matter how he treats her, and to bail him out when he gets in trouble. So we know her through her mistakes. We know her through beliefs and policies that have unquestionably been ruinous to women.

Her life is not the life that most women want. Women don’t want to end up on the stage, as Hillary did on her fifty-second birthday, with a philandering husband standing up and saying how she’s the greatest woman in the world. Who wants that for her daughter? 

Discussion and Questions
LYNNE CHENEY: Those defending Mrs. Clinton as a feminist heroine might be interested in a comment my daughter made when I told her I was moderating this panel. She said, “I think the people who want to defend Mrs. Clinton as a feminist heroine should be asked exactly which parts of her experience one should point to. What exactly has she done?” Then she quoted Peggy Noonan’s new book, “Mrs. Clinton is so famous, so celebrated for her accomplishments. She so quickly and eagerly refers to them. Yet when you look at the record, her reputation for accomplishment seems to be just another fiction.”

BURSTEIN: But if she gets elected to the Senate in her own right, that will be a wonderful signal to women who have been putting their energies and efforts into advancing their husband’s career that it’s not too late for them. And if Hillary has benefited from being Bill Clinton’s wife, well, George W. Bush has benefited from having a father who was President. The problem is you’re holding her to a higher standard.

INGRAHAM: Don’t you think we need some explanations from her about the events that completely gripped our country for two years? Her husband was impeached for lying under oath. People want to understand this. Was her marriage just a completely political bargain? Did she stick it out just to protect the political left wing? Did she know about Monica?

BURSTEIN: I think it’s outrageous of us to put ourselves in her place and imagine that she’s a fan of her husband, that she’s adopted every view he takes. Her choice is that she loves him, that she wants to stay married to him. Her reasons for that choice are none of your business. 

CHENEY: What really drives me crazy is when Hillary acts like the happy wife. Walking hand in hand off the helicopter together at critical moments. It is just so distressing to me.

BURSTEIN: Passion and emotion and love are such confusing things in real life.

CHENEY: But hypocrisy is the thing that is most distressing.

BETTY FRIEDAN: As far as I’m concerned, Hillary Clinton and the President are good role models for the children of our country. They illustrate a marriage between equals. She was at the top of her law school class, he was in the middle of the same class.

She, through her intelligence and her efforts, helped advance his career. And now she’s moving on her own to run for the Senate in New York. This is a wonderful role model.

QUESTION: Nobody has brought up Juanita Broaddrick, and the fact that Bill Clinton has been plausibly accused of rape. Hillary Clinton has been alleged to have been complicit in helping to cover up not only that particular alleged abuse but all the other incidents that have gone on through this man’s career. Surely this is something that needs to be discussed when the subject of Mrs. Clinton’s feminism is raised.

BURSTEIN: I don’t believe Juanita Broaddrick’s is a credible story. Now maybe I’m wrong. But it’s very rare, in my experience, if something that awful happens, that there isn’t more to it.

So the answer to your question is simple: Hillary Clinton hasn’t done anything wrong by staying with a man she doesn’t know to have done the thing he’s accused of. If he did this thing, and she’s crazy, and I’m crazy, and everybody who thinks the story is made up is crazy, then we’ll be very sorry for ourselves one day.

FRIEDAN: Who’s Juanita Broaddrick? I’ve never heard of her.

FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: You’ve never heard of her?

FRIEDAN: No.

FEMALE: She’s the woman Bill Clinton raped.

BURSTEIN: I don’t think that that has ever been proved.

FRIEDAN: He raped her in the White House?

[crosstalk]

CHENEY:  I’m going to step in as moderator and ask Christina to comment on whether she thinks Hillary as a feminist has in any way been undermined by her unsympathetic attitude toward the women alleged to have been imposed upon by her husband.

SOMMERS: What I find interesting with Hillary is that she was very much part of a group that supported Anita Hill. She was at the ceremony where Anita Hill received an award, and she’s very much on her side. Then when the tables were turned, she completely flipped positions. I thought at the time of Anita Hill that it was impossible to know what went on, and I don’t think we know exactly what went on with Juanita Broaddrick. The problem is, both cases were “he said/she said.” Although it’s important to keep in mind that one involved an alleged rape, while Clarence Thomas was never accused of anything more than some ribald banter and tasteless jokes.

But feminists came down very hard on the side that “women don’t lie about these attacks.” They insisted that in any sexual harassment lawsuit a woman has the right to investigate a man’s entire sexual history. Hillary Clinton supported that view when it seemed like a convenient weapon to be wielded against enemies. And Bill Clinton signed that harassment bill. Then they were hoist on their own petard. What bothered me so much about watching the Paula Jones episode and its sequels is that feminists would sound so different when it was their guy, and their power, on trial.

QUESTION: The First Lady has traveled around the world and received, in many cases, a rapturous reception from women.

Do you think by virtue of the model that she presents and the message she’s brought that more or fewer women will be clerks in their Supreme Courts? More or fewer will be successful in their lives?

INGRAHAM: I think she’s irrelevant. Hillary’s message around the world is largely one of scattered clichés and government largesse. She basically wants more U.N. money for more programs, more family planning, and more talk about lifting women up.

I don’t see Hillary’s actions being ones that lift women up out of poverty. What solutions is Hillary Clinton going to give women who want to start a business? Who want to play a sport? Who want to stay married to their husbands and live a happy life? I think she’s largely been either a bad influence for women, or had no effect.

SOMMERS: I have admired some of Hillary’s work abroad. There are many parts of the world where women have not had their first wave of feminism, and I think she’s a very able carrier of basic equity feminism to other parts of the world.

But we don’t need a feminist revolution in the United States. Her agenda at home is divisive at a time where we need more unity.