HILLARY CLINTON, MOTHER IN CHIEF
The depiction of this child, alone and depressed, will pull at the heartstrings of any reader.
Although she is treated (relatively) well, her isolation from family has deprived her life of happiness.
Only in death can a slave be happy, for there she is with her family.
The depiction of this child, alone and depressed, will pull at the heartstrings of any reader.
Meet Hillary. She’s a mom.
But if you’ve been paying any attention to her presidential campaign, you probably already figured that out.
Nary an American fails to recognize the name Hillary Clinton. She was a First Lady who stood by a philandering husband, a senator in New York during 9/11, a Secretary of State who visited 112 countries during her tenure. And on top of all that, in 2008, she became the first woman to make a significant stab at becoming the President of the United States.
As ubiquitous as her name is Clinton’s reputation as one of the most trailblazing women of the twenty-first century. The fact that she’s running for president marks that she is not content with simply fulfilling the norms that have long been expected of American women. Since its origins, the United States has had an established set of mythologized gender spheres, whereby women have been prescribed a place tending house and children as their husbands venture into the world, solving problems and earning wages. Recent years especially have seen a gradual shift away from this ideology, yet in the face of progress, tradition persists; many still believe that men should engage with the public at large, while women live private lives centered on the needs of their family.
Clinton clearly does not fit this mold. Her political ambition, made famous (or perhaps infamous) through frequent commentary and parody, distinguishes her as an individual radically divorced from the idea that a woman’s place is in the home. But even as gender spheres have become more porous in the past several decades, American politics has remained a boys' club. Negotiating her way through a patriarchal system may have made Clinton the United States’ highest profile female politician, but it has come at the cost of her femininity. Reinforced by images in the media, Clinton has existed for many years in America’s collective consciousness as less a woman than a desexualized, closed-off shell of a being, someone to be ridiculed for shedding a tear, or to be imagined as an emasculating, Washington ball-buster.
So why is it that after building a reputation founded on promoting her success in a male dominated political culture and allowing herself to be denied of her femininity, all Hillary seems to want to do is remind us that she is a grandmother? Why do 71% of her 2016 campaign advertisements tell us, in one way or another, that she is a matriarch who has and will continue to fight for families like hers? Why is it that a woman who once infamously said, “I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession” is suddenly promoting herself as a figure of domesticity?
Because it might win her the presidency, that’s why.
While Hillary Clinton might be the first woman to take a legitimate shot at claiming the White House for herself, she is far from original in using motherhood as a means for promoting her politics. In fact, almost 180 years ago, female abolitionists were similarly using the fact that they were mothers to benefit their agendas and political arguments.
And guess what? They won.
Founded in 1833, the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society was originally created as an auxiliary to the male-dominated Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. After a few tenuous and unfulfilling years, women grew tired of their subsidiary role, and members of the B.F.A.S.S. boldly began taking a more active part in abolitionism. They took slaveholders to court, they petitioned Washington, and they even broke into a home to help an illegally quartered slave girl procure her freedom.
But due to the extraordinarily strict Victorian gender spheres of the time, women of the B.F.A.S.S. were harshly criticized for acting in such unladylike ways. Their lives were meant to be domestic; they were not meant to involve any sort of political activity, much less things as audacious as vigilante kidnappings of slaves from their master’s home. While afforded total jurisdiction over matters related to family and morality, women breached a deep-seated social contract the moment they set foot in the political arena. Their husbands and sons were the ones with the power to change the law, and it seemed that the best women could hope for was a chance to influence their male relatives to support more refined political ideologies.
Not content with simply remaining hopeful, however, female abolitionists created a new strategy for achieving their goals. Instead of staying in the domestic sphere, they were going to take the domestic sphere to the public.
Slavery was a violation of motherhood, they argued in The Liberty Bell gift books series, and therefore it must be put to an end. Published annually from 1839 to 1858, each edition of The Liberty Bell contained a variety of short pieces attesting to the evils of slavery. In the nineteenth century, women were expected to dabble only in “the lighter kinds of literature,” such as fiction, poetry, and essays. These were precisely the genres included in the series. By working within, rather than against, the gender constraints of writing, women were able to attract a significant audience, sell copies of the books at anti-slavery fairs, and raise money to support their cause.
While pieces in the collections varied in their content, approximately a third of them invoked motherhood as a vehicle to describe the evils of slavery. The series frequently depicted slave sales where mothers were ripped from their children, sold to faraway states and never to be seen again. Other pieces show children crying for their parents, imploring God why they lived in a world devoid of familial love and tenderness. Perhaps most perverse and shocking to white, middle class readers was that slavery made many black women wish that their children were dead, better off in Heaven than in America, enduring the terrors of the plantation.
Female abolitionists transformed slavery from a political issue into a moral one. How could women sit idly by while the country was consumed by a sin that
savagely warped the experiences of millions of mothers and children? Not only had female abolitionists gained support and sympathy for their cause, but they had done so by staying within the gendered rules of polite society. Had members of the B.F.A.S.S. continued in their earlier activities and in their violation of gender spheres, they would have been disregarded as radicals. Instead, by working within the confines of their gender roles, they maintained an image of respectability and thereby had wider appeal. That The Liberty Bell stayed in circulation for almost two decades proves the popularity of the series, and suggests its role in the abolitionist movement was not insignificant.
Female abolitionists played a part in politics well beyond what was expected of women at the time. They used motherhood as a way to connect to readers and elicit their sympathy—how could one not be moved after reading the horrors that slave mothers and their children endured? In fact, by using motherhood, abolitionists made their voices far louder than they could have done otherwise. At the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865, their battle proved worthwhile. Slavery was abolished.
There is no denying that the circumstances of abolitionists from the nineteenth century and those of Hillary Clinton in the modern day are strikingly different. Clinton is not working within Victorian gender spheres; politics have changed, at least nominally, to accommodate the ideas and ambitions of women. Clinton does not have to use motherhood to gain access to political debates like female abolitionists did. She's had a voice in politics for many years, and has in fact masked her femininity for much of her career in Washington. So while Clinton is clearly borrowing from the ideas of the past, she is not using them in the same way that abolitionists did. Instead, she has accommodated the idea of motherhood as a political device to suit her own context.
It’s no secret that Clinton’s hard-won reputation as a Washington doer has not come without a price. National polls report that while 58% of respondents felt that Clinton had strong leadership qualities, only 37% saw her as honest and trustworthy. Simply put, voters do not feel comfortable with the straight-laced, hard Hillary Clinton that they have come to know.
But voters might feel comfortable with a more maternal Hillary. They might feel more inclined to believe her commitment to families when she tells them about her work as First Lady to provide children with health care, or her goal of making higher education more affordable so parents can send their daughters and sons to college. They may trust her more when they see her tenderly converse with a young girl. They might not feel so threatened, and perhaps will even like her, when they hear her talk about her mom and see her hold her granddaughter in her arms.
Clinton’s use of motherhood, therefore, is not to give her a voice in politics, but instead to make her more agreeable to voters. It is important to keep in mind that Clinton’s campaign is ultimately about getting herself to the White House, rather than promoting an abstract, national cause. She does not speak on behalf of mothers without a voice, like abolitionists did. Unlike them, she does not need to create sympathy for slave mothers among white women. Instead, Clinton's use of motherhood is self-promotionary. That's not to say that she's insincere; based on her record of fighting for the rights of women and children, Clinton undoubtedly wants to help mothers and fulfill the promises she is making to them. But her main aim in talking so much about motherhood seems to be in creating kinship with female voters, in making them see that she's like them and that they can trust her. Furthermore, she is setting male voters at ease by portraying herself as first and foremost a mother, something many men still imagine should be the primary role of a woman.
While it’s discouraging to think that gender dynamics in the United States are still so unequal that a woman needs to remind voters of her maternal capabilities in order to win the presidency (especially because no male candidates feel the need to play up their merits as fathers), the fact that the Clinton campaign realizes this gives her a clearer path to the Oval Office. To win the presidency, a candidate needs to be likable. Mothers are likable, and Clinton has realized that emphasizing her role as one will give her the approachability and personality she has long seemed to lack.
Clinton is just the most recent inheritor in a legacy of women subverting sexism by using motherhood to suit the constraints of the society they live in. Abolitionists relied on motherhood as a way to enter political discourse; Clinton, on the other hand, uses it as a way to make herself appear softer and more appealing to voters. Both parties live in an America that has particular expectations about the way that women should behave. These norms should be debilitating obstacles to women’s success, but both abolitionists and Clinton figured out ways to use motherhood to manipulate these expectations to their political advantage. Talking about being mothers allows them to gain clout rather than lose it. This strategy worked for the abolitionists in 1865, and at the moment, it seems to be working for Clinton as well.
The Clinton of today is not the Clinton of the past. In the place of the woman from 2008, a better candidate, one more likely to win, has emerged. No, hard-ass Hillary isn’t entirely gone—she still rocks the pantsuit, she still refuses to back down from Republicans, and she still emphasizes her administrative experience in Washington. But people know Clinton is competent, and she sees that she doesn’t have to tell them that.
Instead, she’s reminding voters that she can be relatable and kind. She has raised a child, and knows the joys and struggles that come with that experience. She can sympathize with the everyday American woman. She’s a mother—and just like the women who came almost two centuries before her, she’s going to use that to get every ounce of support she can.
