For years I thought of my mother as a pathetic figure who had turned her back on feminism until I saw the scorn heaped upon Clinton and realized my mom was a victim of her time
My mother stands in the kitchen wringing a dishrag between her hands as she watches Hillary Clinton on the national news; its another one of those spots about Clintons supposed likability liability, where a reporter wonders whether she is too wonkish or aggressive to contend against the Trump war machine. My mother watches the footage of Clinton with an intensity that surprises me: she never follows politics news shows and debates are for my father while soap operas and Real Housewives are her domain.
I hope Hillary beats Trump, she says.
My father, from the family room, changes the channel. His tone has a hint of annoyance: Could you please not talk about politics?
With that, my mother turns back to the dishes.
I grew up in a household of yes, dears; a place where second-wave feminism never made it through the front door. My father was a breadwinner and a bully; my mother was a homemaker and master apologist. At 67 years old, my mother is only one year younger than Hillary Clinton. They were cohorts in the time of womens lib, but Clinton lived the mission: smashing down obstacles to education and employment, forging a passion and purpose that didnt hinge on making casseroles or wiping noses. My mother could be a case study from The Feminine Mystique. Growing up, I swore that Id never be like her: Clinton was my heroine; she cared more about reforming healthcare than baking some damn cookies.
As a teenager, I remember watching my mother clear plates from the Thanksgiving dinner shed spent all day preparing and pointedly ignoring her wordless plea for help in the kitchen. The world, as I saw it from my angsty adolescent perch, was divided into two types of women the powerful and the pathetic and I couldnt fraternize with the enemy. If my mother sat in the back row at secretarial school, I would be at the top of my class in a masters degree program. After all, the great work of feminism had cracked open opportunities that my mother had stupidly, lazily, not availed herself of. My hard work, and my force of will, would be rewarded. Id never live under a mans thumb.
But after I moved out and got a job, my fantasies of how Id take on the world slowly ended. Knowing that the man in the cubicle next to mine was making more money for the same work, feeling small and afraid when I got on the late train alone after a long day, and enduring the pitying, withering looks from neighbors and colleagues who knew that I was 30, and still single I could conceive, in abstract, of what my feminist heroes such as Hillary Clinton mustve endured. Yet I still resented my mother all the more for hiding in the bunker of her dull, comfortable life in the suburbs. I couldnt respect any woman without a few scars.
Then, the blitzkrieg of the 2016 election happened and I saw, for the first time, the true wreckage of the sexism my mother mustve lived through. I was ready for Hillary criticisms, for conspiracy theories and jokes about cankles. But I wasnt ready for the Republican frontrunner to crack wise about blood coming out of a woman reporters orifices, and gain in popularity. And I certainly wasnt ready to see lefties I respected arguing that anyone whod served as a senator for eight years, and as secretary of state for four years, could somehow be unqualified to be president. Seeing journalists chide Clinton for shouting too much when her male opponents on both sides would give Foghorn Leghorn a run for his money makes me understand why someone like my mother might be too afraid to step out of the kitchen, and into a bolder life.
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