My Mother, Hillary, and a Banner Day

My mother’s birthday was March 4. She turned 100, becoming a centenarian. My friends stop for a moment trying to do that calculation in their heads because the arithmetic doesn’t work automatically—until they remember that I was born in her 40s. She was far ahead of her time in late childbearing and in most other things as well.

We celebrated this milestone with a small but festive dinner attended by six close friends and my father (a mere 96). My mother had not received a telegram or a letter from President George W. Bush, although any number of people had said she would. She didn’t actually care about the letter from the president, but she had hoped that somehow she might get a letter from Senator Hillary Clinton.

Anxiety was the other guest at the table, because this was the Tuesday of the Texas and Ohio primaries. My father, not completely in the present these days, was very much aware of the double significance of my mother’s big day and Hillary’s big challenge. “Don’t count her out,” he said to me coherently and clearly. The words would echo Hillary’s own later that night. My mother was confident. “Hillary will win tonight. It’s my 100th birthday and I’m her good luck charm.”

When my mother was a little girl, her own mother dressed her up in a white dress, put a banner in her hand and took her to a “parade,” as my mother continues to call it. It was a march for suffrage, and the banner said: “Votes for Women.” She remembers the banner and even what her dress looked like, but more than anything else, she remembers laughter. “They were laughing at us.” The men were laughing at these women marching down the streets of Detroit, Michigan, in the early years of the 20th century proclaiming their right to vote. When my mother and her mother returned home, they were greeted with more derision. More than anything else, she remembers that even the men in her own family thought it was a joke to let women vote and that she and her mother had made a public spectacle of themselves.

A few days before my mother’s birthday and the two primary elections, I heard from a young man in Chicago. Through the Hillary campaign, we have become friends by email. He’s “all-Hillary-all-the-time” and I was moved by his understanding of the significance of her candidacy and by his comprehension of her qualities as a leader. I was stunned by his ability to decipher the subtle codes of sexism when the media was attempting to be sly. I was astounded when his anger was equal to mine over a Chicago Sun Times cartoon depicting Senator Clinton as a “witch” in a boxing ring down for the count. I emailed him “who are you?” I learned he was a man whose mother and grandmothers had both died and that all of these women in his life had told him, at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton, that he should keep his eye on Hillary for the future.

He was the feminist child I never had, but he was a young man and not a young woman. Perhaps that is when I understood that not only is her candidacy good for young women; it is essential for young men.

His email to me, and many others, prior to my mother’s birthday, was that it was Chelsea Clinton’s 28th birthday. He asked us to contribute $28.44. The 28 dollars was for Chelsea’s year and the 44 cents for her mother to become the 44th president of the United States. I did so immediately and so did hundreds of others. I smiled when I read his email and was still smiling when I contributed this symbolic amount. It was not, however, a laughing matter.

I thought of the arc of my mother’s life and how much she had experienced and how much even I had experienced in the post-suffrage years and the second wave of the women’s movement. I thought about how much better our country was for the campaign of Hillary and her daughter’s involvement and the involvement of young men like Kevin in Chicago. I thought nothing about this is a joke any longer.

The next weekend I spent time with a dear friend and her young daughter. In the window of their home is big Hillary for President sign. My friend and I were talking about the “monster” remark from a woman in Senator Obama’s campaign. We talked about our rage at the unfair remarks, the double standard in the spin rooms of the television stations. Suddenly, I was angry in a way I had not expected I could be any longer. I turned and there was 11-year-old Maddy standing next to us in the dining room. I was in the middle of a frothing feminist moment, and at first I was horrified at what she might have heard me say. I looked at her, and she was smiling, in fact, she was laughing—not with derision, but unbridled joy. She got the picture. Our passion for Hillary made her happy. My anger did not scare her; her eyes were wide and admiring.

Maddy already has pictures in her mind that are profoundly different ones from those lodged in our memory banks—mine, my mother’s, Hillary’s mother, Hillary’s and even Chelsea’s. Maddy lives in a country where even if Hillary is not the 44th president of the United States, the notion of a woman sitting in the Oval Office is very real and dare I say the word, absolutely “normal” for her and her generation. My mother carried a banner that said Votes for Women when it was still only a dream. Now, we may vote for a woman and carry banners that proclaim her name.

I hope Maddy never has to be as angry as I have had to be on behalf of women’s rights as civil rights. I hope she will never have to recite the lesson that sexism is as corrosive to democracy as racism. Then, I realize if she needs to be angry, she will be angry, without fear of laughter from the men. For this fact alone, I am grateful to Hillary for her refusal to collapse under unbelievable pressure. I think fondly and proudly of all the historic banners all of us have been brave enough to carry aloft through now three centuries of the fight for women’s rightful place, including the ones that say: “Hillary for President.” Whatever happens in the next months, Susan B. Anthony really was right, “failure is impossible.”