Even some fair-minded people who want to like me feel that there’s something too controlled about how I speak. Often, it’s just about finding the right words. And impulsive doesn’t mean the same thing as truthful. Just look at Donald Trump.
Still, there’s no denying that my cautiousness has had the effect of making some people feel like they weren’t getting the unvarnished me, which in turn prompted the question “What is she hiding?” This frustrated me to no end, and I never figured out how to solve it. I’m not sure there was a solution.
It’s another variant on the impossible balancing act. If we’re too composed, we’re cold or fake. But if we say what we think without caution, we get slammed for it. Can you blame us for feeling like we can’t win, no matter what we do?
Consider another emotional act: crying. I can think of many male politicians who have teared up from time to time. Some have been mocked for it; Senator Ed Muskie’s political career was all but scuttled by his tears in the 1972 New Hampshire primary, even though it may have just been snow blowing in his eyes. But many men have been treated with compassion and even admiration for their displays of emotion. Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, my husband, George W. Bush, Barack Obama—they’ve all welled up at moments of high sentiment. That makes sense because they are humans, and sometimes humans cry.
But when a woman cries, it can be viewed far less charitably. I remember what happened to Pat Schroeder, the talented and hilarious Congresswoman from Colorado who considered running for President in 1987. She ultimately decided against it, and when she held a press conference to announce that, she cried for about three seconds. Today, when you type “Pat Schroeder” into Google, the very first suggestion is “Pat Schroeder crying.” Twenty years later, she was still receiving hate mail because of it—mostly from women who felt like she let them down.
I had my own famed tearful moment, just before the New Hampshire primary in 2008. I didn’t even cry, not really. I was talking about how tough running for office can be (because it can be very tough), and my eyes glistened for a moment and my voice quavered for about one sentence. That was it. It became the biggest news story in America. It will, no doubt, merit a line in my obituary someday: “Her eyes once watered on camera.”
Interestingly, many would say that my tears turned out to be a good thing for me. Dozens if not hundreds of pundits have commented about how that moment “humanized” me. Maybe that’s true. If so, I’m both fine with that and a little beleaguered at the reminder that, yet again, I—a human—required “humanizing” at all.
Still, some sought to capitalize on my perceived vulnerability in the press and on the campaign trail. When he was asked about my tears, former Democratic Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, who was still in the presidential race at the time, jumped at the chance to call me weak. “I think what we need in a Commander in Chief is strength and resolve,” he said. “Presidential campaigns are a tough business, but being President of the United States is also a very tough business. And the President of the United States is faced with very, very difficult challenges every single day and difficult judgments every single day. What I know is that I’m prepared for that.” Shortly after, he dropped out.
In any case, this whole topic of “being real” can feel very silly. I wish we could just dismiss it and go about our business, whoever we are, without worrying about whether we are satisfying some indefinable standard of realness. As the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes, “It’s not your job to be likable. It’s your job to be yourself.”
Yet the issues of authenticity and likability had an impact on the most consequential election of our lifetimes, and it will have an impact on future ones. So there’s something extremely serious going on here, too—especially since crude, abusive, fact-free rhetoric was characterized as authentic in 2016.
I’ve tried to adjust. After hearing repeatedly that some people didn’t like my voice, I enlisted the help of a linguistic expert. He said I needed to focus on my deep breathing and try to keep something happy and peaceful in mind when I went onstage. That way, when the crowd got energized and started shouting—as crowds at rallies tend to do—I could resist doing the normal thing, which is to shout back. Men get to shout back to their heart’s content but not women. Okay, I told this expert, I’m game to try. But out of curiosity, can you give me an example of a woman in public life who has pulled this off successfully—who has met the energy of a crowd while keeping her voice soft and low? He could not.
I’m not sure how to solve all this. My gender is my gender. My voice is my voice. To quote Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in the U.S. Cabinet, under FDR, “The accusation that I’m a woman is incontrovertible.” Other women will run for President, and they will be women, and they will have women’s voices. Maybe that will be less unusual by then. Maybe my campaign will have helped make it that way, and other women will have an easier time. I hope so.
Near the start of my campaign, I met with my friend Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, who has thought about these issues a great deal. She told me that if there was one thing she wanted everyone to know from her book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, it’s this: the data show that for men, likability and professional success are correlated. The more successful a man is, the more people like him. With women, it’s the exact opposite. The more professionally successful we are, the less people like us. Hearing it put that simply, with data behind it, felt like a lightbulb turning on. Here was proof of something so many women have felt intuitively throughout our lives.
Sheryl shared another insight: that women are seen favorably when they advocate for others, but unfavorably when they advocate for themselves. For example, there’s virtually no downside to asking for a raise if you’re a man. You’ll either get it or you won’t, but either way, you won’t be penalized for trying. A woman who does the same is more likely to pay a price. Even if she gets a salary bump, she’ll lose a measure of goodwill. The exception is when a woman asks for a raise on someone else’s behalf. Then she’s seen as generous and a team player. This, too, resonated with me. People like me when I’m in a supporting role: campaigning for my husband, serving as a member of President Obama’s Cabinet. It’s okay for me to be a fierce advocate in those capacities. But when I stand up and say, “Now I’d like a chance to lead,” everything changes.
You have a steep mountain to climb, Sheryl warned that day. “They will have no empathy for you.”
It’s not easy for any woman in politics, but I think it’s safe to say that I got a whole other level of vitriol flung my way. Crowds at Trump rallies called for my imprisonment more times than I can count. They shouted, “Guilty! Guilty!” like the religious zealots in Game of Thrones chanting “Shame! Shame!” while Cersei Lannister walked back to the Red Keep. As Susan Bordo, a Pulitzer Prize–nominated gender studies professor, put it in her book The Destruction of Hillary Clinton, “It was almost medieval.” Mary Beard, the Classics professor at the University of Cambridge, observed that this venom harkened back to an even earlier time. One popular image among Trump supporters, found on everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs, depicted Trump holding up my severed head, like Perseus from ancient Greek mythology, lifting high the head of Medusa.