I’m just a grandmother
with two eyes and a brain. –Hillary Clinton from the video Stand for Reality released by her
campaign in July 2015
I felt my eyes bug out and my mouth fall open cartoonishly
as I heard Hillary Rodham Clinton utter those words. I felt betrayed. I felt
annoyed. Most of all, I felt disappointed. Here’s why:
1. Women should be free to be strong and have
confidence in that strength. I was in elementary school when Hillary
Clinton became the First Lady and I have always looked up to her since. She was
not born into a famous family of politicians, but her hard work at Wellesley
College and then Yale Law School set her on a track to achieve many great
things. Looking at the lists of her accomplishments makes it easy to see that
she is one of the most powerful and successful women in our country and the
world. Many of these accomplishments are preceded by “the first female” and as
such, she is a trailblazer for women everywhere. She has worked to better
education, healthcare, and life for families in our country. All of this has
been done with constant scrutiny from the media, sometimes against a backdrop
of scandal. The thing about Hillary that is most inspiring is that she never
gives up. She is strong. She is a
strong women, she is a strong politician, and she is a strong mother and wife.
It hurts us all as women when she is not honest about her strength and
accomplishments on the campaign trail. If one of the most powerful women in the
world is going around diminishing her success and pretending to be just like
the rest of us, what kind of message does that send? Women have fought for so
long to prove that they are equal and capable, all while having to balance
family and career. Every time one of us has a victory, we all benefit. Please,
do us all a favor and do not pretend to be just average when you are
extraordinary. We the woman of the United States of America are under attack
and we need a strong woman to lead us into battle. We need a leader who will
not be pushed around and who is proud of everything she is, not one who
pretends to be less than she is. We need the Hillary from the Senate Committee
hearing on Benghazi. That Hillary was smart, resolute, and would not lie down
and let others plow her down in the name of partisan politics. She was not just
one of us, she was the best of us and she is the one who could lead this
country.
2. By saying you are just a grandmother, you are alienating the people you are trying to
gain the support of. I do not think it was purposeful, but this line really
rubbed me the wrong way for all the mothers and grandmothers. For all the hard
work she has done in this campaign to talk about her mother and the influence
she has had on her, I have to wonder if her mother might have been a little
hurt by these words if she were alive. On one hand she is trying to cover up
her successful career and assert that even a grandmother can figure out that
climate change is real and dangerous. On the other hand, she sounds as if that
role means you are not enough. A better (and smarter) choice would be to lift
up the women who are wives, mothers, and grandmothers, lift up the women who
have focused on their careers, and lift up the women who have balanced the two.
I am not just anything. You are not just anything. Hillary Rodham Clinton is
most certainly not just anything. We
are complex beings who do the best we can with what we have. We have fought
hard to get where we are and this kind of language puts us into arbitrary
groups in a time when our solidarity or lack thereof will change the history of
this country.
So I would like to say this to you, Hillary: Just be who you
are. That person is flawed and beautiful and resilient, just like the rest of
us. We all have that in common. You are already more like us than you know.
Written by Crystal F. Nichols
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