WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton is the country’s most famous working mother. For 40 years, she’s been at the center of countless conversations about gender and politics. Even her pantsuits have been debated for decades.
WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton is the country’s most famous working mother. For 40 years, she’s been at the center of countless conversations about gender and politics. Even her pantsuits have been debated for decades.
With her at the top of the Democratic ticket, gender was always going to be an inescapable part of the presidential race.
Still, no one expected this.
In its final weeks, the 2016 campaign is awash in charges and countercharges of assault and groping, sexist slurs and graphic language.
Several women have accused Republican nominee Donald Trump of sexual misconduct and assault. The New York billionaire, meanwhile, has argued that Clinton “viciously” ”attacked” the women who said her husband, former President Bill Clinton, committed rape and sexual impropriety.
Trump supporters commonly wear T-shirts with slogans such as “Hillary sucks but not like Monica” and “Trump that Bitch.” At several Clinton rallies this past week, hecklers interrupted her speeches with shouts of “Bill Clinton is a rapist.”
Trump ended the week by pantomiming the descriptions of his alleged assaults, mimicking pawing at a women’s chest and reaching under a skirt.
It’s an election, Clinton said, that “makes you want to unplug the internet or just look at cat gifs.”
Her longtime supporters see the White House as nearly within their grasp. But the nasty tone of the contest has tempered their joy at shattering what Clinton once called the “highest and hardest glass ceiling.”
“It distracts from it enormously. Who ever dreamt this would be the way this campaign would turn out,” said Cynthia Friedman, who co-founded a Democratic National Committee effort to support women in politics with some help from Clinton in 1993. “Watching Hillary at the debate, I actually got almost physically sick to see somebody abused and spoken too so rudely to their face.”
Advocates worry that Trump’s impact goes beyond Clinton, and potentially could undo decades of progress on issues such as sexism and sexual assault by normalizing violence against women.
“Would there have been sexist mudslinging? Absolutely. But not like this,” said Nita Chaudhary, a founder of the women’s advocacy group UltraViolet. “We’ve made progress on rape culture and on sexism in the last two years ago. It feels like the Trump candidacy is undoing all of that.”
Some Republicans are equally dismayed, seeing Trump as a force that will alienate women from their party for years to come as polls indicate the political gender gap has reached historic levels.
This weekend, Clinton’s campaign is trying to capitalize on that divide, with events focused on contacting female voters, including Republicans.