Feminists for Hillary...

What was that about unity and Clinton supporters would support Obama?

Feminists For Hillary:

Dear Hillary,

We’re going to call you by your first name. We hope that’s okay. Though you are a successful Senator, former First Lady, and hold or have held a variety of other highly respected positions and titles, we like to think of you as one of us.

We’re sorry. We want for you to know that many of us tried, worked very hard, on your behalf. You have long represented us, and we have supported you because we want to work for our advancement as a unified front. Many of us have not given up on you or the hope of fulfilling your plans for the presidency, and we don’t intend to any time soon. We know you don’t either.

Our lives are full of everyday misogyny, but your life seems particularly inundated by unnecessary vitriol and hate, and in that, we see our own battles. Over the years, we have seen a woman struggling in a political relationship, an intimate relationship, and we have seen and admired your strength to withstand it all. We hear the critics, we see the pundits’ words in print, and we fear for a world that possess such a hatred of the complex and feminine. Yet you don’t show your fear. You keep moving forward. Many of us have bailed out along the way, terrified, but we owe you and ourselves more than that.

We don’t just love you because you’re a woman. We love you because you fight with us, for us, against the odds. We love you in spite of (or perhaps in some ways, because of) defeat. We’re defeated every day. We live in a country run by men, whose agendas will never place us at the forefront of policy. They grew up with us, live with us, but they don’t know us the way you do. They don’t wake up every day experiencing our collective female oppression and imposed inferiority.

We are women, we are feminists, and we love you, and we’re sorry. We’re still here, and we still believe.

Feminists for Hillary
June 2008