Identity Politics is a column written by veteran journalist Susan Milligan, covering the big issues in the socio-political ether as they intersect with design, art, and other modes of visual communication.
Hillary Clinton has a long career of being first. First female chair of the Legal Services Corporation in 1978. The first woman to be made a partner at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock the following year. First Lady of Arkansas, First Lady of the country (and first First Lady to hold a law degree), the first woman to be elected a US senator from New York (and first First Lady elected to the Senate). The first woman to win the Iowa caucuses and, of course, the first woman to win a major party nomination for president.
The ultimate first – making it to the Oval Office job – was beyond her grasp. And her 2016 loss had all the elements of the frustrations women have endured in less-publicized employment struggles: she won the popular vote but didn’t get the job because of arcane rules that are the election equivalent of old boy’s club practices that keep women out of the room where it happens. And the presidency didn’t just go to any man, but a man who was notorious for his misogynistic remarks, a man not stopped even when a recording emerged the month before the election in which he bragged about being able to “do anything” to women, even “grab ’em by the pussy,” because he was famous.
Such is the painful conundrum of being a trailblazing woman. You often get burned.
Now, Kamala Harris is trying to be the first woman president. And she’s avoiding some of the pitfalls that beleaguered Clinton because Harris is not actually branding herself as the would-be first woman president – let alone the first Black and Asian woman president.
Even though she is facing the same general election foe Clinton did (and Trump has actually escalated his misogynistic rhetoric this time around), Harris doesn’t draw attention to her gender or to the historic possibilities of her candidacy. It’s just there, without her remarking on it.
Hillary Clinton made her femaleness a part of her campaign – sometimes awkwardly so: in her first run, in 2008, she needled primary opponent Barack Obama for being a bit too sensitive to criticism. “I’m with Harry Truman on this,” Clinton said at a Pennsylvania rally that year. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Just speaking for myself, I am very comfortable in the kitchen.”
Harris, meanwhile, unironically talks about her favorite method of preparing collard greens: washing them in the bathtub and cooking them with bacon fat, garlic, and chili peppers. But it’s not in the reassuring context of – don’t worry; I still cook for my husband and kids even though I want to have my finger on the nuclear button. It’s just foodie talk.
Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits were a consistent topic of media conversation, despite the fact that the pantsuit was designed to serve as an unremarkable campaign uniform, much like a man’s suit. Harris wears pantsuits – sometimes with fashionable heels, sometimes with comfortable kicks – but there’s nary a mention of it in stories about her rallies. And while there have indeed been comments about Harris’s looks (Trump seems particularly obsessed with it, complaining about descriptions of Harris as a “beautiful woman,” and insisting he’s better looking than she is), it was Clinton who was the subject of a Washington Post story about displaying “cleavage” on the Senate floor (she didn’t, really, unless you looked very closely). And it seems an absurd observation now when we have a US senator content to wear hoodies and cargo pants on the Senate floor.
Harris has been sexualized, to be sure, with the right-wing suggestion that she “slept her way to the top” because she once dated former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown (never mind that she was a district attorney, state attorney general, and U.S. senator). But the slurs haven’t filtered into the mainstream media coverage of her, even on a sanitized or wink-wink level. Clinton, meanwhile, always had the albatross of her own marriage around her neck – blamed for staying with a straying husband.
Harris’s gender is an asset this year in a way that has zero to do with any kind of “first.” With reproductive rights a central issue in the election, Harris has an inherent credibility on the issue even the most pro-choice man in politics can never have. Her candidacy underscores the perverse contradiction this fall: can we really be ready to elect our first female president, even as women’s bodies have been increasingly under the control of the state? She doesn’t have to talk about how personally insulting it is to her, as a woman. It’s obvious.
And Harris has Clinton to thank for taking the front-line assault in the presidential gender wars. To be sure, Shirley Chisholm took the worst of it in 1972, when the idea of a woman (especially a Black woman) running for president was so anathema to American politics and culture that she wasn’t even allowed to participate in televised primary debates (only after legal action was she allowed to make one speech). She simply wasn’t taken seriously as a candidate for the highest office in the land.
Clinton was taken seriously, making the attacks on her more personal and arguably more vicious. And it paved the path for Harris, who could not have run a campaign so remarkably un-gendered if Clinton had not taken the hits first. Some of it is the times – people are more used to women leaders, making the possibility of a female president more normal and arguably inevitable. Clinton, too, reads more like a 1970s-era feminist, Wayne State University associate professor Janine Lanza, an expert on gender and politics, observed to me – and younger women can’t relate to that as much. Harris epitomizes a more modern kind of feminist. She doesn’t talk about it directly; she just lives it. And thanks to the advance work of trailblazers like Chisholm and Clinton, she just might end up living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
For added commentary, PRINT’s Amelia Nash reached out to design industry leaders for their take on the topic of gender, identity, and brand as they intersect in politics and electioneering. Read their responses here.
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Susan Milligan is an award-winning veteran journalist covering politics, culture, foreign affairs, and business in Washington, DC, New York, and Eastern Europe. A former writer for the New York Daily News, the Boston Globe, and US News & World Report, she was among a team of authors of the New York Times bestseller Last Lion: The Rise and Fall of Ted Kennedy. A proud Buffalo native, Milligan lives in northern Virginia.
Header image composite by Debbie Millman.