For much of this year, Clinton has spoken with ease — and little controversy — about female empowerment. At Tina Brown’s ‘Women in the World’ conference in April, Clinton declared that the “double standard” for women was “alive and well.” In countless public appearances, she has opened up about how that standard played out in her own career: from being underestimated by male colleagues as a young lawyer to the advice given to career women her age that they should keep family pictures off their desks.
The former Secretary of State has turned scrutiny about her scrunchies, headbands and hairstyles into laugh lines. She has poked fun at the sexist slights of foreign leaders—like that of Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, who told her he was briefed that she only wore her hair back when she was in a “bad mood.”
She often advises young women to handle criticism by developing skin “as tough as a rhinoceros.” And she rarely gave a speech this fall without reminding audiences she was soon to be a grandmother. The tableau was complete when she tweeted a softly lit image of her cradling newborn Charlotte while Bill Clinton beamed over her shoulder.
Source: Hillary Clinton’s gender politics – CNNPolitics.com
Strategic essentialism is inherently political. The idea is that one uses essentialism – in which shared physical characteristics help indicate a more profound shared characteristic – in order to gain social mobility, particularly when working on an inequality through politics. In it’s most controversial uses, this often means using essentialism in gender, race, or sexuality. Or in our case as environmentalists, using essentialism about the environment to our advantage.
Using Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign as an example, strategic essentialism can be used to bring support and provide platforms for solutions. When boiled down to its roots, the idea of strategic essentialism is “solidarity for equality.” With Hillary Clinton’s campaign, trying to pull in women voters is a big part of the rhetoric and ideas that Hillary talks about and uses. My questions about strategic essentialism boil down to the pros and cons. Do the pros of a potential gain for a minority group out-weight the cons of essentializing an entire group of people? Where can that line be drawn?
In the case of Hillary Clinton, she is using her strategic essentialism as a women to pull in voters. This is working for older women who have been exposed to Hillary’s ways for longer, but not so much for younger women. In a LA Times article by Evan Halper, it appears that Hillary is losing the younger generation of women to another type of political pull: Bernie Sanders’ progressive push against income inequality. If Hillary is not pulling in a huge portion of young women, is her strategic essentialism even working?
Check out Travis’ site to see more on essentialism and gender! Travis looks at gender as a social construct, masculine rationality, and objective/objectification.