Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Candidacy and Fear of the “Rising Feminine”

I read an interesting article last night written by a newspaper reporter in Oregon.  He had interviewed an old friend of Hillary Clinton, Jean Houston, following Clinton’s campaign appearance in Eugene.  Clinton had sought out Houston along with Mary Catherine Bateson for support and counsel during crises around Bill Clinton’s presidency, the failure of her own health care initiative in 1994 and her ongoing intense vilification by the media. 

This especially caught my eye:

The biggest change in human history over the last 5,000 years, Houston said, “is the rise of the feminine . . . slowly, but surely, to full partnership with men over the whole domain of human affairs. This is shifting everything.” This was what Houston and Bateson tried to convey to Clinton in 1995 when they helped her understand why, quite apart from political strife, she was the object of so much loathing.

 ”It’s the fear of the ‘rising feminine,’ ” Houston said.

The article goes on:

“The current election is a look at archetypal structures,” said Houston, a handsome 71-year-old with a broad smile. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has “a shamanic personality, of course,” she said. Clinton is “the classical wise woman or priestess, if you will.” The presumptive Republican nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, she added, is “the warrior.”

On Clinton’s friendship with these women:

In her 2003 memoir, “Living History,” Clinton [wrote]  ”As much as I loved my husband and my country, adjusting to being a full-time surrogate was difficult for me. Mary Catherine and Jean helped me better understand that the role of first lady is deeply symbolic and that I had better figure out how to make the best of it.”

 …Clinton later enlisted Houston and Bateson to help craft her first book, “It Takes a Village,” which became a bestseller.

 Woodward wrote that Houston tried to steer Clinton away from her “warrior mode” and “the need to have enemies who could symbolically be singled out to embody the opposition.”

 ”It’s a shame the warfare model is still there,” Houston said. “If she could have moved to the next level, she would be the next president.”

Houston says Clinton has difficulty “portraying her authentic self”:

“She is funny, hilarious, generous, warm, given to acts of kindness that are extraordinary,” Houston said. “She is a deep woman, not just a very bright woman. But she is part of a dying breed, an archaic sensibility.”

To be very clear, Houston’s approach to spirituality is not one that resonates with me.  I do think, though, that she may be onto something when she describes what might be the archetypal significance of the people who have emerged as frontrunners in the 2008 campaign.   I think she’s right about the fear of the “rising feminine,” though I think it might work as well to say that people are afraid of the success of feminism and of the powerful women who embody its successes. 

Clinton’s friendship with Houston and Batesman ended when journalist Bob Woodward’s uncharitable and mean-spirited characterizations of Houston having guided Clinton through imaginary conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt, with whom Clinton identified very closely and whom she admired, resulted in new and improved rounds of Clinton-bashing.  It’s not at all hard for me to imagine the value these imagined conversations might have had to Clinton; it’s also not hard for me to imagine how Woodward and others might have delighted in turning this into  ”Wackygate”.  There’s nothing wacky about the use of imagination, creativity, art or ritual.  It’s unfortunate that Woodward’s and others’ sleazeball tactics worked and that Clinton severed her relationship with these women friends, who cared about her.  That Clinton sought out woman healers during one of the darkest seasons of her life changes the way I think of her and imagine her in a way that is, for me, very positive.  During this time of her friendship with these women, she gave her powerful and memorable speech in Beijing in which she spoke passionately about the problem of violence against women and girls throughout the world.  She said, in part:

Women comprise more than half the world’s population. Women are 70% percent of the world’s poor, and two-thirds of those who are not taught to read and write.

Women are the primary caretakers for most of the world’s children and elderly. Yet much of the work we do is not valued – not by economists, not by historians, not by popular culture, not by government leaders.

At this very moment, as we sit here, women around the world are giving birth, raising children, cooking meals, washing clothes, cleaning houses, planting crops, working on assembly lines, running companies, and running countries.

Women also are dying from diseases that should have been prevented or treated; they are watching their children succumb to malnutrition caused by poverty and economic deprivation; they are being denied the right to go to school by their own fathers and brothers; they are being forced into prostitution, and they are being barred from the bank lending office and banned from the ballot box.

Those of us who have the opportunity to be here have the responsibility to speak for those who could not.

As an American, I want to speak up for women in my own country – women who are raising children on the minimum wage, women who can’t afford health care or child care, women whose lives are threatened by violence, including violence in their own homes.

I want to speak up for mothers who are fighting for good schools, safe neighborhoods, clean air and clean airwaves; for older women, some of them widows, who have raised their families and now find that their skills and life experiences are not valued in the workplace; for women who are working all night as nurses, hotel clerks, and fast food cooks so that they can be at home during the day with their kids; and for women everywhere who simply don’t have time to do everything they are called upon to do each day.

Speaking to you today, I speak for them, just as each of us speaks for women around the world who are denied the chance to go to school, or see a doctor, or own property, or have a say about the direction of their lives, simply because they are women. The truth is that most women around the world work both inside and outside the home, usually by necessity.

We need to understand that there is no formula for how women should lead their lives. That is why we must respect the choices that each woman makes for herself and her family. Every woman deserves the chance to realize her God-given potential.

We also must recognize that women will never gain full dignity until their human rights are respected and protected.

Our goals for this Conference, to strengthen families and societies by empowering women to take greater control over their own destinies, cannot be fully achieved unless all governments – here and around the world – accept their responsibility to protect and promote internationally recognized human rights.

The international community has long acknowledged – and recently affirmed at Vienna – that both women and men are entitled to a range of protections and personal freedoms, from the right of personal security to the right to determine freely the number and spacing of the children they bear.

No one should be forced to remain silent for fear of religious or political persecution, arrest, abuse or torture.

Tragically, women are most often the ones whose human rights are violated.

Even in the late 20th century, the rape of women continues to be used as an instrument of armed conflict. Women and children make up a large majority of the world’s refugees. When women are excluded from the political process, they become even more vulnerable to abuse.

I believe that, on the eve of a new millennium, it is time to break our silence. It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights.

These abuses have continued because, for too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words.

The voices of this conference and of the women at Huairou must be heard loud and clear: It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls.

It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution.

It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.

It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.

It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes.

It is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalized by the painful and degrading practice of genital mutilation.

It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.

If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, it is that human rights are women’s rights – and women’s rights are human rights. Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak freely – and the right to be heard.

Anyone who reads my blog regularly knows I have never supported Hillary Clinton’s candidacy (nor do I support Obama’s and certainly not McCain’s; I support only my own, and if not my own, then Cynthia McKinney’s), but I’m feeling Clinton very deeply these days.  I think she has been made to be the focus of, and to bear up under, free-floating misogynist, sexist resentments and fears of decades and even centuries.  The way she has been imagined and treated in this campaign does not bode well,  not only for Clinton’s candidacy but for feminism, for the lives of girls and women everywhere.

Note:  I’d like for this thread not to become about the Presidential campaign itself, with people stumping for their favorite and trashing their non-favorite.  I’d rather we focus more on why the candidates have the appeal to the American public that they do or do not have. 

Heart