Hillary's Tears

Hillary's Tears

The media has practically run amok analyzing Hillary Clinton's “emotional” moment captured on video and now playing at an Internet site near you. What did it mean? Was it scripted or spontaneous? Did it really have an effect on the upset of the polling projections in last Tuesday's New Hampshire primary? What does it say about women voters?

I think that what viewers, and by extension, voters, saw in Hillary's response to the inquiry: “How do you do it?” says more about us than it does about her.

We're not mind-readers, and we'll never know for sure how much of her response was sincere and how much was performative, the self-conscious reaction of a seasoned politician who has learned that she is always “on” whenever she presents herself to the public.

As gendered human beings, we always respond to some degree, in “scripted” ways to certain situations because we learn from infancy that the world sees us as “male” and “female” and automatically sets up certain expectations that frame how we behave and also how our words, gestures, and body language are perceived by others.

So in some ways, it doesn't matter so much what Hillary's “emotional moment” meant to her as what it meant to us and what it reveals about our own individual expectations of who she “really” is.

Rush Limbaugh predictably mocked Clinton, calling it her “waa-waa” moment, thus demonstrating his own bullying instincts and the schoolyard vulgarity that characterizes his Clinton shtick and makes “right-wing” and “rudeness” nearly synonymous among talk radio ranters of his ilk.

Katha Pollitt, veteran feminist in the trenches, saw the immediate stereotype of female weakness and noted that the video raised “the oldest dumbest canard about women: they're too emotional to hold power.” For her Hillary was not so much an individual woman, as a symbol of the double standards women still must confront in public life.

Most ordinary folks, without an ax to grind, saw Hillary's tears in terms of their already established expectations about her: “If she is breaking down now, how would she act under pressure as president?” grumbled one 52-year-old male on nytimes.com. Women could be equally harsh, as a 46-year-old female accountant demonstrated when she complained of Clinton's subsequent comment that “Some of us are right, some of us are wrong.” “This is exactly what is wrong with her campaign,” she wrote. “As long as she continues the 'I am right and you are wrong' mantra, there will be no collaboration, no cohesiveness, no unit.” One can fairly assume that neither of them were Clinton supporters to begin with.

But evidently, many other women, saw themselves in that moment of vulnerability: Those of us who call ourselves “feminists” and don't see it as the “F-word." Younger women who caught in Clinton's weariness the exhaustion of all the women before them who fought so hard just so a woman could run for President and not have her campaign seen as a joke. Women who were fed up with one moment of vulnerability being blown so out of proportion.

Primary season in a national election is not all the different from courting season. We project our deepest desires, fears, and aspirations onto individuals that we can never really know on a personal level and then interpret their behavior in terms of our pre-existing ideas about who they really are: white/black, male/female, Democrat/Republican, wife/husband, mother/father etc.

Any female candidate faces a double burden of conflicting and deep-seated cultural expectations about who she should be as a leader and as a woman. We expect her to be strong, but not too strong, vulnerable, but not weak. It's an exhausting balancing act for all professional women, and we hear women's awareness of that tension in the self-conscious laughter that arose immediately when another woman asked Hillary Clinton: “How do you do it?” It's a question that many women, struggling to balance children and career or the needs of a spouse or partner with their own individual aspirations, ask themselves all the time.

Maureen Dowd wrote in her New York Times op-ed that “in a weirdly narcissistic way, [Hillary] was crying for us” and for the country's failure “to grasp how much it needs her.”

I saw it differently, and like many of the women who witnessed her response to a crucial question – how do you do it ?– I believe many women saw themselves in that moment of vulnerability.

For women, Hillary's tears, welling but not shed, were those tears many women find welling up in such moments of fatigue and vulnerability when we reflect on just how hard it is for us to manage the juggling act that our society demands of us and that it often judges so harshly when we enter public life.

So before we ask ourselves what Hillary's tears meant for the voters of the New Hampshire primary, perhaps we might also ask ourselves what those tears meant for us as well. It could be revealing.