How Hillary Clinton Made Women’s History
A misty-eyed Hillary Clinton strode onto the stage at Brooklyn’s Navy Yard Tuesday evening, shortly after clinching the New Jersey primary, with promising leads in two other states, and she did something that she has often been loathe to do: She fully, unselfconsciously celebrated the historic nature of her campaign. Clinton jokingly promised not to smash the (partial) glass ceiling she and her supporters were standing under, before thanking them for helping her become the first female nominee of a major political party.
Technically, Clinton made history Monday evening, reaching the 2,383 delegates needed to secure a spot at the top of the Democratic ticket, according to the Associated Press. The Clinton campaign was caught a bit off-guard by the early announcement.
But they were prepared on Tuesday, with a video that ran before her speech featuring archival footage of women suffragists marching — she would later tell the audience her mother was born the day that 19th Amendment was ratified, 95 years and three days earlier — plus footage of feminist icons like Shirley Chisholm, Dolores Huerta and Gloria Steinem. In one corner at the Navy Yard, supporters held up large cutout letters that spelled “HISTORY.” Even her Twitter avatar was updated to display her face between the words “History made.”
The moment was particularly striking given that throughout her political career, Clinton has grappled with whether and how much to highlight her gender — it can be a fine line to walk between exciting voters about her historic achievements and turning voters off. A 2015 EMILY’s List report urged her to “[d]e-emphasize the ‘first’ talk.
“They already know she’d be the first woman president… we don’t get anything by reminding them,” it said.
She rarely mentioned her gender the first time she ran for president, in 2008. This time around, she’s been somewhat more upfront about it, but wary at times of overemphasizing its importance. “At the end of the day, being the first woman president can only take you so far,” she said in a recent interview with New York magazine. “What have I done that can actually produce positive results in somebody’s life? Do we have more jobs? Are people’s incomes going up? Have we made progress on the minimum wage? What have we gotten done on equal pay? What are we doing on early childhood?”
That view is shared by many of the young women whose support she’s hoping to earn. Polls show she enjoys a huge advantage in women voters over Donald Trump, though throughout the primary, most younger women have broken for Bernie Sanders. Many of those women don’t see a woman president as being so out of reach; it’s going to happen, so it doesn’t necessarily have to be her, the thinking goes.
The history of women running for the highest offices in the land can help put that thinking in context. The first woman to run for president was Victoria Woodhull, in 1872, nearly 50 years before women across the country would be given the right to vote. Woodhull, a fortune teller, stockbroker and editor of her own newspaper, published a column announcing her intention to run in the New York Herald.
“I am quite well aware that in assuming this position I shall evoke more ridicule than enthusiasm at the outset,” Woodhull wrote two years before she was formally nominated by the Equal Rights Party. “But this is an epoch of sudden changes and startling surprises. What may appear absurd today will assume a serious aspect tomorrow.”
It took another 144 years for the idea of a woman president to be taken seriously enough that she could clinch a major party’s nomination, but Woodhull’s words — particularly about the lack of enthusiasm that would greet a woman’s candidacy — were prescient.
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