In a must-read piece in the Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Kaufman and Carol Hymowitz provide a compelling snapshot of the feminist consciousness raising project that IS Hillary Rodham Clinton's bid for the presidency. The piece includes depressing facts about the dismal status of women's equality. And it is a narrative of the reaction of women to the ongoing malevolent national sexist backlash to the very idea of a woman as Commander-in-Chief. You should read it all, but here are some snippets:
Valerie Benjamin, a human-resources manager for a consulting firm here, was driving to work recently in her red minivan with a Hillary bumper sticker when a man pulled up alongside and rolled down his window. "You can be for Hillary all you want," he shouted, "but there is no way that thing is going to become president."
"I couldn't believe this guy was shouting at me in my car," says Ms. Benjamin. "I am continuously surprised by the level of venom."
An hour away in Indiana, Pa., a working-class town, Jill Fiore, who teaches part-time at a local college and has a doctorate in English, says she constantly has to remind students to call her "Dr. Fiore" -- the same way they address male professors -- rather than "Jill" or "Mrs. Fiore." Unable to get a full-time college teaching job, she made just $8,000 last year cobbling together part-time work, and she recently decided to open a yoga business.
"The sexism aimed at Hillary is astounding me," she says. "We want to let our daughters know that we can be anything. It's a lie. If even Hillary Clinton can't make it, what chance do we have?"
Exit polls indicate that Sen. Clinton has run strongest among working-class women and women in low-paying professional jobs such as nursing and teaching -- women who work on their feet, who often have faced wage discrimination and have struggled economically.
Jean Yarnal, who has worked in local government for 41 years, says she was unnerved recently when a man she knew came into her office and asked for help with a zoning issue. When talk turned to politics, she says, he denounced Sen. Clinton as a "lesbian" and used several slurs. Ms. Yarnal says she didn't respond, but thought to herself, "That's the last time I do you a favor."
"It's like the feelings against women are getting stronger," says Ms. Yarnal. "It's like men are saying, 'We want to put you women in your place -- watch out, don't go too fast.' "
Katherine Putnam, president of Package Machinery Co., a West Springfield, Mass., equipment manufacturer, recalls that at a lunch she attended recently, a group of male chief executives "started talking about what an awful b---- Hillary was and how they'd never vote for her." She says she kept quiet. "I didn't want to jeopardize my relationship with them," she says. "But their remarks were a clear reminder that although I could sit there eating and drinking with them, and work with them, instinctively their reaction to me isn't positive."
"No one can say that the male vote is all gender-based," says Beth Brooke, global vice chair of strategy and regulatory affairs at Ernst & Young, and one of four women on the company's 21-person America's Executive Board. "But it reinforces among women of my generation the feeling that every day we walk in the door [at work], we are walking into an environment that is still biased. I'm feeling a tension I don't normally feel."
Some women in town say they don't bring up politics at work. "The consensus in my office is that women are too emotional and won't make a good president," says Terri George, a paralegal in a law office.
On March 5, the day after Sen. Clinton won Ohio, Jackie LeViseur, a fund-raiser at Youngstown State University, arrived at her office to find her female colleagues, mostly secretaries, high-fiving each other and cheering in the hall. The men, most of them bosses, remained in their offices, looking, says Ms. LeViseur, like their team had lost the football game.
Heather Arnet, a Clinton supporter who runs a Pittsburgh organization that lobbies for more women on public commissions and corporate boards, recently surveyed the Internet and found more than 50 anti-Hillary Clinton sites on Facebook. One of them, entitled "Hillary Clinton Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich," had more than 38,000 members.
"What if one of these 38,000 guys is someone you, as a woman, have to go to and negotiate a raise?" she asks.
via Gawker: "Yes, men are going to start resisting equal rights for women. And that's a woman's fault too."
Hillary Clinton Feminist Politics Barack Obama Democratic Primary Sexist News Gender Democrats Misogyny A-List Bloggers Hillary Hating
