Big Girls Don't Cry

The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

Rebecca Traister

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781439150290
• eBook ISBN: 9781439154878
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Social Sciences

Journalist and Salon writer Rebecca Traister investigates the 2008 presidential election and its impact on American politics, women and cultural feminism. Examining the role of women in the campaign, from Clinton and Palin to Tina Fey and young voters, Traister confronts the tough questions of what it means to be a woman in today's America. The 2008 campaign for the presidency reopened some of the most fraught American conversations—about gender, race and generational difference, about sexism on the left and feminism on the right—difficult discussions that had been left unfinished but that are crucial to further perfecting our union. Though the election didn't give us our first woman president or vice president, the exhilarating campaign was nonetheless transformative for American women and for the nation. In Big Girls Don't Cry, her electrifying, incisive and highly entertaining first book, Traister tells a terrific story and makes sense of a moment in American history that changed the country's narrative in ways that no one anticipated.Throughout the book, Traister weaves in her own experience as a thirtysomething feminist sorting through all the events and media coverage—vacillating between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and questioning her own view of feminism, the women's movement, race and the different generational perspectives of women working toward political parity. Electrifying, incisive and highly entertaining, Big Girls Don't Cry offers an enduring portrait of dramatic cultural and political shifts brought about by this most historic of American contests.

1 HILLARY IS US

IT’S EASY TO forget that at the start it was feminists who weren’t wild about Hillary Clinton.

I don’t mean at the start of Hillary. Back in 1993, when she marched into the White House with her ill-tended hair, barren cookie trays and big ideas about health care, feminists thought her the bee’s knees, the elephant’s instep, the best thing to happen to the executive branch since Eleanor Roosevelt.

I’m talking about more than a decade later, when it was clear that Hillary was locked and loaded to do what Eleanor could not have done: she was the one who was going to make a go at the presidency, the one they’d been waiting for. You’d have thought that women who had dedicated their lives to improving professional and political prospects for themselves and their daughters would have been beside themselves at the prospect of a solid Democratic female presidential candidate. But the intervening thirteen years had made things between feminists and Hillary Clinton considerably more fraught.

In 2006 the country was fired up for midterms that would halt Republican control of Congress and bring us one election cycle closer to a new Democratic ticket. As the possibility that Clinton was going to jump into the 2008 presidential race became increasingly distinct, it often seemed as though feminists were more distraught about it than the right-wing louts who’d been pressing their “Iron My Shirt” shirts since 2001.

That spring I attended a benefit for the Women’s Campaign Forum, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to putting prochoice women in political office. It was a crowd of monied, Botoxed, electorally enthralled dames who, in the popular imagination of the time, should have had “Hillary ’08” mown into their Hamptons house topiary, if not their bikini lines. But on that night, a few months before the election that would secure Clinton her second term as the junior senator from New York, discussion of her future beyond New York was as cool as the evening breeze. “I like her a lot more than my wife does!” an affable WCF supporter was telling me, mock sotto voce. His wife heard him and sidled up, eyeballing my reporter’s notepad. “We both love Hillary,” the woman corrected with crisp dishonesty. “I just hope she can catch fire.”

It seemed a neat summation of how many politically engaged women were feeling about the woman poised to come closer than any before her to gaining Oval Office entrance. Clinton was on the brink, and though many of her would-be cheerleaders weren’t eager to say it out loud, they were secretly hoping she would just catch fire. Literally.

Though it is often cited as the period during which Clinton’s self-assuredness created the resentments that would later provoke lusty axe wielding, it remains remarkable, miraculous really, that there was a span of months, nestled between two centuries of uninterrupted white male presidential power and one long Democratic primary tussle, during which the nomination of Hillary Rodham Clinton to the Democratic ticket seemed inevitable. Not just possible or probable: inevitable. One of the strangest things about this moment, for which Clinton would pay dearly, was that when her victory was presumptive many American feminists did not cheer her on, but shrugged their shoulders, curled their lips in distaste, or simply kept their distance.

* * *

In my years writing for Salon I had witnessed the feminist hunger for a female president when it was still comparatively abstract. In 2005 I covered a premiere party for Commander in Chief, the short-lived network television show in which Geena Davis played the president. The program was a cliché-studded mess, chock-full of menopause jokes and aphorisms most frequently found in forwarded emails. (“If Moses had been a woman leading the Jews in the desert, she’d have stopped and asked for directions. They’d have been in Israel in a week!”) The party for the show, hosted by the White House Project at Caroline’s Comedy Club, left no Girl Power signifier unturned; chocolate bars were handed out while Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” played. The hokeyness of the affair made it all the more embarrassing that, at the moment in the otherwise dreadful pilot when the heroine entered the House Chamber to the familiar words “Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States” and the imposing Geena Davis—Thelma!—walked through the door, an unironic chill shot through the crowd.

Looking around at the gathering of mostly over-fifty women, some of whom had begun to sniffle, it dawned on me that some probably hadn’t been sure they’d live long enough to see this, even on television. Gloria Steinem confirmed this realization later in the evening, when she took the stage and asserted, “One of the advantages of being an old person is that you see how far we’ve come.” Steinem also hit on the thing that gave the evening its undeniable frisson: part of what made this silly program moving was the unspoken awareness that women were, for the first time, within striking distance. “We are so ready,” Steinem told the crowd.

A year and a half later it was clear that although feminists may have been ready for the idea of a female president, they were not so ready for the candidate who was actually going to run. Even Steinem wasn’t exactly throwing herself behind Clinton. In early 2007 she announced in a New York Times op-ed that she was supporting both Clinton and her newly hatched competitor, Barack Obama. The op-ed was very warm toward Clinton, but not a ringing endorsement. Far more damning were critics like Susan Douglas, who described the mood in a piece for In These Times: “We sat around the dinner table, a group of 50-something progressive feminists, talking to a friend from England about presidential politics. We were all for Hillary, weren’t we, he asked. Hillary? We hated Hillary. He was taken aback. Weren’t we her base? Wasn’t she one of us? Why did we hate Hillary?”

Why did they hate Hillary? How had the candidate contracted this social disease, and why was it manifesting symptoms at such a crucial historical moment?

Perhaps women demanded authenticity from Clinton in a way that they might not have in another candidate, male or female. Ann Douglas, a Columbia University cultural historian who had profiled Clinton for Vogue in 1998, told me in 2006 that because of Hillary’s long time in the public eye and her history as a flashpoint for issues political and personal, women saw—or more to the point, didn’t see—in her what they wanted to see in themselves. She referred to an old Tony Curtis anecdote about a fan who approached him and asked, “Are you who I think I am?” It was the same with Clinton, Douglas said. “We say, ‘I want her to hold up my own ideals of myself. I want her to be who I think I am.’”

Here was a woman who had been vastly overqualified for the traditional role of first lady, making feminist fantasy flesh by attempting a return to the White House as president. She wasn’t the kind of woman you’d have guessed might be the first, some shellacked Republican whose politics made Margaret Thatcher look like Barbara Jordan. No, Clinton was a Democrat, with a lifetime of advocating on behalf of children’s welfare, women’s equality and universal health care; she was a woman whom her spirited conservative detractors had made the standard-bearer for feminism. To hear right-wing men tell the story, left-leaning women were already running through the streets, burning Bella Abzug’s bra in ecstasy!

But they were not. By 2006 the discontent that some establishment feminists felt about Clinton’s impending run had become the undercurrent of many political conversations. At a September awards reception for the Center for the Advancement of Women, I asked a smiling Jane Fonda what she thought of the idea of Hillary running for president. Fonda tensed; her grin faded. It was a celebratory, lady-happy night at the Waldorf Astoria; later the Washington comedy troupe The Capitol Steps would perform a My Fair Lady parody called “Wouldn’t It Be Hillary?” Here were all these women celebrating advancement. And here was this unpleasant question. “I don’t put so much importance on candidates,” Fonda said, though two days later she would travel to Sweden to stump for female parliamentary contenders. “I want to spend my time and energy getting women to the polls. I would never vote for a candidate just because she was a woman, because we have had plenty of female presidents and prime ministers where I would rather have had a male feminist.” A few months later Fonda would refine this point in an interview with LA Weekly, allowing, “It may be that a feminist, progressive man would do better in the White House than a ventriloquist for the patriarchy with a skirt and a vagina.” (She later insisted that she hadn’t been referring to Hillary specifically.)

* * *

When America first met her in 1992 Hillary Rodham Clinton looked like what she was: a working mother. She had recently chucked her Coke-bottle glasses but still sported headbands and weird amounts of ineptly applied makeup. Why should it have been otherwise? Clinton was a busy woman when her husband ran for president. Mind-bogglingly she would be the first first lady in American history to have maintained a full-time career outside her husband’s political life prior to his presidency. In short, Clinton was the first candidate for the job of first lady to have a life that reflected post-second-wave America and the many working women who made their careers and raised their families here.

“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life,” she famously said. She was responding to reporters at a Chicago diner who pressed her about Jerry Brown’s charges that her law profits conflicted with her husband’s political career. Her penitent follow-up was never as widely remembered. “I’m a big believer in women making the choices that are right for them,” she told the reporters who’d been herded out of the diner as soon as she dropped the cookie bomb. “The work that I have done as a professional, as a public advocate, has been aimed at trying to assure that women can make the choices they should make—whether it’s full-time career, full-time motherhood, or some combination.… [That] is a generational change.”

Amy Wilentz wrote about that famous remark, “What’s wrong with baking cookies, Hillary, huh? Are you too good for that? But she did think she was too good for that, and so did hundreds of thousands of us. We were made for things that were better than baking.” Hillary’s statement wasn’t radical for a certain class of professional women who had built careers in the 1970s and 1980s. But it was radical to hear it expressed by a woman whose task it was to win the hearts of American voters, some of whom had not yet adjusted to the idea of a woman who didn’t consider tending home and hearth her highest calling.

“I got hundreds of letters about ‘cookies and tea,’” Clinton wrote in her memoir, Living History. “One letter referred to me as the Antichrist, and another said I was an insult to American motherhood.” Clinton understood her position: “While Bill talked about social change, I embodied it. I had my own opinions, interests and profession. For better or worse, I was outspoken. I represented a fundamental change in the way women functioned in our society.” Alluding to the many times during that 1992 campaign that she was called a Rorschach test for the American people, Clinton maintained that neither the devotion nor the virulent rage she inspired was about her, but rather was about the still recent rupture in the American social fabric that she represented: “I had been turned into a symbol for women of my generation.”

Everyone soon learned that Clinton had not changed her name after marrying her big-pawed law school swain, at least not until 1982, when advisors determined that her refusal to add her husband’s last name to her own had cost Bill Clinton his second term in the Arkansas governor’s mansion two years earlier. The sacrifice of her maiden name in the interest of her husband’s political future always seemed to me to shed valuable light on Hillary and what she would eventually become. Whenever people claimed that she was a born shape-shifter, that political chameleonism was written into her genetic code, I would think of that last name and her protracted insistence on keeping it independent. She hadn’t wanted to be Hillary Clinton; she wanted to be Hillary Rodham. When faced with the assertion that doing it her way would result in her husband’s loss, or at least blame for her husband’s loss, she made the change. But it was a compromise, not a concession: she became Hillary Rodham Clinton. The question of her name would return, and on the campaign trail in 1992 it forced her to begin to grasp that although she “had worked full-time during [her] marriage to Bill and valued the independence and identity that work provided,” she was now “solely ‘the wife of,’ an odd experience.” Clinton described opening a box of stationery she’d ordered; embossed across the top was “Hillary Clinton.” “Evidently someone on Bill’s staff decided that it was more politically expedient to drop ‘Rodham,’ as if it were no longer part of my identity,” she wrote, adding that she quickly ordered new stationery. But by that point, hers was a lost name.

There were still plenty of ways Clinton asserted her independence from hoary femme couverte practices, including her 1992 campaign trail claim, “[I’m not] some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.” This was a gutsy thing to say. The fury with which the comment was greeted reflected a country unused to the idea that women are not obligated to stay in bad marriages and support their mates. It was the kind of statement that made millions of women, who may never before have identified with a political wife, look up at the television and take notice.

To many of those women Hillary Clinton was the real deal: smart and driven, with good politics. A Goldwater Republican kid who’d turned left at Wellesley, she gave a graduation speech so feisty that she received a seven-minute standing ovation and was featured in Life magazine as a student leader. She went to Yale Law School and worked for abused kids at Yale-New Haven Hospital, did research related to Walter Mondale’s senate investigation into the treatment of migrant workers, and campaigned for George McGovern in Texas. She spent a summer working for the radical lawyer Robert Treuhaft, monitored the Black Panther trials for civil rights abuses and was one of a handful of young women on the impeachment inquiry staff that advised the House Judiciary Committee during its Watergate investigation. Clinton specialized in children’s rights and in 1974 famously compared kids’ legal rights to other unjust “dependency relationships,” citing “marriage, slavery and the Indian reservation system.” She would later be raked over the coals for aligning the institutions of marriage and slavery, but her point was legally and historically dead-on. Clinton was a rigorous social and political thinker.

In 1974 she made the loaded choice to give up her promising career in Washington to follow her boyfriend back to his Arkansas home, where he was planning to run for the U.S. House of Representatives. Her friend Sara Ehrman recalled the road trip the two women took together from Washington to Arkansas, during which Ehrman tried to persuade Hillary that she was making a terrible error; when they entered Fayetteville, Arkansas, they saw football fans hanging from lampposts making Razorback hog calls. A Washington Post Magazine piece from 1999 described Ehrman’s realization “that her beloved Hillary Rodham, her high-powered hope for the future, was about to settle in a town full of frat boys wearing pig hats.” “That,” Ehrman told the Post, “is when I started to cry.”

Clinton found a way not only to live her life in Arkansas, but to make herself heard over the “Woo Pig Sooie!” chorus. She became the second female faculty member at the law school of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. She cofounded Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families and was appointed by Jimmy Carter to the board of directors for the Legal Services Corporation, which she was the first woman to chair. Garry Wills would write in 1992 that Hillary Rodham was “one of the more important scholar-activists of the last two decades.” As the first female partner at the Rose Law Firm in the years preceding her husband’s run for the presidency she was twice rated one of America’s most influential lawyers by the National Law Journal. Chelsea Clinton was born in 1980, and Hillary scored an Arkansas Mother of the Year award in 1984, an honor that might have surprised those who deemed her the cookie-eschewing Antichrist eight years later.

Hillary Rodham Clinton was a boomer lady of the left, successfully balancing work and life, and many women just plain admired her. As the late great columnist Molly Ivins joked when Bill Clinton was traversing the campaign trail in May 1992, “What this country needs is a candidate half as good as his wife.” The filmmaker and feminist writer Nora Ephron, who had covered the nomination of Shirley Chisholm for president in 1972 and had attended Wellesley a few years before Hillary, marveled to Newsday in 1993, “Did you ever think that anybody like us would be in that job?… She has a career and a child and a husband, and she’s doing it.” In the same interview Ephron said, “I love her so completely that, honestly, she would have to burn down the White House before I would say anything bad about her.”

Hillary didn’t burn down the White House, though tabloids claimed that she broke a lamp or two in fights with her husband. But her tenure on Pennsylvania Avenue did not seal her place in the hearts of the American public. People who liked her liked her a lot. When she entered the White House her favorability ratings were higher than those of either Laura or Barbara Bush. But those who didn’t like her really hated her. Bill Clinton had crowed about giving the nation a “two for the price of one” presidency, but the nation was not grateful. For those women who saw in Hillary a reflection of their own values and achievements, it was startling to witness the contempt that she inspired.

The hammering of Hillary was unrelenting. She was a bitch, a witch; she had big thighs, fat ankles. She was Shillary, Shrillary, Hellary Rotten Clinton. Together she and her husband were “Billary.” Republicans sifted through her every business deal, tried to nail her on Whitewater and tie her to the death of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster. She was mocked bitterly after reports that she was having imaginary conversations with the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt. By 1996 Nora Ephron was telling a graduating class at Wellesley, “Don’t underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back.… Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you.”

What juiced many of the most damaging early attacks on Hillary was her role in the failed effort to pass a well-intentioned and dismally received plan for universal health care. She and her husband, like many before them, understood that America’s health care system was broken and needed to be rebuilt. Just after taking office in 1993, Bill announced that Hillary, who had led a successful effort to reform Arkansas’s education system, would lead a task force to overhaul the national health system. Although her appointment provoked some early grumbling, her work initially earned positive reviews. Her lengthy testimony before five congressional committees in September 1993, weeks before the legislation was formally presented to Congress, was widely hailed as brilliant, though she would later write that she suspected the accolades were the product of “talking dog syndrome,” a riff on Samuel Johnson’s comment that a woman preaching was like a dog walking on its hind legs. “Some people are still amazed that any woman… can hold her own under pressure and be articulate and knowledgeable,” Clinton wrote. “The dog can talk!”

Regardless, Hillary’s barking testimony was soon forgotten; the Health Security Act was a political disaster. The reasons for Clinton’s health care belly flop were varied and depended on who you asked. Many felt that the complex plan reached too far and too left, pushing for limits on spending and coverage requirements that the public and business employers were not ready to accept. Republicans knew that they could not afford to let health care pass and hand middle-class voters to the Democrats for generations; Republican strategist Bill Kristol had told them as much in a memo that urged them to kill the bill in any form. Both Clintons suffered from a hunted-animal, anti-Beltway complex; their early work on health care was done mostly in secret with their friend and business consultant Ira Magaziner, who did not have many W...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1: Hillary is Us
• 2: Spousal Supports
• 3: Campaigning While Female
• 4: Five Days in January
• 5: The Most Restricting Forces
• 6: All About Their Mothers
• 7: Boys on the Bus
• 8: Things to Do in Denver if You’re Female
• 9: Enter Palin
• 10: Pop Culture Warriors
• 11: The Next Wave is Here
• 12: The Aftermath
• Acknowledgments
• Note on the Author’s Use of Her Previously Published Work
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author