Hillary Clinton’s Nomination Changed How I Feel About Having a Baby

It’s probably too late for me, but I would have a baby in a world where Hillary Clinton is the President.

First, some background. I’m a Gen Xer. Society told the kids of my generation that the Big Fights were over. Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, the fight against unnecessary US military intervention — sorted. The Boomers had come before us and taken care of all that. We had Michael Jackson and Madonna on MTV and the stalemate of the Cold War as proof of their victories.

Raised on Free to Be You and Me, us children of the 70’s and adolescents of the 80’s were shown women in Power Suits going to work in sneakers and told not to notice the high heels they packed in their handbags, or the fact that the ERA was deadlocked in Congress and would never be ratified. The transition of Jane Fonda from Hanoi Jane to Fitness Icon was presented as an object lesson in the arc that women were expected to travel. The time for aggressive, discomfit-inducing feminism was over. Women could and would succeed by asking for what we wanted…while being attractive.

I don’t remember exactly when I started noticing that something wasn’t right in the narrative. I suspect it was somewhere around the time when, at 12, the elevator man in my apartment building started giving me small gifts. His attention escalated until one day on the way down from my floor to the lobby, he backed me up against the wall of the elevator, pressing his erection against my thigh and dry humping me while wetly whispering compliments into my ear. I watched the lighted numbers above the elevator door count down from seven as I tried to make sense of a tsunami of conflicting feelings that included disgust, pride, betrayal and a shameful component of animal arousal. I exited the elevator and never told anyone what had happened — I thought it must be at least party my fault for being a ‘cocktease,” something my mother had said I never should be. I learned to be careful of what elevator I took when alone.

Right around then, I allowed my also-12 boyfriend to do what he was trying to do, and put his hand up my shirt. I liked making out with him. As it turned out, I liked it when he put his hand up my shirt. It seemed that he did too, at the time. When I got home, he called me and said he was breaking up with him, “You’re too fast for me,” he said before hanging up.

I learned then that as a woman, I was a bitch when I didn’t and a slut when I did. There was something wrong there but I didn’t know how to explain it and no one in 1984 was having the conversation that would explain it for me. I limited my disappointment to the specific men involved, expecting that my future included a man who was smart enough and equality-minded enough to marry and mate with.

Also right around this time, one day while I was getting ready to go out with my friends, my mother took one look at my outfit and makeup (remember, this was the early Eighties. We all dressed like sluts) and said, “If you get pregnant I’m not going to take care of your baby!” I was still a virgin, but I resolved then to make sure to go on the Pill when I became sexually active. That was one true part of how the fight for women’s sexuality changed things for me and my generation. For my whole life Planned Parenthood was in existence and available. I planned to have children someday far off in the future, but didn’t plan on being a teen mom.

Fast forward to 1992. It is eight years later and I’m 20, in recovery from an abusive relationship. Part of that process included me shaving off my long brown hair. My bald head exposed me to a different side of misogyny: the way society treats women when their appearance announces a lack of submission to the male gaze. But I still haven’t shed my conviction that women can’t “have it all” if we would just ask for it…while being pretty. If anything, my experience with a shaved head reinforced my belief that when Geraldine Ferraro had run for Vice President, she failed in part due to her unfuckability. If she had just done a better job of being attractive while being powerful, success might have been hers.

I still expected that marriage and children were in my eventual future. I pinpointed 28 as the right age to marry and my early 30’s as the right age to have kids.

It looked like the tide was turning for women as well. Finally, after 12 years of Republican Presidents and embarassingly funky granola Democratic candidates, along came Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton, his strong, pretty wife. From the beginning there was a quality to her personhood that drew the focus on her in a way that no politician’s wife had ever done before. Despite the fact that there was nothing weak or effeminate about Bill, the jokes and whispers that SHE was the real power in that marriage started immediately. I dug the way this avowed feminist rocked the WASPy headbands and didn’t get why they made so many people so mad. People said that she wished she were running for office herself, but they said it like it was a bad thing. I didn’t see why it was. Bill Clinton’s arrival on the political scene made it look like the Democratic party had escaped the Seventies and was ready to win in the modern world.

Then, in March of 1992, Hillary Rodham Clinton had the nerve to be proud of her career. In response to a question about choosing to pursue the career in law for which she earned a degree from Yale, Hillary Clinton said, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.”

The backlash was swift, massive, and fronted by women. They denounced her for demeaning women who had chosen to stay home, baked the cookies and had the teas. For standing up for herself, this women was cast in the role of being bad for women and mean to women.

I was 20. I say this again to excuse the ridiculous thing I thought, which was that the campaign, and Hillary herself, would stand firm and tell the critics to bugger off. That of course did not happen. Getting Democratic control of the free world was far more important than one woman, her headbands and her silly self-determination. In the end, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barbara Bush each sent a cookie recipe in to Family Circle magazine for a bake off. I’m not sure anyone believed that Hillary Clinton’s Chips were a regular snack in the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion. The recipe submission was a stand-in for Hillary’s (and by proxy, all the uppity working women in America) submission to the cult of domestic womanhood.

Intellectually, I understood her capitulation, but emotionally, it felt like a deep wound. That incident made it clear to me that the story of equality and victory I was raised on was a lie. I was now able to see the size and scope of the Patriarchy and the massive distance women still had to go to achieve equality. I felt the attacks on Hillary as if they were happening to me and I wanted both justice and retribution. I resolved then that if the jokers were right, if this woman ever wanted to run for office, any office, she could count on my vote. And I meant count on it. She wasn’t going to need to cajole me or pander to me or prove anything to me. I had her back, period.

Over the next eight years I voted for her husband three times. One of those votes of course after he’d been quite publicly a terrible husband but our forgiving him seemed to be what she wanted and so I did. People were mad at her then for not divorcing a man with access to nuclear weapons, which seemed a pragmatic decision on her part. People also accused her of expecting a political payoff and I hoped she got it. It seemed only fair compensation for suffering what was a terrible public humiliation.

During that time I also met and moved in with a man. I expected that we would graduate college, get decent jobs, find a largeish rent stabilized apartment in a nice area and proceed with getting married and having kids. As my magic marrying age crept closer, I kept expecting a proposal from my partner. None was forthcoming. He’d struggled in the graduating college and finding secure employment categories. Instead of a ring, I got excuses for postponing adulthood.

In 2000, I finally got the chance to vote for her for Senate. I was proud to be one of the 55% of New Yorkers who voted for her. I was even more proud to be part of the 67% who reelected her, taking that huge number as solid proof of my rightness in supporting this incredibly hardworking woman.

The late 90’s had seen feminism renewed and revived and it felt like it was finally Hillary Clinton’s and our time to succeed on our terms. The years Hillary Clinton served in the Senate coincided with the years when I thought I was going to be ready for marriage and kids. And emotionally during those years I was. The decision to marry someone and have a baby or not is far more complicated and personal than politics. The end result, that I did not do either of those things, is entirely due to underlying problems with my relationship. While I didn’t do it, I still planned to. I passed those years believing that once this one thing (college graduation, job, decent-sized and affordable apartment) worked out, my partner and I would get on with the marriage and babies.

Instead, in 2006 my 12 year relationship collapsed. I was less sad at losing the person than I was at losing the promise of my life plan. It was rough for a while, leaving me at one point sobbing in my doctor’s office that at 34 I was running out of time to find a new partner for marriage and childbirth. She’d just had a baby at a little over 40, and she reassured me that I still had time. I knew that the time I did have wasn’t unlimited and if I wanted to make those things a priority I needed to find myself someone who felt the same way.

But when the only guy I liked was expressing a willingness to be agreeable to the marriage part but no great commitment to the having kids part, I decided to take the gamble that he would come around.

By the time the New York primary took place in 2008, it was looking most probable that Barack Obama was going to be the Democratic nominee, but Hillary was still saying she was in it to win it and I asked the universe or whatever for a boost of luck as a pulled the lever for her. Obama of course got the nomination and Hillary famously threw her full support behind him. It hurt to transfer my allegiance to Obama but for the second time she’d asked me to support a man out of love for her and I did.

Obama proved worthy of that support. I celebrated the night we elected Obama, dancing with strangers in the PATH train on the way home. Of the things Obama gets blamed for, the fact that they years of his Presidency coincided with the years where my partner did not change his mind about having babies and I discovered I didn’t care shouldn’t be included, but that’s what happened.

On April 19, 2016, I placed my 4th-ever vote for Hillary Clinton on my 44th birthday. And finally, finally, this time she secured the nomination. At the announcement that the California polls were closed, the votes were coming in and she’d won the most of all the things, the popular vote and the pledged delegates and the Super Delegates, I felt something inside me unclench and I started sobbing.

So now here I am, 44 and happily childless by choice. It’s worked out fine. But the next day, in the secret group that has been my sanctuary this primary season, someone joked about all of us feeling frisky now that Hillary has finally clinched the Democratic nomination and joked about a baby boom in early 2017. Thinking about it, I realized there was suddenly something different in the way I felt about having kids. Even though in reality that ship has probably sailed for me, I noticed that in my gut I felt that a world where Hillary Clinton was president was a world where I’d be willing to have a baby. That a world where Hillary Clinton was President of the United States would be a world where it was safe for a woman to be pregnant, to be a mom, without that status making her weakened and a subject of the patriarchy. It was a feeling that could also be called hope.