from The Nation:
BLOG | Posted 02/05/2008 @ 02:15am
Which Womanhood? Laura Flanders
I wish I felt what Robin Morgan feels. "Our President Ourselves!" she cheers, in a rousing pitch for Hillary Clinton. "We need to rise in furious energy – as we did when courageous Anita Hill was so vilely treated in the US Senate, as we did when desperate Rosie Jimenez was butchered by an illegal abortion, as we did and do for women globally who are condemned for trying to break through."
Morgan asks, "Why should all women not be as justly proud of our womanhood and the centuries, even millennia of struggle that got us this far, as black Americans women and men are justly proud of their struggles?"
I wish I felt her poet's passion for Clinton as a player in the global women's movement, but I don't. Indeed, I'm reminded that there are parts to be proud of in this movement of ours, and less attractive parts, of which Hillary Clinton, I'm sad to say, constantly reminds me.
Morgan recalls how Clinton defied the US State Department and the Chinese Government to speak at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women. I saw Hillary Clinton speak that rainy day in China and her defiance was something of which to be rightly proud. But even as Clinton called for the recognition of women's rights as human rights, the rigged-for-profit trade policies that she supported then and continues to endorse were encouraging a global sweatshop economy that has all but eradicated the right to unionize in most of the world -- a working woman's best protector. (It took her six years to get off the board of the anti-union giant Wal-Mart.)
"For too long the history of women has been a history of silence," Clinton told the World Conference then. But almost exactly a year later, she supported her husband's signing of the so-called Personal Responsibility Act, which successfully shifted responsibility for poverty in an affluent society off that society and onto the backs of poor mothers. Those moms barely got to say a word, while DC pols slandered and steamrollered them. .....(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?pid=280397