What in the world was this? I’ve been in politics for a long time, but I was taken aback by the flood of hatred that seemed only to grow as we got closer to Election Day. I had left the State Department one of the most admired public servants in America. Now people seemed to think I was evil. Not just “not my cup of tea” but evil. It was flabbergasting and frightening.
Was this all because I’m a woman? No. But I believe it was motivation for some of those chanters and some of that bile.
Later I read an interview with Margaret Atwood, the prescient author of The Handmaid’s Tale, which put the campaign into yet another historical light. “You can find websites that say Hillary was actually a Satanist with demonic powers,” she said. “It’s so seventeenth century that you can hardly believe it.” The Puritan witch hunts may be long over, but something fanatical about unruly women still lurks in our national subconscious.
That doesn’t just affect me and other candidates. It affects our supporters. Nearly four million people joined a Facebook group supporting my campaign, fittingly called Pantsuit Nation. It was a secret group. It had to be. Otherwise its members were exposing themselves to vicious sexist online harassment, from both the right and the left.
You can hardly open a newspaper these days without reading another grim story: female engineers reporting blatant harassment in Silicon Valley; women entrepreneurs making pitches to investment firms and being propositioned in response; a new study finding that women are given a harder time than men in job interviews; another finding that women are penalized when they decline to reveal their salary history, while men end up making more when they do the same.
That’s why it’s so maddening that the basic fact that sexism is alive and well should still be up for debate. I can’t count the number of times that good-hearted men who should know better dismiss the notion that sexism and outright misogyny are still potent forces in our national life. “But things have changed,” they say, as Donald Trump brags about groping women and a few weeks later wins the presidency, as his rally-goers chant “Trump that bitch,” as the White House proudly releases photos of old white men gleefully deciding which health services to take away from women.
And on that fundamental question of whether it would be good to see a woman—any woman, not just me—become President, the electorate is deeply, depressingly divided. A 2014 Pew Research Center poll found that 69 percent of Democratic women and 46 percent of Democratic men (not terrible, but you can do better than that, Democratic men!) said they hoped to see a female President in their lifetime, but only 20 percent of Republican women and only 16 percent of Republican men did. In 2008, researchers found that more than a quarter of the population expressed anger or upset feelings at the mere thought of a female President. And after the 2016 election, the Diane D. Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society at the University of Arkansas put out a report on the impact of sexism on the race. Researchers asked people to respond to five statements that reflect sexist thinking, including “Feminists are seeking for women to have more power than men” and “Discrimination against women is no longer a problem in the United States.” In results that surprised no one, more than a third of respondents gave answers that were sexist. Trump voters were more sexist than Clinton voters. Republicans were far more sexist than Democrats. And not just men; women were quite sexist, too.
On that note, beginning even before I ran, political commentators wondered whether I’d inspire an unbeatable wave of women to come out and vote for me, in the same way President Obama inspired record-breaking black turnout. I hoped I would, of course, but I had my doubts. Gender hasn’t proven to be the motivating force for women voters that some hope it might be. If it were, we’d probably have had a woman president or two by now, don’t you think? In the end, I won an overwhelming majority of the votes of black women (94 percent) and Latino women (68 percent), and I won women overall by a safe margin (54 percent). But I failed to win a majority of white women, although I did better with them than Obama did in 2012.
So yes, things have changed. Some things are a lot better. But many are still bad. And they are connected—the bad is the backlash to the good. Women’s advancement has set into motion vast changes that inspire intense feelings of all kinds. Some of us are exhilarated. Others feel a whole lot of rage.
The good news—and there is good news—is that there’s another side to all of this. It can also be deeply rewarding to be a woman in politics. You know that just by being in the room, you’re making government more representative of the people. You’re bringing a vital perspective that would otherwise go unheard. That always made me stand up a little straighter. It’s why I love the song “The Room Where It Happens” from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s brilliant musical Hamilton:
It felt really good to be in rooms where things happen—the Oval Office, the Senate chamber—as an advocate for issues that mattered to me: education, equal pay, health care, women’s rights. Maybe those issues would have been close to my heart even if I were a man, but maybe not. Life naturally pushed me in their direction. A young mom interested in policy often ends up working on kids’ issues. A First Lady is often involved with women’s issues. That was okay with me. Some might have found it limiting, but I consider these real-life issues that affect us all.
Later, I moved into different realms: working to rebuild New York after 9/11 as a hometown Senator, supporting our troops and caring for our wounded warriors and all our vets as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, keeping our country and world safe as U.S. Secretary of State. I moved into different rooms: the Situation Room, foreign ministries, the United Nations. And I found that the decades of work I had done on women and families served me well in all those places, because it meant that I understood the intricacies of people’s lives. I knew how governments could help or hurt families. I knew how to marshal resources and support to the people who needed them most. It turned out that my work on so-called women’s and children’s issues prepared me well for nearly everything else I’ve ever done.
I also believe the fact that I’m a woman is one reason why so many people open up to me about the details of their lives and families. They tell me about their children’s medical diagnoses, their caregiving of aging parents, troubles in their marriages and family’s finances, painful experiences with sexual harassment and discrimination. Warmhearted male politicians also receive these confessionals, but from what I can see, women hear them more often. Maybe it’s easier to cry in front of us. Maybe it feels like talking to a girlfriend. All I know is that a lot of people have grabbed my hand and told me their worries and dreams, and that’s been a unique privilege.
There’s another thing that women confide in me about, and that’s stories of their reproductive health. No essay about women in politics could be complete without talking about this. It is such a central part of women’s lives: whether we become mothers and at what age and under what circumstances. Reproductive health in all its complexity—pregnancy, fertility, birth control, miscarriage, abortion, labor, birth—can comprise some of the most joyful and terrifying moments we will ever experience. But a lot of the time, we process these moments in silence. These stories go unspoken, even among women. Then I meet women at rallies or dinners or fund-raisers, or just taking a walk, and they take a deep breath and let it all out.