Progress Now Action

Robin Morgan the award-winning poet, novelist, political theorist, feminist
activist, journalist, editor, and best-selling author, has published more
than 20 books, including the now-classic anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful
(Random House, 1970) and Sisterhood Is Global (Doubleday, l984; updated
edition, The Feminist Press, 1996); with the recent Sisterhood Is Forever:
The Women's Anthology for A New Millennium (Washington Square Press, Simon &
Schuster, 2003). A founder/leader of contemporary US feminism, she has also
been a leader in the international women's movement for 30 years.

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT (#2) by Robin Morgan

"Goodbye To All That" was my (in)famous 1970 essay breaking free from a
politics of accommodation especially affecting women (for an online version,
see
http://blog.fair-use.org/category/chicago/).

During my decades in civil-rights, anti-war, and contemporary women's
movements, I've avoided writing another specific "Goodbye . . .". But not
since the suffrage struggle have two communities--the joint
conscience-keepers of this country--been so set in competition, as the
contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) and Barack Obama (BO) unfurls.
So.

Goodbye to the double standard . . .

--Hillary is too ballsy but too womanly, a Snow Maiden who's emotional, and
so much a politician as to be unfit for politics.
--She's "ambitious" but he shows "fire in the belly." (Ever had labor pains?
)

--When a sexist idiot screamed "Iron my shirt!" at HRC, it was considered
amusing; if a racist idiot shouted "Shine my shoes!" at BO, it would've
inspired hours of airtime and pages of newsprint analyzing our national
dishonor.

--Young political Kennedys--Kathleen, Kerry, and Bobby Jr.--all endorsed
Hillary. Sen. Ted, age 76, endorsed Obama. If the situation were reversed,
pundits would snort "See? Ted and establishment types back her, but the
forward-looking generation backs him." (Personally, I'm unimpressed with
Caroline's longing for the Return of the Fathers. Unlike the rest of the
world, Americans have short memories. Me, I still recall Marilyn Monroe's
suicide, and a dead girl named Mary Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick.)

Goodbye to the toxic viciousness . . .

Carl Bernstein's disgust at Hillary's "thick ankles." Nixon-trickster Roger
Stone's new Hillary-hating 527 group, "Citizens United Not Timid" (check the
capital letters). John McCain answering "How do we beat the bitch?" with
"Excellent question!" Would he have dared reply similarly to "How do we beat
the black bastard?" For shame.

Goodbye to the HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs. If
it was a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously outraged-and
they would not be selling it in airports. Shame.

Goodbye to the most intimately violent T-shirts in election history,
including one with the murderous slogan "If Only Hillary had married O.J.
Instead!" Shame.

Goodbye to Comedy Central's "Southpark" featuring a storyline in which
terrorists secrete a bomb in HRC's vagina. I refuse to wrench my brain down
into the gutter far enough to find a race-based comparison. For shame.

Goodbye to the sick, malicious idea that this is funny. This is not "Clinton
hating," not "Hillary hating." This is sociopathic woman-hating. If it were
about Jews, we would recognize it instantly as anti-Semitic propaganda; if
about race, as KKK poison. Hell, PETA would go ballistic if such vomitous
spew were directed at animals. Where is our sense of outrage-as citizens,
voters, Americans?

Goodbye to the news-coverage target-practice . . .

The women's movement and Media Matters wrung an apology from MSNBC's Chris
Matthews for relentless misogynistic comments (
www.womensmediacenter.com). But what
about NBC's Tim Russert's continual sexist asides and his all-white-male
panels pontificating on race and gender? Or CNN's Tony Harris chuckling at
"the chromosome thing" while interviewing a woman from The White House
Project? And that's not even mentioning Fox News.

Goodbye to pretending the black community is entirely male and all women are
white . . .

Surprise! Women exist in all opinions, pigmentations, ethnicities,
abilities, sexual preferences, and ages--not only African American and
European American but Latina and Native American, Asian American and Pacific
Islanders, Arab American and-hey, every group, because a group wouldn't be
alive if we hadn't given birth to it. A few non-racist countries may
exist--but sexism is everywhere. No matter how many ways a woman breaks free
from other oppressions, she remains a female human being in a world still so
patriarchal that it's the "norm."

So why should all women not be as justly proud of our womanhood and the
centuries, even millennia, of struggle that got us this far, as black
Americans, women and men, are justly proud of their struggles?

Goodbye to a campaign where he has to pass as white (which whites-especially
wealthy ones--adore), while she has to pass as male (which both men and
women demanded of her, and then found unforgivable). If she were black or he
were female we wouldn't be having such problems, and I for one would be in
heaven. But at present such a candidate wouldn't stand a chance-even if she
shared Condi Rice's Bush-defending politics.

I was celebrating the pivotal power at last focused on African American
women deciding on which of two candidates to bestow their vote--until a
number of Hillary-supporting black feminists told me they're being called
"race traitors."

So goodbye to conversations about this nation's deepest scar-slavery-which
fail to acknowledge that labor- and sexual-slavery exist today in the US and
elsewhere on this planet, and the majority of those enslaved are women.

Women have endured sex/race/ethnic/religious hatred, rape and battery,
invasion of spirit and flesh, forced pregnancy; being the majority of the
poor, the illiterate, the disabled, of refugees, caregivers, the HIV/AIDS
afflicted, the powerless. We have survived invisibility, ridicule, religious
fundamentalisms, polygamy, teargas, forced feedings, jails, asylums, sati,
purdah, female genital mutilation, witch burnings, stonings, and attempted
gynocides. We have tried reason, persuasion, reassurances, and being
extra-qualified, only to learn it never was about qualifications after all.
We know that at this historical moment women experience the world
differently from men--though not all the same as one another--and can govern
differently, from Elizabeth Tudor to Michele Bachelet and Ellen Johnson
Sirleaf.

We remember when Shirley Chisholm and Patricia Schroeder ran for this high
office and barely got past the gate-they showed too much passion, raised too
little cash, were joke fodder. Goodbye to all that. (And goodbye to some
feminists so famished for a female president they were even willing to
abandon women's rights in backing Elizabeth Dole.)

Goodbye, goodbye to . . .

--blaming anything Bill Clinton does on Hillary (even including his
womanizing like the Kennedy guys--though unlike them, he got reported on).
Let's get real. If he hadn't campaigned strongly for her everyone would
cluck over what that meant. Enough of Bill and Teddy Kennedy locking their
alpha male horns while Hillary pays for it.

--an era when parts of the populace feel so disaffected by politics that a
comparative lack of knowledge, experience, and skill is actually seen as
attractive, when celebrity-culture mania now infects our elections so that
it's "cooler" to glow with marquee charisma than to understand the vast
global complexities of power on a nuclear, wounded planet.

--the notion that it's fun to elect a handsome, cocky president who feels he
can learn on the job, goodbye to George W. Bush and the destruction brought
by his inexperience, ignorance, and arrogance.

Goodbye to the accusation that HRC acts "entitled" when she's worked
intensely at everything she's done-including being a nose-to-the-grindstone,
first-rate senator from my state.

Goodbye to her being exploited as a Rorschach test by women who reduce her
to a blank screen on which they project their own fears, failures,
fantasies.

Goodbye to the phrase "polarizing figure" to describe someone who embodies
the transitions women have made in the last century and are poised to make
in this one. It was the women's movement that quipped, "We are becoming the
men we wanted to marry." She heard us, and she has.

Goodbye to some women letting history pass by while wringing their hands,
because Hillary isn't as "likeable" as they've been warned they must be, or
because she didn't leave him, couldn't "control" him, kept her family
together and raised a smart, sane daughter. (Think of the blame if Chelsea
had ever acted in the alcoholic, neurotic manner of the Bush twins!) Goodbye
to some women pouting because she didn't bake cookies or she did, sniping
because she learned the rules and then bent or broke them. Grow the hell up.
She is not running for Ms.-perfect-pure-queen-icon of the feminist movement.
She is running to be President of the United States.

Goodbye to the shocking American ignorance of our own and other countries'
history. Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir rose through party ranks and war,
positioning themselves as proto-male leaders. Almost all other female heads
of government so far have been related to men of power-granddaughters,
daughters, sisters, wives, widows: Gandhi, Bandaranike, Bhutto, Aquino,
Chamorro, Wazed, Macapagal-Arroyo, Johnson Sirleaf, Bachelet, Kirchner, and
more. Even in our "land of opportunity," it's mostly the first pathway "in"
permitted to women: Reps. Doris Matsui and Mary Bono and Sala Burton; Sen.
Jean Carnahan . . . far too many to list here.

Goodbye to a misrepresented generational divide . . .

Goodbye to the so-called spontaneous "Obama Girl" flaunting her bikini-clad
ass online-then confessing Oh yeah it wasn't her idea after all, some guys
got her to do it and dictated the clothes, which she said "made me feel like
a dork."

Goodbye to some young women eager to win male approval by showing they're
not feminists (at least not the kind who actually threaten the status quo),
who can't identify with a woman candidate because she is unafraid of
eeueweeeu yucky power, who fear their boyfriends might look at them funny if
they say something good about her. Goodbye to women of any age again feeling
unworthy, sulking "what if she's not electable?" or "maybe it's
post-feminism and whoooosh we're already free." Let a statement by the
magnificent Harriet Tubman stand as reply. When asked how she managed to
save hundreds of enslaved African Americans via the Underground Railroad
during the Civil War, she replied bitterly, "I could have saved thousands-if
only I'd been able to convince them they were slaves."

I'd rather say a joyful Hello to all the glorious young women who do
identify with Hillary, and all the brave, smart men-of all ethnicities and
any age--who get that it's in their self-interest, too. She's better
qualified. (D'uh.) She's a high-profile candidate with an enormous grasp of
foreign- and domestic-policy nuance, dedication to detail, ability to absorb
staggering insult and personal pain while retaining dignity, resolve, even
humor, and keep on keeping on. (Also, yes, dammit, let's hear it for her
connections and funding and party-building background, too. Obama was
awfully glad about those when she raised dough and campaigned for him to get
to the Senate in the first place.)

I'd rather look forward to what a good president he might make in eight
years, when his vision and spirit are seasoned by practical know-how--and
he'll be all of 54. Meanwhile, goodbye to turning him into a shining knight
when actually he's an astute, smooth pol with speechwriters who've worked
with the Kennedys' own speechwriter-courtier Ted Sorenson. If it's only
about ringing rhetoric, let speechwriters run. But isn't it about getting
the policies we want enacted?

And goodbye to the ageism . . .

How dare anyone unilaterally decide when to turn the page on history,
papering over real inequities and suffering constituencies in the promise of
a feel-good campaign? How dare anyone claim to unify while dividing, or
think that to rouse US youth from torpor it's useful to triage the single
largest demographic in this country's history: the boomer generation--the
majority of which is female?

Older woman are the one group that doesn't grow more conservative with
age-and we are the generation of radicals who said "Well-behaved women
seldom make history." Goodbye to going gently into any goodnight any man
prescribes for us. We are the women who changed the reality of the United
States. And though we never went away, brace yourselves: we're back!

We are the women who brought this country equal credit, better pay,
affirmative action, the concept of a family-focused workplace; the women who
established rape-crisis centers and battery shelters, marital-rape and
date-rape laws; the women who defended lesbian custody rights, who fought
for prison reform, founded the peace and environmental movements; who
insisted that medical research include female anatomy, who inspired men to
become more nurturing parents, who created women's studies and Title IX so
we all could cheer the WNBA stars and Mia Hamm. We are the women who
reclaimed sexuality from violent pornography, who put child care on the
national agenda, who transformed demographics, artistic expression, language
itself. We are the women who forged a worldwide movement. We are the proud
successors of women who, though it took more than 50 years, won us the vote.

We are the women who now comprise the majority of US voters.

Hillary said she found her own voice in New Hampshire. There's not a woman
alive who, if she's honest, doesn't recognize what she means. Then HRC got
drowned out by campaign experts, Bill, and media's obsession with All Things
Bill.
So listen to her voice:

"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.
"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 woman 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 along women ages 14
to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes. 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.

"Women's rights are human rights. Among those rights are the right to speak
freely--and the right to be heard."
That was Hillary Rodham Clinton defying the US State Department and the
Chinese Government at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing (the
full, stunning speech:

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/hillaryclintonbeijingspeech.htm).

And this voice, age 22, in "Commencement Remarks of Hillary D. Rodham,
President of Wellesley College Government Association, Class of 1969" (full
speech:

>
http://www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/Commencement/1969/053169hillary.html)

"We are, all of us, exploring a world none of us understands. . . .
searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living. .
. . [for the] integrity, the courage to be whole, living in relation to one
another in the full poetry of existence. The struggle for an integrated life
existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with
desperately important political and social consequences. . . . Fear is
always with us, but we just don't have time for it."

She ended with the commitment "to practice, with all the skill of our being:
the art of making possible."
And for decades, she's been learning how.

So goodbye to Hillary's second-guessing herself. The real question is deeper
than her re-finding her voice. Can we women find ours? Can we do this for
ourselves? "Our President, Ourselves!"

Time is short and the contest tightening. We need to rise in furious
energy--as we did when courageous Anita Hill was so vilely treated in the US
Senate, as we did when desperate Rosie Jiminez was butchered by an illegal
abortion, as we did and do for women globally who are condemned for trying
to break through. We need to win, this time. Goodbye to supporting HRC
tepidly, with ambivalent caveats and apologetic smiles. Time to volunteer,
make phone calls, send emails, donate money, argue, rally, march, shout,
vote.

Me? I support Hillary Rodham because she's the best qualified of all
candidates running in both parties. I support her because her progressive
politics are as strong as her proven ability to withstand what will be a
massive right-wing assault in the general election. I support her because
she's refreshingly thoughtful, and I'm bloodied from eight years of a jolly
"uniter" with ejaculatory politics. I needn't agree with her on every point.
I agree with the 97 percent of her positions that are identical with
Obama's-and the few where hers are both more practical and to the left of
his (like health care). I support her because she's already smashed the
first-lady stereotype and made history as a fine senator, and because I
believe she will continue to make history not only as the first US woman
president, but as a great US president.
As for the "woman thing"?

Me, I'm voting for Hillary not because she's a woman--but because I am.


RM
February 2, 2008
New York City