Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
By the time Clinton graduated from Yale Law School, many people, including her boyfriend Bill, believed she could, and should, embark on a political career. She'd given the Wellesley commencement speech that had earned her a 'Life' write-up of her own.
In 220 years of American presidential politics, there had been no serious female major party contenders, though women had been campaigning for the presidency since before they could vote, starting with Victoria Woodhull in 1872 and Belva Lockwood in 1884.
Though Hillary Rodham married Bill Clinton 11 years after Camille Hanks married Bill Cosby, and after having earned her own law degree, the terms of her marriage were also shaped in their own way by a presumption of a husband's centrality and a wife's subsidiary nature.
Our government and its social policies, its tax breaks, the way school days work, so much of the country we live in is built for married couples with a male breadwinner and a female domestic laborer. Government needs to be massively altered in order to serve this population.
In 1965, Cosby had become the first black man ever to star in a prime-time television show; he was conscious enough of his non-dissolved, traditional nuclear family that he made it the foundation of his public persona, his comedy act, and eventually of his blockbuster sitcom.
For inspiration, we still demand the rhetorical high notes. Clinton has hit them before, in her speech in Beijing as first lady when she said, 'Women's rights are human rights,' and in her 2008 concession speech, when she talked about the '18 million cracks' in the glass ceiling.
When lawmakers start to make laws that hurt single women, often the women that they're hurting the most are not the economically powerful ones. They're not Sandra Fluke. They're not Lena Dunham, who conservatives hate more than anybody. They're hurting low-earning single mothers.
Single women will get us closer to gender equality, and that will take many forms, including a reimagining of what families entail and what it means to have a full female life. Also, their presence will force the government to support a population of independent women more capably.
There is a kind of woman who is economically powerful, professionally powerful, who threatens a white male grip on power that has a long historic precedent in the country. Independent women living outside of marriage threaten all kinds of things about the way power is supposed to work.
There are all kinds of ways in which women, together, change the world. And I don't mean that in a cheesy way. I'm not somebody who believes all women should support each other. I believe very strongly in women critiquing each other, just not critiquing each other more intensely because they're women.
One of the things that gets confused often is the difference between marriage and good marriage. Marriage is a theoretical concept of the institution, and 'you should be married,' is actually meaningless. Marriage is pretty meaningless without the notion of having a specific person to whom you are married.
Like everyone else, I can barely take the waves of embarrassment that come with watching someone do something so badly. Roseanne Barr singing the national anthem, Sofia Coppola acting in 'The Godfather: Part III,' Sarah Palin talking about Russia - they all create the same level of eyeball-squinching discomfort.
In the nineteenth century, in part because a ton of American men moved west, in part because of the Civil War, and in part because of trepidation about marriage, which was then a very confining institution, there was a big population of women - mostly middle-class white women on the East Coast - who didn't marry.
The diminishment of southern contests is the kind of veiled racist rhetoric that Bill Clinton deployed memorably in South Carolina in 2008, and which does not look any more attractive on Bernie - the guy whose campaign is centered on the premise that he plays cleaner and more progressive politics than his opponents.
I think a lot of divisions of perspective and experience that happen within feminism are very natural. Any movement that represents the interests of 51 percent of the population is covering such divergent experiences, perspectives, and priorities that, if you're doing it right, people are going to be arguing within it.
I think that technology - computers and smart phones and 24-hour availability - often leaves me, and others I know, feeling blank and depressed at the end of a day. I also believe that hyped expectations for raising children leaves many women and men feeling as if their days are a blur of carpools and play-groups and tutors.
Plenty of the women who were single in the nineteenth century wrote about their desire to evade marriage. Marriage was scary in a lot of ways. It often involved having a lot of kids, losing your autonomy, being in service to a husband and children who were often born at an unremitting pace without the benefit of modern medicine.
One of the favorite conservative themes is that the cure for poverty is more marriage and earlier marriage. We hear that all the time; there have been billions of dollars now, between the Bush administration and the Obama administration, which has continued the marriage education program, on trying to get more people to get married.
'Marriage' was not that big a deal, to be honest! I mean, it makes life easier for technical reasons: insurance, next-of-kin stuff, joint tax filing, etc. The real shocker was falling in love with the man I'm married to. I was 32 when we met, and I had really never been in a functional relationship before, had never been deeply in love.
All the epic allusions contribute to the difficulty Clinton has long had in coming across as, simply, a human being. She is uneasy with the press and ungainly on the stump. Catching a glimpse of the 'real' her often entails spying something out of the corner of your eye, in a moment when she's not trying to be, or to sell, 'Hillary Clinton.'
During childbearing years, changing jobs - even for a fundamentally better gig - can be a very bad idea. Those prime childbearing years - mid-twenties to early forties - overlap precisely with prime professional years. This is when employees are most attractive to new employers, when they should be able to zip up ladders with the most alacrity.
Roseanne was a huge groundbreaking comedian. Margaret Cho. Ellen DeGeneres, and then on 'Saturday Night Live,' the era of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler sort of helped to bring in an awareness of a new generation of women comedians, often women who were feminist in their comedy, who were unafraid - and this came from the genre of show that was emerging.
In 2008, I started the election season as a critic of Hillary Clinton, a fan of Barack Obama, and a supporter of John Edwards. But by the end of Clinton's historic drive toward nomination, the gendered rhetoric used against her - as well as the way so many men in my own party diminished the value of electing a female president - had radicalized me.