by Gail Collins
“YOU CAN’T SAY A WOMAN’S LIFE IS MORE VALUABLE THAN A MAN’S LIFE.”
The women’s movement had not created the kind of open and caring society its more optimistic leaders had envisioned. It had merely opened doors, and for all the struggles and silliness, women were still racing through them, making use of the opportunities that came in reach. Somehow, many of those shocking little girls who wanted to let their lace training bras show were growing up to be college students who befuddled the nation by ending the boys’ domination of higher education.
They were also demonstrating their willingness to give their lives for their country. After the invasion of Iraq, the army created a small museum in Fort Lee, Virginia, to honor the women who had fallen during the second Gulf War and its aftermath. By early 2009 the memorial contained 115 names. The female soldiers who gave their lives were truck drivers and helicopter pilots, kitchen workers and medics, and almost everything in between. The majority were under 25. A number were mothers. And although their sacrifice had been honored, it had hardly traumatized the nation in the way opponents of women in the military had once predicted. “I think people have come to the sensible conclusion that you can’t say a woman’s life is more valuable than a man’s life,” said Wilma Vaught, a retired air force brigadier general who was president of the Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation.
At the time of the Iraq invasion, 350,000 women were serving in the American military—about 15 percent of the active-duty personnel. Their performance during the invasion of Iraq and the conflict that followed would make it clear how much the military had come to depend on them. The Iraq experience also underscored Dena Ivey’s concern about what would happen when the sexes were mixed in the field. Women returned with post-traumatic stress disorder at much higher rates than men, and experts began to wonder if that was because, along with the inevitable stress of being in danger in a strange, hostile place, women also lived in fear of sexual assault from their fellow soldiers. Studies of female veterans seeking help from the Veterans Administration indicated that high proportions of them had suffered sexual trauma. Representative Jane Harman of California visited a VA hospital in the Los Angeles area and told a congressional panel, “My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that forty-one percent of the female veterans seen there say they were victims of sexual assault while serving in the military.” Twenty-nine percent of those women reported having been raped, she added. “Women serving in the U.S. military today are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq.”
And while women were still barred from high-risk jobs such as tank operator, Iraq demonstrated how little difference that made. “Frankly one of the most dangerous things you can do in Iraq is drive a truck,” an expert in post-traumatic stress disorder told the New York Times. There were plenty of women driving trucks. And the impossibility of making a clear distinction between combat and noncombat posts was highlighted early in the war when the U.S. Army 507th Maintenance Company—a unit full of cooks, clerks, and maintenance workers—was separated from a convoy crossing the desert and wound up lost in the hostile city of Nasiriyah. Nine Americans were killed, and the world saw the dazed faces of others who had been taken prisoner, one of them an African-American woman simply saying she was “Shauna” from Texas. It was Shoshana Johnson, a single mother who joined the army intending to follow her father’s career as a cook and who was shot in both ankles before she was taken captive and held for twenty-two days.
Another prisoner, Jessica Lynch, became famous when word went around the nation that Lynch, a tiny blond woman from West Virginia who had joined the military at 18 in hopes of getting enough money to go to college, had valiantly held off hostile forces who surrounded the lost caravan until her gun ran out of bullets. Later, after she was retrieved from an Iraqi hospital, Lynch would make it clear that her rifle had jammed and she had never fired a shot. “Lori was the real hero,” she said.
Lynch’s best friend in the army, 23-year-old private Lori Piestewa, was lying beside her in the Iraqi hospital, but the doctors had neither the equipment nor the supplies to treat her severe head injuries, and she died before help arrived. Piestewa, the daughter of a Hopi father and a Hispanic mother, was raised on a reservation in Arizona. She was the first American woman to die in the war.
Piestewa had hoped to become the first person in her family to go to college, but she became pregnant at 17 and got married instead. Two children later, she and her husband divorced, and Piestewa was living with her parents in a trailer on the reservation, where the astronomical unemployment rate left her with very few options. Looking for a way out, she left her children with her parents and enlisted, promising that when she returned, she would build the whole family a real house. She was so determined to make good that when she broke her foot in basic training, she concealed it from her officers. “She didn’t want to get held back,” said her father. Later, when her unit was deployed to the Middle East, Piestewa had the option of remaining behind for treatment of a badly injured shoulder. But once again, she covered up her physical problems in order to stay with the rest of the company.
The 507th left Kuwait as part of a convoy headed across the desert to Baghdad, but it fell behind because of the weight of its vehicles. The big water truck Lynch was driving broke down, leaving her stranded in the sands until a Humvee raced over and Piestewa, behind the wheel, called out, “Get in, roommate.” The lost company eventually found a road; then its leaders made a wrong turn and led the line of trucks into enemy territory in Nasiriyah. Piestewa’s Humvee was in the rear when the men in the front discovered their mistake and tried to turn the line of trucks around. At one point she was offered a chance to switch to a safer car, but Piestewa felt it was her responsibility to stay with Sergeant Robert Dowdy, the senior noncommissioned officer she was driving. Her manner was so serene, another driver said, that she calmed the people around her. “If it wasn’t for her, I probably would have freaked out.”
As the company attempted to get back out of the city, it came under heavy mortar fire. Piestewa—carrying Dowdy, Lynch, and two other soldiers she had picked up along the way—skillfully and calmly steered her Humvee around the roadblocks until the truck immediately ahead of her jackknifed, and her front wheel was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade as she tried to weave around. The damaged Humvee, out of control and going about forty-five miles per hour, smashed into the truck. Lori Piestewa was fatally injured.
She left behind her parents, a 5-year-old son, and a 3-year-old daughter. Jessica Lynch, who returned home to a huge reception in West Virginia, thanked everyone who had helped her, then concluded, “Most of all, I miss Lori.”
15. Hillary and Sarah… and Tahita
“I’M NOT GOING TO TELL MY DAUGHTER—OH, I QUIT.”
Hillary Clinton’s life had been unlike that of any other woman in American history, yet she was also very typical of that whole generation of postwar feminists who had intended to both change everything and have it all. In the ’60s, she was a superachiever at an all-female college, where she worried endlessly about the meaning of life and chose boyfriends who were prepared to worry with her. As class-graduation speaker at Wellesley, she shared the stage with Edward Brooke, the first African-American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction, who Hillary bravely and impolitely dismissed as a typical politician, caring only about what was possible, not what was right. In the ’70s, she went to law school and cohabited with her boyfriend, who loved the fact that she was so smart. (On the campaign trail in 2008, Bill Clinton would say that when they were at Yale together, he had told Hillary that he knew all the best people of their generation, “and you have the finest mind.” While it seemed a little over the top for a law school student to feel he already knew every baby boomer in the nation worth knowing, the audiences liked the show of husbandly pride.)
Hillary intended to take the world by storm but wound up putting her ambitions behind those of her husband
. For all that she achieved, for nearly twenty years after her marriage, she was known mainly as Bill’s wife. (George McGovern remembers that when he was running for president in 1972, an aide told him that a very bright young lawyer from Arkansas was going to be the campaign’s organizer in Texas and that he wanted to “bring his girlfriend,” too.) Arkansas was not exactly where the action was for ambitious young legal crusaders, but Hillary moved there because her husband-to-be intended to run for office in his home state. She waited until she was in her thirties to get pregnant, and there were fertility issues, followed by work-family issues. Later, in her campaigns, she would talk about the time when she had to be in court, and Chelsea was sick and the babysitter called in sick, too. “And it was just that gut-wrenching feeling, and I was lucky enough to have a friend who could come over and watch Chelsea while I ran to court, then ran back home.” But that was one bad day. Child care was actually less a problem than the fact that she was responsible for making money while Bill ran for office and served as governor of a state that barely paid its highest elected official minimum wage. She had never envisioned herself as a corporate lawyer, but there she was.
During Bill’s presidency, she became the most active first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt, and like her famous predecessor, she created a wide network of supporters dedicated to social issues such as child welfare and women’s rights. She visited more than eighty countries and addressed a United Nations conference on women in Beijing, “speaking more forcefully on human rights than any American dignitary has done on Chinese soil,” the New York Times reported. But she also failed spectacularly in her attempt to reform the nation’s health-care system. And, of course, there was the humiliation of her husband’s infidelity in what was probably the most public case of adultery since Henry VIII. Ironically, voters seemed to like her better as the betrayed wife than they did when she demonstrated what a marriage of equals might look like in the White House.
Then it was her turn. Before her first lady stint was even over, Clinton started running for the U.S. Senate in New York, a state where she had never lived until she established residency for her campaign. Nevertheless, she won handily and became a very good senator, tending the nuts-and-bolts needs of her constituents while pursuing the big-picture programs like the policy wonk she had always been. She was surprisingly eager to work with Republicans; unsurprisingly interested in the arcane details of complicated legislation.
Women were always her special constituents. Sometimes they saw something of themselves in her. Many of those who had grown up in her era had struggled to balance jobs and family, and wound up putting family first—with no regrets but still with a feeling that their dual burdens had made them miss the chance to do something really big, really wonderful, in the outside world. When Clinton became a senator, they thought about second chances; that even if you were 40 or 50—maybe even 60?—it was still not too late to go for it. And elderly women would always come up to her, saying that they wanted to see a woman in the White House before they died. Some had been born before women could vote, and she could remember all their faces and their stories.
No one knows exactly when she first thought about running for president, but it must have been very early in the game. (Male politicians, after all, tend to start fantasizing with their first election to the board of aldermen or the state legislature.) When Hillary finally announced she was a candidate, the old NOW veterans were thrilled. “I put everything away just to work with Hillary. It was my most devoted time,” said Himilce Novas, a Cuban-American writer and college professor. Having a woman elected president would carry a huge symbolic value. “That was a question people would always ask me—when would there be a woman in the White House?” said Muriel Fox. The women’s rights leaders had always believed they would live to see the day. But as the years went on, there had perhaps begun to be a little doubt.
In 2007 they were certain again. Clinton seemed like the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee, even to the people who hated her. She had all the money, all the support, and in the early Democratic debates, she cleaned the floor with her opposition, letting the country see that she had the stature, the gravitas, for the job. Then, suddenly, Barack Obama caught fire. No one expected it. He was only 46 and less than three years out of the Illinois state senate. He was supposed to be the presidential candidate later, after the Hillary Clinton administration had run its course.
Obama had been born in 1961, to a woman who was a rebel in ways Hillary Rodham would not have dared to try. Ann Dunham, too, was the daughter of an adoring but difficult father—hers had wanted a boy so much he’d named her Stanley, after himself. (She never used the name.) Ann’s Kansas working-class parents had a tendency to keep moving west, and she wound up in college in Hawaii, where she married a Kenyan exchange student and had a son when she was still 18. Her husband went off to Harvard, then back to Africa, and the marriage was over. She struggled—as Obama would remind audiences who worried that he seemed “elitist”—as a single mother, sometimes on food stamps. She married an Indonesian businessman and returned with him to Asia, became an anthropologist, and later specialized in microfinancing businesses for women in the developing world. She divorced her second husband but retained her love for his country and its culture. She died of ovarian cancer at 54.
Her early death taught her son to seize the moment. Obama told the public that he had no time to waste becoming more “seasoned” in the Washington ways of doing business; those old ways were the problem, a culture of corruption that was wearing the country down. And it was Hillary—who had always seen herself most of all as an agent of change—who he identified as the emblem of the old. Now he was the one who wanted to do more than just pursue the possible, and his candidacy was as much a history-making event as hers.
Her supporters were outraged, sure Clinton was the victim of a male political establishment that had never really wanted a woman to begin with. Robin Morgan rewrote her famous diatribe “Goodbye to All That”: “Goodbye to the toxic viciousness…. Goodbye to the HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs…. Goodbye to the most intimately violent T-shirts in election history, including one with the murderous slogan ‘If only Hillary had married O.J. instead!’ Shame. Goodbye to Comedy Central’s South Park featuring a story line in which terrorists secrete a bomb in HRC’s vagina….” Gloria Steinem asked, in the New York Times, whether a black woman with Obama’s qualifications would be taken seriously as a candidate, and answered in the negative: “Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House,” she wrote. But some other women—even women politicians—were uncomfortable with the complaints about sexism. In March 2008, at a Women in Leadership Conference, Alaska governor Sarah Palin told Newsweek, “Fair or unfair, I think she does herself a disservice to even mention it, really.”
Clinton’s staying power was remarkable. Every time she appeared to be hopelessly down, she popped back up. In New Hampshire, when a sympathetic voter asked how she was holding up, Clinton’s eyes got moist; many women flashed back to high school and saw the smart girl being bullied by the more popular guys. (She would get misty a few more times during the campaign, always when people were unexpectedly nice to her.) She stunned everyone by taking New Hampshire—the first woman ever to win a primary for the presidential nomination. Then she lost, then she won. But she was not good at organizing in the caucus states, where intensity of devotion mattered more than general popularity, and there were a lot of caucus states. By spring, the party leaders were beginning to mumble—and the TV talking heads beginning to shout—that it was time for her to throw in the towel.
He wants to force me into a corner where I will say, Okay, fine, I give up, I’m the girl, I give up. I’m the nice person, I don’t want to have a fight. I’ll go home. Well, I’m not going to do it, she’d tell her aides. In private, she slammed her fist on the table and fumed. I’m sick of be
ing pushed around in this campaign. I’m not going to give up. I’m not going to tell my daughter—Oh, I quit, because I’m the girl and they’re all being mean to me. I’m not going to do it. Then she went out and did yet another rally, yet another question-and-answer session, yet another interview for local TV in Puerto Rico or Indiana or Montana. Her campaign was far from perfect, but as a candidate, she got better and better as she rolled along, seeming to grow more comfortable in her role at every stop. She began winning the white male vote in working-class states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, a shift many observers attributed to racism against Obama. Susan Faludi suggested that it might be something more positive: a rethinking by men about the way they viewed women candidates. For most of American political history, she wrote, men had regarded female politicians as versions of “the prissy hall monitor.” But there was not any of that in the late-season Hillary, who strode into a bar and traded shots with Pennsylvania workmen, danced the night away in her last-ditch Puerto Rico primary campaign, and joked with reporters in the back of her press plane at the end of the day while nursing a cocktail.
Thanks to the enthusiasm of Democratic voters, who turned out in record numbers, Clinton won eighteen million votes—more votes than any candidate for a presidential nomination had won before 2008. But it was not enough. Obama played by the rules, outorganized the Clinton machine, and won the most delegates. Hillary Clinton was not going to be the Democratic nominee, and 2008 was not going to be the year that the United States of America elected a woman president. But for the first time, a woman had come close, and throughout the rancorous, emotion-laden, endless primary fight, the one question that no one ever felt the need to pose was whether she was strong enough, tough enough, to be commander in chief. By the time the final primaries rolled around, the nation had gotten used to the idea of a woman as a presidential candidate—of a woman as president. And if that was not the White House, it was still a lot.
