For years I thought of my mother as a pathetic figure who had turned her back on feminism – until I saw the scorn heaped upon Clinton and realized my mom was a victim of her time

My mother stands in the kitchen wringing a dishrag between her hands as she watches Hillary Clinton on the national news; it’s another one of those spots about Clinton’s supposed “likability liability”, where a reporter wonders whether she is too wonkish or aggressive to contend against the Trump war machine. My mother watches the footage of Clinton with an intensity that surprises me: she never follows politics – news shows and debates are for my father while soap operas and Real Housewives are her domain.

“I hope Hillary beats Trump,” she says.

My father, from the family room, changes the channel. His tone has a hint of annoyance: “Could you please not talk about politics?”

With that, my mother turns back to the dishes.

I grew up in a household of “yes, dears”; a place where second-wave feminism never made it through the front door. My father was a breadwinner and a bully; my mother was a homemaker and master apologist. At 67 years old, my mother is only one year younger than Hillary Clinton. They were cohorts in the time of women’s lib, but Clinton lived the mission: smashing down obstacles to education and employment, forging a passion and purpose that didn’t hinge on making casseroles or wiping noses. My mother could be a case study from The Feminine Mystique. Growing up, I swore that I’d never be like her: Clinton was my heroine; she cared more about reforming healthcare than baking some damn cookies.

Clinton was my heroine; she cared more about reforming health care than baking some damn cookies

As a teenager, I remember watching my mother clear plates from the Thanksgiving dinner she’d spent all day preparing and pointedly ignoring her wordless plea for help in the kitchen. The world, as I saw it from my angsty adolescent perch, was divided into two types of women – the powerful and the pathetic – and I couldn’t fraternize with the enemy. If my mother sat in the back row at secretarial school, I would be at the top of my class in a master’s degree program. After all, the great work of feminism had cracked open opportunities that my mother had stupidly, lazily, not availed herself of. My hard work, and my force of will, would be rewarded. I’d never live under a man’s thumb.

But after I moved out and got a job, my fantasies of how I’d take on the world slowly ended. Knowing that the man in the cubicle next to mine was making more money for the same work, feeling small and afraid when I got on the late train alone after a long day, and enduring the pitying, withering looks from neighbors and colleagues who knew that I was 30, and “still” single – I could conceive, in abstract, of what my feminist heroes such as Hillary Clinton must’ve endured. Yet I still resented my mother all the more for hiding in the bunker of her dull, comfortable life in the suburbs. I couldn’t respect any woman without a few scars.

Then, the blitzkrieg of the 2016 election happened and I saw, for the first time, the true wreckage of the sexism my mother must’ve lived through. I was ready for Hillary criticisms, for conspiracy theories and jokes about cankles. But I wasn’t ready for the Republican frontrunner to crack wise about “blood coming out” of a woman reporter’s orifices, and gain in popularity. And I certainly wasn’t ready to see lefties I respected arguing that anyone who’d served as a senator for eight years, and as secretary of state for four years, could somehow be “unqualified” to be president. Seeing journalists chide Clinton for “shouting too much” when her male opponents on both sides would give Foghorn Leghorn a run for his money makes me understand why someone like my mother might be too afraid to step out of the kitchen, and into a bolder life.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘This understanding crystallized during the debates: fingers pointed, repeatedly, toward Clinton’s face; the booing and the constant talking over her – and the fact that she has to stand there, calmly, and take it, lest she be “too shrill”.’ Photograph: Edward M Pio Roda/CNN/EPA

This understanding crystallized during the debates: fingers pointed, repeatedly, toward Clinton’s face; the curt way she’s called “the secretary”; the booing and the constant talking over her – and the fact that she has to stand there, calmly, and take it, lest she be “too shrill” – makes me ache with rage. I remember the boss who told me to “be more positive” (AKA “smile more”) during a job performance review (the rest of my work “exceeded standards”) and the ex-boyfriend who said, in a not-kind way, that I “want too much in life”. I felt a sudden, inchoate longing for my mother.

I saw her life in context – being told that she was only smart enough to be “the secretary”; that appealing to men was paramount; and that being a good mother meant baking the damn cookies. Watching Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail is like stepping through a funhouse mirror: the overt sexism seems hopelessly insurmountable. How tiring it must be to have your ambitions mocked, your tone and your appearance policed, and how tempting it is smother all those hateful voices by pushing your head further into the sand. After a while, your strong will must go soft from lack of use.

My mother is a victim of her time. She’ll never possess the steeliness of Hillary Clinton, but this is not her fault – and it makes Clinton’s triumph more vital: because every state won and delegate counted isn’t just a step toward the presidency, it’s a victory lap for women like my mother, who could only dream of standing up to all the people who ever told them no.



My mother wants Hillary to beat Trump. I can’t guarantee that for her, but what I can do is tell my father that she can talk politics if she wants.