The Baroness: a Hillary kind of feminist…

On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, the New York Times published an op-ed by Gloria Steinem in which she implicitly called on the women of the Granite State to go to the polls to vote for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. Steinem’s screed has been widely cited as a feminist call to arms, but it is nothing of the sort, and Steinem is no more a feminist than Clinton is.

Steinem writes that “The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together,” but then contradicts her own apparent recognition of the interdependence of sex and race by advocating that women should choose a woman over a man simply because of her sex or gender; there is nothing less feminist than such an injunction. For Steinem to pit a white woman against an African American man shows that she really doesn’t understand the intersectionality of race and gender to which she plays lip service.

There is an enormous irony in Steinem’s injunction to us to remember that “The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division.” In fact, the single act that has arguably had the most impact on the lives of women — and African American women in particular — over the last decade is the so-called Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which Bill Clinton championed and signed into law. It is no coincidence that the welfare ‘reform’ act had the full support of Newt Gingrich and the right-wing Republicans to whom Bill and Hillary Clinton handed control of Congress in 1994, because the welfare ‘deform’ law (as many progressive activists call it) was straight out of the Republican playbook. The Clintons played into the discourse of poor women of color as ‘welfare queens’ and the Clinton administration’s policies not only did nothing to help them, Clinton policies deepened poverty among poor women of color and their children. The PRWORA had and still has the full support of Hillary Clinton, which tells one all one needs to know about Hillary’s politics. And yet, this is the kind of politics that Gloria Steinem apparently considers feminist and progressive — which demonstrates clearly that neither Gloria Steinem nor Hillary Clinton are either feminist or progressive.

Hillary Clinton also served on the board of Wal-Mart while the corporation engaged in massive and systematic discrimination against women and people of color — something else that, in my view, fails to qualify Hillary as a feminist or a progressive.

And despite questions put to her directly on the issue, Hillary Clinton has refused to express support even in principle for transgender inclusion in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). When asked directly about of the inclusion of gender identity and expression in ENDA, Hillary responded, “No one who’s a leader in the gay and lesbian community has asked me to do that.”

Is that how a true feminist would respond? I hardly think so. And yet, this is the woman whom Steinem champions as a feminist and a progressive. The truth is that Gloria Steinem is a celebrity feminist, which is to say, a feminist manqué. An upper-middle-class white woman who seems utterly unconscious of her own class privilege and white skin privilege, Steinem offers a muddle-headed faux feminism for similarly privileged — not to mention and clueless and gullible — white women who passionately want to believe in Hillary as a kind of latter-day Joan of Arc going into battle on behalf of all women everywhere.

The false feminism that Clinton and Steinem articulate is one in which the mere election of a women to elective office is held to be an intrinsically transformative moment. But having lived for two years under Margaret Thatcher’s iron-handed rule, I can assure you that Thatcher was no feminist and her election represented no victory for women, let alone for feminism. It is no coincidence that Ronald Reagan called her “the best man in England.” While Maggie fulfilled social expectations by having children and was certainly conventionally gendered in terms of deportment (the hairspray, the pumps, the whole get-up), she wielded power just like a man, and if anything, was tougher and more ruthless than any of her male predecessors — which is, of course, precisely how she rose to the premiership and how Hillary will seize the Democratic nomination this year if she does succeed in capturing it.

In truth, while many women have been elected to national leadership, none — not Indira Gandhi, not Golda Meir, not Sirimavo Bandaranaike — have transformed the fundamentally masculinist discourse of power governing their polities. Neither has Angela Merkel, nor has Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. And while it’s too soon yet to come to a final verdict on Michelle Bachelet, hope is diminishing that she can effect such a transformation.

Closer to home, the election of the first woman Speaker of the House of Representatives has not changed the way the House is run; if anything, Nancy Pelosi is even more authoritarian than Tom DeLay (the majority leader and the real power behind the throne of Speaker Dennis Hastert) in the way she operates. Still closet to home, the same is true of the first woman (not to mention ‘out’ lesbian) elected Speaker of the New York City Council. Christine Quinn has not only failed to reform the Council, she has reinforced the top-down, authoritarian, utterly masculinist modus operandi that she inherited from Gifford Miller and Peter Vallone before him.

Like Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton embodies not a feminist but a masculinist ethos — an ethos of power and the attainment of power for its own sake. True feminism is not about the election to public office of those assigned to the female sex and the feminine gender. True feminism aims at the dismantling of the existing sex/gender binary which is the source of the oppression of those who identify as women and men (or something entirely outside the binary system). True feminism rejects existing masculinist discourses of power such as those articulated by anti-progressive anti-feminists such as Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton. True feminism accepts nothing less than the fundamental transformation of politics and society. And so, if one is a true feminist, one can only conclude that, as with Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979, Hillary Clinton’s election in 2008 would represent a triumph of masculinist politics in the guise of feminist philosophy.