SMRs and AMRs

Saturday, June 07, 2008

What Hillary Won

By GAIL COLLINS
NYT

As the sun was sinking on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, the nation’s wounded feminists were burning up the Internet.

They vowed to write in Hillary’s name on their ballots in November; to wear “NObama” T-shirts all summer; to “de-register” as Democrats. One much-circulated e-mail proposed turning June 3, the day Barack Obama claimed the nomination, as a permanent day of mournful remembrance “like the people in Ireland remember the Famine.”

“The passion is very intense,” said Muriel Fox, a retired public relations executive in New York who was one of the founding members of the National Organization for Women. “It’s very much a feeling that Hillary has not been respected.”

Feel free to make fun of them. The women of Fox’s generation ought to be used to it by now. The movement they started was the first fight for equality in which the opposition deployed ridicule as its most lethal weapon. They won the ban on sex discrimination in employment by letting a conservative congressman propose it as a joke. When they staged their historic march in New York in 1970, they heard themselves described as “braless bubble-heads” by a U.S. senator and were laughed at on the evening news.

They had always seen a woman in the White House as the holy grail. Now their disappointment is compounded by the feeling that Clinton’s candidacy was not even appreciated as a noble try.

(Continued here.)

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