There is a truth, however uncomfortable, to be found in Madeleine Albright‘s recent remarks–at a Hillary Clinton campaign rally–that women who don’t support other women (in politics) have a special place in a very hot place reserved just for them. (Albright, justly notorious for her infamous remark suggesting the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children as a result of the sanctions against their nation following the First Gulf War was ‘worth it‘, obviously attracted some particularly pointed flak.)
But Albright was right about one thing. Women must support other women politically; when they vote, assume political power, draft legislation, organize politically, support candidate campaigns. Women will come to attain power and retain it when women see themselves as a political bloc, and vote accordingly. As Simone de Beauvoir noted in the famous Introduction to her opus The Second Sex:
If woman seems to be the inessential which never becomes the essential, it is because she herself fails to bring about this change. Proletarians say ‘We’; Negroes also. Regarding themselves as subjects, they transform the bourgeois, the whites, into ‘others’. But women do not say ‘We’, except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say ‘women’, and women use the same word in referring to themselves. They do not authentically assume a subjective attitude. The proletarians have accomplished the revolution…but the women’s effort has never been anything more than a symbolic agitation. They have gained only what men have been willing to grant; they have taken nothing, they have only received.
The reason for this is that women lack concrete means for organising themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat. They are not even promiscuously herded together in the way that creates community feeling among the American Negroes, the ghetto Jews….They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men – fathers or husbands – more firmly than they are to other women. If they belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that class, not with proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is to white men, not to Negro women….The bond that unites her to her oppressors is not comparable to any other.
Beauvoir is supporting a particular form of identity politics, and asking for women to organize themselves into a political unit. She wants that unit to demonstrate a solidarity of work and interest, one that is not forthcoming so long as women remain as separated as they are, by class (social and economic) and race. Women, all to often, are called upon to display solidarity with their class or their race, and they comply; for true political power to be attained, by women, for women, it will have to be sought from other women, and not just those whom they have persuaded to stand shoulder to shoulder with them. They will have to break the bond that unites them to their oppressors, and to do that they will have to disdain older ties, from older forms of political solidarity and build new ones–with other women.
These considerations are especially important for the Hillary Clinton campaign but not exactly in the way Albright and Clinton might have intended–at that moment, standing together on stage. For they apply equally to those women seeking power, as they do to those who would support them. If those women are to expect the support and solidarity of other women, they must support those women themselves, through action and deed. That is, we can reframe Beauvoir’s remarks as rendering the burden of extending solidarity, a shared, mutual one: if Hillary Clinton expects and demands women’s vote because she is a woman candidate, then she must have shown she is a woman who takes care of other women, whether white, black, rich or poor. She must have supported them because they were women, and she, as a woman, understands the life experiences and stations which women undergo and occupy; her politics must show such a concern for other women.
As I noted in a recent post, it is not clear to me Hillary Clinton has done this, or will. (That case has been made much stronger by Michelle Alexander‘s essay in The Nation, and will be made even more so when Liza Featherstone‘s anthology of feminist writings on Hillary Clinton is published later this year.) There might be, for all I know, a special place in that very hot place for women who don’t support other women; we can only wonder who will sit in that particular hot seat.
Samir Chopra 