Hillary Just One of Many

She wasn’t going to “stay home and bake cookies”, she was going to reform the health-care system: if we elected her husband, we were thus going to get “two for the price of one”. With those words, Hillary Clinton launched herself into America’s national consciousness, and began a political career that very nearly brought her the Democratic presidential nomination earlier this year. Though she lost that contest, along the way she succeeded in making herself into something more than an ordinary woman in politics. She became an archetype, the Female American Politician.


More than that: she became the archetype of the Powerful American Woman. She herself once explained the hostility she inspires as the misdirected fury of men who were angry at a “female boss” or other female authority figure. They felt bad about being subordinate to a woman at work, so they took it out on her.


This was not entirely accurate: some people disliked Hillary just because she was Hillary. But it’s true that her personal style – frequently chilly, determinedly frumpy, visibly calculating, pointedly humourless – did come to seem like a kind of norm. That’s why, when she lost the Democratic nomination, it wasn’t hard for some to see it as a defeat for all women. If Hillary couldn’t make it in national politics, her disappointed supporters declared, then no woman could.


As anybody who has been watching the news for the past week will already know, that statement turned out to be dead wrong. As it turns out, there are numerous ways for women to be politically powerful in America, and they don’t all involve wearing shapeless trouser suits and looking frosty: Sarah Palin, enter stage right.

The interest in her and her life story is no fluke, either. Following the failure of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Palin is suddenly, and flamboyantly, the most prominent female politician in the country. At age 44, she is also the most prominent representative of her generation of women – a generation which already looks set to be different, in important ways, from its predecessors.

There is, at the moment, even a potential first lady who seems destined to break, if not glass ceilings, then at least preconceptions about what that particular job means, with all of its loaded cultural connotations. Michelle Obama is equally articulate, equally maternal, and no less well-groomed that Sarah Palin. She gave a convention speech which was, in its way, no less revolutionary – in her allotted half-hour, she portrayed herself neither as a traditional first lady, nor as a presidential substitute who would set up her desk next door to the Oval Office, but as rather something different altogether – a successful career woman as well as a mother, a dedicated activist and a wife.


Instead of a tough suit she wore a soft dress. Instead of telling the American public they would get “two for the price of one”, she seemed secure enough about her own identity to simply support her husband. As it happens, she, like Sarah Palin, is 44 years old.


None of this is meant to imply that Hillary Clinton’s generation is finished, let alone Hillary herself: she may well be back in the national game, in 2012, 2016, or later. But the appointment of Palin does bring the Hillary Era to an end – she isn’t the archetypal Female American Politician anymore, she’s just one of many.