Hillary Clinton isn’t a feminist; she is just politically ambitious

As the presidential election campaign in the United States heats up, the question of whether America is ready for a female president has arisen, given that Hillary Clinton is a serious contender in the race.

This question has become even more pertinent as one of the front-runners in the Republican Party is the misogynistic, racist, xenophobic and narcissistic Donald Trump, who has turned his campaign into a C-grade reality TV show, complete with swear words and derogatory names for women.

Surprisingly, Hillary Clinton’s candidacy has divided, rather than united, women. Younger women, it appears, prefer the other Democratic Party candidate, the left-leaning, anti-war Bernie Sanders, whose popularity seems to be rising.

Older feminists who are in Hillary’s age-group, such as the iconic Gloria Steinem, are supporting her simply because she is a woman, as they believe it is time that the world’s only superpower had a woman at the helm.

However, many younger women have refused to buy this argument, not because they do not believe in gender equality, but because they are not convinced that having a “token” woman in the White House is enough to bring about a significant change in the current world order.

It is these women who interest me the most, because they have clearly inherited a world where the big gender wars have already been waged and where a robust women’s movement in the 1960s and ‘70s delivered to them things that had been denied their mothers and grandmothers, such as the right to have an abortion or the opportunity to work in any profession one chooses.

They are the beneficiaries of the women’s movement, and perhaps this is the reason they are not so concerned about the sex of the presidential candidate, but about his or her political and ideological beliefs.

PLEASE MEN

Although women in America haven’t quite broken the glass ceiling yet in the corporate world or in politics, the issue of whether a woman should work or not or whether she has the right to determine how big her family should be, are now non-issues.

However, in some ways, the women’s movement is in severe decline in the United States. In music videos, on TV and in the media in general, women’s bodies are being displayed and portrayed as commodities, which is a throwback to the days when all women could aspire for ways to look beautiful and please men.

The arguments against voting for Hillary are as varied as they are complex. Some women say that Hillary represents a single-issue brand of feminism that is concerned mainly about placing women in powerful positions and about equal gender representation, which have little to do with women’s daily experiences.

In this regard, Sanders is much more in tune with what women and other marginalised groups want, as he links women’s issues with other types of inequality and injustices, such as the rising racial and income inequalities, which are having a devastating impact on both low-income American men and women, especially blacks.

ESCAPED IMPEACHMENT

Others still haven’t forgiven Hillary for standing by her philandering husband Bill, who escaped impeachment during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

The irony is that even during that time, President Bill Clinton’s charisma and charm had endeared him to American women, who were more critical of Lewinsky, whom they believed was a silly little intern who had dared to seduce the President of the United States — not considering that perhaps she may have been a victim of sexual abuse, as he clearly had the power in the relationship.

“Many feminists who weren’t married to him also remained silent, choosing Bill’s female-friendly policies over individually wronged females,” commented Susanna Schrobsdorff in a recent issue of Time magazine.

Hillary’s dismissal of the Lewinsky affair as a “vast right-wing conspiracy” basically reduced Lewinsky to a pawn in a political game, and severely damaged her reputation.

Yet Hillary, who is now claiming to be a feminist, did not stand in sisterhood with her then because only by standing by her man could she achieve her political ambitions.

Feminists who claim that Hillary is a women’s rights defender should ponder the fates of Lewinsky and the many other women whose reputations and lives lie in tatters because of her husband.

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