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chapter 1 Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Race Question, and the “Masculine Mystique” Kathryn Kish Sklar How can we best place Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign in historical perspective—what were its precedents, and what might unfold from it?1 Of course, it’s impossible to speak about her candidacy without also thinking about Barack Obama’s—and once you start thinking about gender and race, can class be far behind? Future historians might agree that Clinton’s campaign revolved around three questions. First, on the “woman question” Clinton’s candidacy built on the gradual change that took place over two generations since 1930; she consolidated those changes into a permanent base for women presidential candidates in the future. Second, on the “race question” Clinton’s campaign built on the historic precedent of 1869 in which white women competed with Black men for the right to vote. Her example shows that future women candidates for president—Black or white—need to seek an alternative precedent for white feminists’ history on the race question. Third, Clinton’s campaign prompts us to ask the “gender question” as well as the “woman question” and the “race question”—and ask questions about the relationship between gender and class. Why has gender remained so prominent in American politics and class so submerged in the past half century? How might the gender question be answered differently in the future? On the “woman question,” I agree with Katha Pollitt, who wrote in The Nation on June 6, 2008,“Thank you, Hillary, for opening the door for other women.” Pollitt thought that “because [Clinton] normalized the concept of a woman running for President, she made it easier for women to run for every office, including the White House. That is one reason women and men of every party and candidate preference, and every ethnicity too, owe Hillary Clinton a standing ovation, even if they can’t stand her.”2 Jo Freeman charted changes in public opinion polls from 1930 to 1990. In 1937 only a third of respondents were willing to vote for a woman for president. By 1945 that figure grew to 50 percent. In 1972 (elevated by the Second Wave) it grew to 70 percent. And in 1990 it reached 90 percent, where it has stayed.3 So when Hillary Clinton’s candidacy emerged in 2006, it built on seventy years of gradual change in public opinion with regard to women candidates for president. But, of course, her candidacy was about more than “the woman question .” Race, too, was deeply involved. And on this question Clinton failed to establish a path for future white women candidates. Her claim that more hardworking “white”Americans were voting for her exemplified her effort to use race to her advantage in ways that forever tarnished her reputation.4 What was she thinking? Perhaps the historic precedent of 1869 was in her mind. That iconic moment shaped the woman suffrage movement for decades thereafter and has usually been interpreted as pitting the suffrage of white women against Black men. But if we step back and look at the broader context of that moment, we see that its origins in 1837 offer a more usable past for future women presidential candidates. In 1869 the woman suffrage movement tried to find a place in the politics of the post–Civil War era.After a bloody Civil War accomplished the abolition of slavery, the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution was debated. Adopted in 1870, it declared: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Suffragists were divided over this revolutionary amendment, which for the first time created a “national” citizenship. One group, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B.Anthony, decided not to support it because they wanted“sex”to be included in the protected categories. In 1869 they formed the National Woman Suffrage Association in New York and launched a periodical called Revolution. Feminist historians have generally seen them as radical in their insistence on women’s rights. Another group, headed by Lucy Stone and Elizabeth Blackwell, supported the amendment and in 1869 formed the American Woman Suffrage Association in Boston. Feminist historians have generally seen them as more conservative.5 Yet new views of these groups see them as quite similar, more mainstream than radical or conservative. If we measure radical change as the willingness to...

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