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We welcome this guest post from Yasmine Ergas, who teaches international law at the School of International and Public Affairs of Columbia University and is the associate director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights.
Earlier this year, French minister of justice, Rachida Dati, created shock waves, not so much by giving birth out of wedlock and refusing to divulge the name of the father, but by going back to work after only five short days. Last spring, the Spanish minister of defense, Carme Chacon, proudly reviewed the troops, pregnant belly first. And on Jan. 13, Hillary Clinton appeared at her confirmation hearing with Chelsea at her side. Are these women, Hillary in particular, heralding a new way of politics by bringing female solidarity, maternity, and womanly ways of being into the traditionally male—and adamantly masculine—enclosures of government?
Sometime in the middle of her campaign, after Bill had made one too many offensive remarks, Hillary changed strategy: Bill was relegated to the background. The iconic Clinton family had never done much for her candidacy anyway. Those pictures a' trois on the campaign trail served as a perpetual reminder of unsavory domestic relations rather than as a net positive. It was smart of Hillary to let Bill go silently into his foundation's night.
In place of the threesome came Hillary and Chelsea. A grown woman with her grown daughter. Sure, it was a unit made of shared ambitions and intense grooming. But it was also a unit made of similarity and difference, of experience and apprenticeship, of a solidarity that runs both ways. Standing next to each other on a podium, working the crowds together, they seemed to acknowledge that there was a reason why it was just the two of them up there, and that reason might not have been of their own making. Surely, neither Hillary nor Chelsea had invited Gennifer Flowers, or Monica Lewinsky, or any of their ilk, into their household. Of course, mobilizing Chelsea wasn't just circumstantial, it was also clever politics. It brought some youth appeal (not much, to be honest) to counter Obama's messianic status among the young. It dispelled the idea that Bill would be the real president. Even more, having her child around feminized Hilary. It promised to transform the incipient dragon lady—the "monster" that Samantha Power had invoked—into a mother figure.
And that transformation emphasized the idea that the relationship between mother and child can stand on its own terms, that what can be passed from mother to daughter includes knowledge about how to be out there in the world, that a woman with children is not a woman alone. So it is actually Hillary and Chelsea who are iconic. They represent all those women who, in fact or in fantasy, have brought up their daughters to be participants in the world.