They say the personal is political; I find that more salient with this election. Increasingly, I'm becoming a feminist. I've never really considered myself a feminist as much as a humanist, in that I cared about all injustice. Gay rights dominated my activism because of the great, glaring injustices. But the last few months are teaching me things I hadn't previously noticed.
Hillary's win tonight is important because of the personal message it sends. Her run will, perhaps imperceptibly, lift ceilings. And if she wins, if we "watch a woman get older before [our] eyes on a daily basis" maybe it will make quotidian life easier for women, who are getting older on a daily basis, everywhere.
All my life, I have believed it was unsafe to show my weakness. The first child from a hippie commune to go to school in the a very conservative, rural school house, the bullying was intense. Helpful adults harangued me: "don't let them see it bothers you." Somehow, I was to blame for being a 1st grader, in a 2-room school house and being thrown down a flight of stairs, having a tooth knocked out, being constantly taunted and tormented. Because I showed emotion, I made it fun for them to pick on me. A stoic exterior would protect me. That may have been a unique circumstance, but I've also noticed a lot of ambitious women believing they cannot show vulnerability.
In the last 5 years I've purposefully worked to learn how and where to be vulnerable. I actually went to therapy to deal with the issue. And today, all the tabloids blared about "Hillary's melt-down;" "Hillary loses it." It was like the funhouse version of my nightmares writ large. If you show weakness, an amorphous 'they' will pounce and destroy you.
Regardless of who wins the primary, I've VERY glad that Hillary won tonight. It tells women, people, everywhere that they can succeed without building a fake persona that never admits vulnerability. I know this affects men as well, but I think it hits women (and gay men) much harder.
The primary is hardly over, although Edwards' unpardonable attack on Hillary's "weakness" has meant I can no longer support him (and I'd given him "00, so I truly had placed great hopes in him. I don't understand how a man who has often been good on women's issues and has such a beautiful, genuine, and vulnerable wife would want to send the message to all women that weakness will be punished if you leave the domestic sphere. I'm sure he just saw an opening and pounced, but it left me wondering if he'd rub Angela Merkel's shoulders.)
Finally Chris Matthews illustrates how Hillary's run will change things. In trying to understand why women voted for Hillary, he said tonight "I wish we had more women on the panel," presumably to explain these crazy women voters and how they thought! I guess he never saw the need for women to talk about anything else on the show. They obviously aren't interested in "men's" issues, like the economy, or war, or health insurance or anything like that. After all, they only make up 52% of the population. But now that Hillary is running, now a woman's point of view might be relevant to something, and he all of a sudden wishes they had more women on the panel. Well, maybe in four years, they will have more women on the panel. (And maybe they'll even have <gasp> some older women? I love Rachel Maddow and Katrina Vanden Heuvel, but can you imagine a woman as old as Chris Matthews on the show with him? Maybe in 20 years they will still be allowed to speak. Or a woman who didn't dye her grey? Women have to be attractive and young to be taken seriously.) Now Matthews is an idiot, but Clinton running will have a trickle down effect at all levels.