How We Feel About Hillary Reveals How We Feel About Ourselves

Let me start with a confession. Beginning when I was about nine and continuing to my mid-thirties, I honestly thought that I wanted to be the first woman president of the United States.

In many ways, I could have been. I’m ambitious, I have a good academic pedigree, I’m an activist on social justice issues, I know how to fundraise, and I’m persuasive. I’m also white and straight, which I devoutly wish didn’t matter, but does. I also came of age in the can-do-must-do spirit of the 1970s when women my age were brought up to believe they could and should be anything they wanted, just like the “Free To Be You and Me” song said. Many of us marched off into media, law firms and the financial world.

But once there, we slowly discovered that the road to the top was much longer and bumpier than we had been told; all the more so if we wanted to have a life that included children. Somehow, neither jobs nor men’s lives had changed along with women, so we tried to do it all and felt guilty when we couldn’t. Women changed, but society hadn’t at the same speed. We were forced to realize that a good enough job was — well, good enough. Hillary’s campaign exposed a deeper and harder truth — too many women have limited their expectations of themselves. We hate Hillary because we hate that we don’t have a good excuse for not asking more of ourselves. She did what other over-achieving women had convinced themselves wasn’t possible.

I wanted to be president of the United States because I wanted to be a powerful person who made the world better for others. But I also took note as Sheryl Sandberg, Katie Couric and Marisa Mayer rose to the top, and through no fault of theirs, perpetuated a continuing problem: women think we are valuable only if we are excellent, the first, the best, the most.

On top of that, as my friend Gloria Steinem points out, the last time most of us had a powerful woman in our lives, we were children and she was our mother. When we see and hear Hillary Clinton, we feel regressed to childhood. This affects women less than men, who seem to feel totally unmanned, but it affects women, too. It’s due to the deep unfairness of the fact that men don’t raise children as much as women do. The truth is that women won’t be completely equal outside the home until men are equal in it.

Of course, we should be able to be proud just for being good, not excellent, but we weren’t raised that way. So when we see Hillary Clinton who is doing what we could not — and also putting up with hatred from more woman-fearing men and disappointed-in-life women than any human being should ever have to bear — we punish her for excellence and success. Before the campaign is over, she will have been exposed, humiliated, laughed at, probably even spat upon.

But what I believe we are beginning to realize is this. A Hillary win will be huge for women, even if this political season soured and squelched many younger women’s political ambitions. She will be the first President who knows what it’s like to live as a female in a male-dominant society. She will keep standing up for the needs of women in all our diversity, not only in this country but in the world, as she always has.

It takes an extraordinary woman to prove to both men and women that we are not two gendered groups. No one has to be compared to anyone else. Each of us is a unique and excellent human being.