Hillary: Sexism or Self-Sabotage?
There were gender issues at play in Clinton’s Presidential run, but they weren’t what did her in. Are we finally ready because a postgender conversation about the choices all women have to make?
by Shoshana Zuboff
Hillary Clinton did not hit a glass ceiling. Wealthy and powerful Democrats anointed her as their Presidential nominee years ago. She was lowered from above on a jeweled scaffold, and the take rest was supposed to be easy. But in the close, Senator Clinton blamed the failure of her campaign on sexist attitudes and media coverage. Some of her followers are pursuing these charges by calling for media boycotts. Even former President Bill Clinton railed against the sexist disrespect he claimed the media had aimed at his consort (this from the man who had subjected her to marital humiliation on a galactic scale).
Did Hillary Clinton combat sexism along the way? Yes. Many, if not most, women do. A ponder published last month in the Journal of Child Development reports that 90% of teenage girls have experienced sexual harassment. Last year, a view released by the Defense Dept. indicated that 34% of active-duty women in the U.S. armed forces reported having experienced sexual harassment. In 2006, 62% of college women acknowledged having been sexually harassed. A 2004 Harris Poll found that 31% of all female workers had been harassed at work. A modern thought of university employees showed that besides than 40% of faculty women were sexually harassed, as were a large plurality of women and men among mark of respect, clerical, and scholar employees.
A Stubborn Stain
In 2006, as in 1997, sex discrimination accounted for 30.7% of the sum charges brought to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The pay gap between men and women continues to be wide—a 31% divergence 10 years in imitation of community graduation. Working mothers are frustrated by the shortcoming of opportunities during the term of good part-time jobs, and their families suffer. Studies by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, the National Women’s Business Council, and others have repeatedly shown the disadvantages women face in their access to insurance, credit, and health care. The scarcity of women in public- and private-sector leadership is notorious and shameful. Sexism has remained a stubborn stain, and the collective enjoin to confront it seems to have gone dark in recent years.
But was it sexism that brought Senator Clinton down? Or was her campaign torpedoed by the choices she made in response to the inevitable challenges raised by sex and sexism? Clinton’s tortuous journey from self-proclaimed next commander-in-chief to self-professed victim of the glass ceiling reflects the many choices that women encounter daily: Do we confine ourselves to the stereotypes of our sex? Do we adapt to a servant’s world by making ourselves again masculine? Or do we take a leap of faith along a less well defined "postgender" path, finding new ways to inhabit old roles and moving beyond the stereotypes of both sexes?
These were tough calls when I boarded this train 30 years since, and as Senator Clinton has shown, they are not one easier today. Her choices over the past months have prompted me to consider my own choices over the past decades and reflect on what I learned.
Navigating Without Maps
I think of my generation—women who entered the workforce in the late 1970s and soon ’80s—as "the bodies over the barbed wire." Many of us were the first to cross the threshold. Then we were the only woman in the room. We were in succession our have a title to, traveling an unforgiving frontier, when Mrs. Clinton was cocooned in her First Lady rank in Arkansas then Washington, or quietly attending Wal-Mart (WMT) board meetings while that company racked up one of the worst sex sagacity records in U.S. corporate history. There were few options in those days for confronting sexism. There was no one to tell; no antecedent to guide us. Most of us chose to march into the headwinds and do our jobs well.
From: Hillary: Sexism or Self-Sabotage?
