The Unique Way Hillary Clinton Talks About Women
Last night, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton didn’t so much play the gender card as simply show up on the debate stage a woman. What a difference it highlighted between her and her opponent. And how incredible it was to hear a female candidate talk about women’s issues not as abstractions, but as deeply personal, as fundamentally normal, and just as universal as men’s experiences.
That Clinton is the first woman to be nominated as a presidential contender by a major American party would be notable for its symbolic value alone. But Clinton has shown, time and again, that she isn’t a same-old politician who just happens to be a woman; she doesn’t adhere to the same-old views held by so many white men; she doesn’t come from the same-old starting point. At last night’s debate, that was clear right out of the gate, when Clinton asserted that “the Supreme Court should represent all of us.” The “us,” she said, included women and the LGBT community - groups that together make up a majority of the United States but are so often cast as “them.”
And she was only getting started. One of the most poignant moments of the debate was when moderator Chris Wallace brought up abortion rights. Trump bumbled through some of the usual anti-abortion talking points, even suggesting that women cavalierly have abortions at nine months - something that doesn’t happen. “If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby,” Trump said. He refused to say whether he wanted Roe v. Wade overturned wholesale, instead claiming he would appoint anti-abortion justices and the issue would go back to the states.
Clinton, visibly irritated, quickly moved from the standard rhetoric on choice and women’s rights to stories of women themselves. Trump’s claim that abortions happen at nine months, Clinton said, was false “scare rhetoric.” But yes, she conceded, some women do have abortions late into their pregnancies - often because something has gone tragically wrong. “You should meet with some of the women that I have met with, women I have known over the course of my life,” Clinton said. “This is one of the worst possible choices that any woman and her family has to make. And I do not believe the government should be making it.” She also touched on Trump’s comments, early in his campaign, that if abortion were illegal, women who end pregnancies should get some form of punishment. “You know, I’ve had the great honor of traveling across the world on behalf of our country,” Clinton said. “I’ve been to countries where governments either forced women to have abortions, like they used to do in China, or forced women to bear children, like they used to do in Romania. And I can tell you: The government has no business in the decisions that women make with their families in accordance with their faith, with medical advice. And I will stand up for that right.”
Too often, abortion is discussed as a moral or religious issue, the central question being where life begins. The woman is routinely erased. Clinton shifted that narrative, focusing instead on abortion as women actually experience it: not as a philosophical debate, but as a very real and often necessary medical response to a pregnancy that isn’t wanted or, because of medical complications or heartbreaking circumstances, simply cannot be. The decision, Clinton said over and over, has to be a woman’s, not a government’s. Notably, in his answer to Wallace’s abortion question, Trump didn’t say the word “woman” once.
And Clinton didn’t relegate “women’s issues” to questions specifically about women’s rights. Wallace asked both candidates about their economic plans, and Clinton went down a laundry list of ideas: clean energy, fighting climate change, raising the minimum wage, improving infrastructure, helping small businesses. “And I sure do want to make sure women get equal pay for the work we do,” she said. Not the work they do – the work we do. It was a phrasing no previous major party presidential contender could have uttered.
When Trump talked about women, it was with disdain or dismissal. “These women - the woman on the plane, the - I think they want either fame or her [Clinton’s] campaign did it,” he said about the nine women who now have accused him of sexual assault. He spit out the phrase “these women” twice, like the words were acid.
“Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger,” Clinton said in response. “He goes after their dignity, their self-worth, and I don’t think there is a woman anywhere who doesn’t know what that feels like.” She’s right: Most women do know exactly what that feels like, including Clinton herself. That she herself has experienced the kind of sexist belittlement so many women face made her words all the more powerful. And they make her positions on the slew of issues that impact women all the more potent: She doesn’t see women as an interest group or people who are valuable because of their relationships to others - the position so many male politicians take when they cast women as mothers, wives, and daughters in need of protection - or “others” in any way. She sees women as women. She’s one of us.
“Nobody has more respect for women than I do,” Trump claimed, to audience laughter. “Nobody.” But the only other times he even used the word “women” in the debate was when he was saying Saudi Arabia treats women poorly - a point he made not out of personal concern, but as a gotcha comment about the Clinton Foundation donations - and when he mentioned “our policemen and women are disrespected” - a concern not for women specifically, but for law enforcement generally. And, of course, there was the moment he called Clinton “such a nasty woman.” Women, in Trump’s debate rhetoric, were largely “those women” who were accusing him of assault, women overseas who Clinton allegedly doesn’t care about, and the “nasty woman” challenging him. And of course the women he respects more than anyone - women who went otherwise unmentioned in the course of a 90-minute debate.
Clinton didn’t have to claim that she has more respect for women than anyone because it’s evident she respects women - she is one, and she folds her own experience into her advocacy and her positions. Plenty of men have been great advocates for women’s rights, but without women at the table - without a woman at the head of the table - the promise of gender equality can’t be fully realized. For too long, the way women experience the world and how that shapes our collective consciousness and which issues we prioritize has all been cast as a kind of minority view, deviating from the standard, rational, and more important male one. Last night, Clinton spoke not just as a politician, but as a female politician, with a quiet insistence that living every day as an American woman wasn’t some divergent factional existence, but normal, a way of seeing the world that must be folded into our political universe. Unlike every politician who has been on the presidential debate stage before her, she was able to talk about “women’s issues” not as ideas or special interests, but as realities, discussed exactly as women live them. When you’re so used to hearing your experiences discussed in the third person - and many women, myself among them, are used to that - it’s refreshing and a little startling, in the best way, to suddenly find yourself referred to as part of a collective “us,” especially by a person in a powerful position that has always been occupied by men.
This is what having more women in power does: It normalizes being female. That’s no small thing in a country with more than 200 years of uninterrupted male executive leadership, where for more than half of our country’s existence women couldn’t vote, and where never before has there been a woman in Clinton’s current position. Of course her opponent, who she is trouncing handily, thinks she’s nasty - women everywhere know that feeling too. But finally, we saw ourselves and our experiences reflected up on the national stage. Women in power may not be the new normal quite yet, and even a Clinton presidency wouldn’t usher in an era of completed feminism and perfect female representation. But last night, we got a taste of what it would be like to have a woman in our country’s highest position of power. For the many of us who have spent our whole lives hearing men talk about us, seeing a woman talk about actually being one of us was thrilling - and not nasty at all.
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