Michelle Goldberg in DoubleXX:
Gloria Steinem has a theory about liberal women who feel, or have felt, antipathy towards Hillary Clinton. They are insecure about their own bad marriages. That, at least, is the implication of an astonishingly condescending passage in her new book, My Life on the Road, excerpted in the Guardian. Steinem describes herself as “blindsided by the hostility” toward Clinton from some white liberal women during her first run for Senate. Eventually, Steinem developed an idea about where that animus came from. “If Hillary had a husband who regarded her as an equal—who had always said this country got ‘two presidents for the price of one’—it only dramatised their own lack of power and respect,” she writes. “After one long night and a lot of wine, one woman told me that Hillary’s marriage made her aware of just how unequal hers was.” There are a lot of theories out there about the very real resistance to Clinton among women who, on the demographic surface, should be her base. This, however, is the first time I’ve seen it suggested that they wish their husbands would be more like Bill Clinton.
And what about those women who condemned Clinton for remaining with a husband who humiliated her? “It turned out that many of them had suffered a faithless husband, too, but lacked the ability or the will to leave,” writes Steinem. “They wanted Hillary to punish a powerful man in public on their behalf.”
More here.
