فصل 27

27

There’s yet another side to the matter of women in politics. It’s not just that politics can be rewarding for those women who choose to enter it. In the long run, it also makes our politics better for everyone. I believe this as strongly as I believe anything. We need our politics to resemble our people. When the people who run our cities, states, and country overwhelmingly look a certain way (say, white and male) and overwhelmingly have a shared background (wealthy, privileged) we end up with laws and policies that don’t come close to addressing the realities of Americans’ lives. And since that’s a basic requirement of government, it’s a pretty big thing to get wrong.

In other words, representation matters.

Is representation everything? Of course not. Just because I’m a woman, it doesn’t mean I’d be a good President for women. (I would have been, but not only because of my gender.)

But it does matter, and often in concrete ways. I remember when I was pregnant with Chelsea, working at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, and repeatedly went to my superiors to ask about their maternity leave policy. They avoided the question until there was no longer any way to avoid it, then stammered that they didn’t have a policy. “No woman who’s worked here has ever come back after having a baby.” So I wrote my own. I was a new partner and had the power to do that. But what about more junior lawyers or support staff? Would they have been expected to come in a few days after giving birth, or not come back to work at all? It took a woman in the room to notice a huge hole in the firm’s policies and care enough to fix it.

Representation matters in less visible but no less valuable ways, too. I remember being riveted as a little girl whenever a woman appeared in our history lessons: Abigail Adams, Sojourner Truth, Ida Tarbell, Amelia Earhart. Even if it just amounted to a sentence in a dusty book—and often that’s all they got—it thrilled me. The great men in our history books thrilled me too, but it meant something different, something quietly momentous, to learn that a woman had done something important. It opened the world up a little more. It made me dream a little bigger. I remember coming home from school and opening Life magazine to read about Margaret Chase Smith, the gutsy Republican Senator from Maine who stood up to Joe McCarthy. Years later, when I became First Lady, I wrote her a fan letter.

As a young woman, I was moved and inspired watching Barbara Jordan speak out eloquently for the rule of law on the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings; Geraldine Ferraro stand onstage as the vice presidential candidate for my party; Barbara Mikulski shake up the U.S. Senate; Dianne Feinstein take on the NRA; and Shirley Chisholm run for President. What hadn’t felt possible suddenly was.

When Chelsea was a little girl, I saw the power of representation through a new lens. I watched her leaf through the pages of her children’s books, searching intently for the girl characters. Now little girls have a new group of fictional heroines to look up to, including Wonder Woman and General Leia (she got a promotion from Princess). Slowly but surely, Hollywood is moving in the right direction.

That’s why it meant so much to me to see all the little girls and young women at my campaign rallies and all the moms and dads pointing and saying, “Look. You see? She’s running for President. You’re smart like she is. You’re tough like she is. You can be President. You can be anything you want to be.”

After the election, I received a letter from a medical student named Kristin in Dearborn, Michigan. She wrote,

I saw you speak for the first time as a small girl. My mom took me, and helped me up to stand on a fence and held me by the back of my overalls because I kept trying to wave to you and cheer you on. I was so ecstatic to hear such a smart woman speak, and I’ve never looked back. You never let that version of me down. I read your history as I got older, and then I got to see more speeches and read your writings. You never let down the older versions of me either.

To this day, even knowing how things turned out, the memories of all those proud and excited girls—and the thought of the women they will become—means more to me than I can express.

I know that there are some reading this who will sneer. Representation! It’s so soft, so wimpy, so liberal. Well, if you can’t imagine why it would matter for many of us to see a woman elected President—and that it wouldn’t matter only to women, just like the election of Barack Obama made people of all races, not just African Americans, feel proud and inspired—I’d simply urge you to accept that it matters to many of your fellow Americans, even if it doesn’t to you.

I wish so badly that I had been able to take the oath of office and achieve that milestone for women. Still, there were many feminist moments in this election we shouldn’t forget. I will always remember Bill’s speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. At one point, he uttered the memorable words, “On February 27, 1980, fifteen minutes after I got home from the National Governors Association conference in Washington, Hillary’s water broke.” Watching from our home in New York, I had to laugh. That was the first time that had ever been said about a presidential nominee. I thought it was about time.