Hillary, Just Be a Woman

Watching America has a piece from north of the border, translated from French in Le Devoir: The Battle of Hillary Clinton

The subhead is the title of the Lenny Kravitz song, “Just Be a Woman”.

What is keeping Hillary up is Barack Obama, who carries the strong image of renewal in the face of a woman whose experience, instead of being an asset, is becoming a photo with wrinkles and extra weight to carry around.

Yes, yes. It’s so much easier for we men to get away with the wrinkles… and in fact, a few are probably required for credibility.

And yet, says the author,

The double standard will continue to plague her. This woman, who succeeded in protecting herself with a solid shell of armor in the face of all sorts of tests, is going to discover that armor is heavy and that she cannot pretend to be a political man without paying a price. She will have to be a political woman, and that, that will be new.

In other words, Hillary must embrace the very womanliness, or even femininity, that plagues her.

It’s a far cry from the days of Maggie Thatcher in Britain, who was called, affectionately by some, aggressively by others, the “Best Man in the Cabinet” – a title that could be well defended. Thatcher famously had training to lower her voice, to masculinize herself. It worked. She was the epitome of the strong female leader, who succeeded perhaps by trading in her femininity for strength. Even her handbags became famous (selling at auction for $100,000s): for every other woman, the handbag is, while practical, a symbol of their gender; for Thatcher, it was a weapon with which she “handbagged’ her opponents.

So , if this article is correct, times must have changed, because none of what worked for Thatcher has a chance of working with today’s modern American electorate (despite the fact that in so many ways she was cut from the same cloth as Reagan, an archetypal American leader).

It may be that one corollary of our demand for authenticity is that our leaders and representatives embrace their own gender:

She only has ten months to stop playing a political man to become a political woman, with all the risks that that might entail.

Read The Battle of Hillary Clinton (or “Just Be a Woman”) here on Watching America.com