The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Re: But how DID Hillary become a senator?

Anne,

The larger question about Hillary-as-beneficiary-of-Bill is fair game, and I want to say more about it in a second. First, though: what was creepy about Matthews wasn't that he was saying Hillary benefited from a form of nepotism (maritalism?); it was that he was saying we could elect her only because we felt sorry for her. Which seems creepier and nastier to me.

But on to the larger question about what, exactly, the nature of Hillary's accomplishments is--something that's been troubling me these past weeks. Like you, I'm sometimes bemused by the eager championing of her candidacy by feminists; you'd think feminists would want the first female presidential candidate to have a very different C.V. (And I'm sure many do.) I think you're right, we probably would never have heard of Hillary if Bill Clinton hadn't picked up his saxophone and started campaigning all those years ago. Yet if you stop and think about it, the issue is a little more complicated. Because one important (and unanswerable) question is: Would we have heard of Hillary if she hadn't married Bill Clinton? After all, she presumably shaped her career largely around his ambitions and his talent, and part of the deal they struck seems to have been that when the time came, he'd use his influence to support her. You could take the hard line and say that lots of talented women of her generation chose NOT to get married precisely so they wouldn't find themselves in her shoes. And I can understand that. Or you could say she shouldn't have settled so early into the role of just supporting him. But whatever the case, it would be important, I think, to acknowledge how difficult it is in within a marriage, even now, to insist that a husband's choices should be shaped by a wife's ambitions, rather than vice versa.  You could still conclude that she just doesn't have real credentials, and that parlaying Bill's power into her own is creepy. Even so, it's a conundrum the men in this race didn't have to face -- just it proved a benefit they weren't able to take advantage of.