photo by WBUR

Quite a few feminist activists are not supporting Hillary Clinton in her bid for the presidency. And that may seem odd, given that she's the first viable woman candidate to run for the White House. She remains highly suspect to her cohort: middle- and upper-middle-class educated and professional white women over 40 years old.

Rebecca Traister gives her own reason why she's not supporting her:

Unlike its sister gem, "I'm not a feminist, but ..." (an utterance that nearly always gives away the fact that its speaker is in fact a feminist), the Hillary disavowal, in my case, has been true: I really am not a Hillary Clinton supporter. A feminist by trade, I have wished that I could get behind Clinton, a woman I admired when she first arrived in the White House 15 years ago. But there has been nothing in her steady, ineluctable move to the center that I could embrace; I understood why she did it, but it cost her my support.

And Frances Kissling states her own reason:

The sad fact is that Clinton has felt compelled to run as a stereotypical male. In her own mind it is only a certain kind of man who is qualified to be president and she will be that man: tough on everything from war, flag burning, kids' access to video games, illegal immigrants and Palestinians. She has missed the opportunity to talk about what it really means for women to be equal in this country. She has shown no interest in using her extensive international experience to push for more women in party leadership, state legislatures and even the Senate. A woman candidate who considered her gender a strength (as opposed to something she needed to overcome) would announce a series of measures specifically designed to ensure that women's needs and rights were at the forefront of her agenda.

In 30 Ways of Looking at Hillary, a recently published anthology in which thirty well-known women writers reflect on the candidate, Susan Morrison (who edited the book) says:

As I talked with women about their reactions to Hillary, some themes came up again and again. Many women were divided within themselves as to how they feel about her, and I noticed a familiar circle of guilt: these women believe they should support Hillary as a matter of solidarity. But, because they expect her to be different from (that is, better than) the average male politician, she invariably disappoints them; then they feel guilty about their ambivalence. Some feel competitive with her. Having wearily resigned themselves to the idea that "having it all" is too much to hope for, they view Hillary as a rebuke: how did she manage to pull it off—or, at least, to appear to pull it off? Other women say they want to like her but are disturbed by the anti-feminist message inherent in the idea of the first woman president getting to the White House on her husband's coattails.

All these reasons more or less span the spectrum of feminist reaction to Hillary Clinton, but perhaps her decision to stay with her husband during the Monica Lewinsky scandal seems to be at the core of why she's highly suspect to feminists.

And she has also been accused, by metonymy, of throwing highly accomplished women she had been close to under the bus during her husband's first term in the White House: Lani Guinier; Marian Wright Edelman; Zoe Baird; and Kimba Wood, among others. In fact, during the campaign for that first term, a reporter's question to her more or less captured her reputation as a polarizing figure in contemporary American politics: "You know, some people think of you as an inspiring female attorney mother, and other people think of you as the overbearing yuppie wife from hell," the reporter said. "How would you describe yourself?"

This last question is quite apt and cogent: Over fifty books have attempted to scrutinize her (the most recent cited above), but she remains unknowable and inscrutable, forever elusive even to those who are supposed to be close to her. “I’m a Rorschach test,” Clinton herself once told a reporter, meaning the way people project into her their own preconceptions and obsessions, and how they see whatever they want to see in her. The most interesting point for me about Hillary Rodham Clinton is that in spite of all these books about her, she has managed to retain control over her own narrative, has managed to elude all the frames and grids people have constructed for her.

(Biodun Iginla)