FREE TO BE

The first-woman-to-become-president narrative that Hilary Clinton is riding doesn’t interest me. What does interest me, deeply, is the way she’s continually attacked for those attributes that confirm and confuse her womanhood: her hair, her ankles, her neck, her pantsuits, her laugh, her ambition, her emotional restraint. It all seems irrelevant.

But when I look back at photos of Clinton from the late 1970′s, during her husband’s first term as governor, I want to cry. There are, here, glimpses of a young woman who is intelligent, willful, wild, expressive, and free. She is wearing her hair in its natural shade (dirty blonde) and texture (big waves), pinned behind her ears with plastic barrettes. She is sporting oversized, hopelessly utilitarian glasses that cover half her face. And she’s draped in hippy-ish Gunne Sax-style dresses with peasant skirts, leg of mutton sleeves and mandarin collars, in loopy floral prints. She’s a vibrant young woman, effortlessly attractive, serious, passionate, alert to the world and the people around her. Where is this Hilary now?

Part of the problem is my own nostalgia, as these pictures show Clinton at an age when she’s far younger than I am now. We change as we get older, and our personalities congeal around those traits that we’re rewarded for. But Hilary’s manicured public image – linked to an extreme makeover after her husband’s 1980 loss in the gubernatorial race – is different, slightly sinister and slightly sad. At that moment she voluntarily remade herself, surrendering her name and her appearance. She has, since, become a fierce political warrior. But was it necessary for her to lose her sass, and herself, along the way?

October 29, 2016 by Nalina Moses

The William J. Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas is bigger than it appears in photographs but not nearly as monumental. The building, completed in 2004 by Polshek Partnership, is a long, glass box whose back end is firmly anchored along the south bank of the Arkansas River, and whose front end cantilevers over the water. It has a handsome glass skin overlaid with metal balconies, patios and screens that filter sunlight and views.

The center is, fittingly, friendly and capacious, with a cool, professional sheen. The exhibits give a rather clinical account of the work and accomplishments of the Clinton administrations. Al Gore’s accomplishments, which include promoting the internet and educating the world about global warning, are separated into a single, stingy display. The building is Pure Bill. Its construction was instrumental in the revitalization of the city’s River Market district. But it’s sited a distance from the liveliest blocks, sits out of alignment with existing streets and, rather than facing the heart of the city, looks far and high across the river in a hopeful, metaphoric gesture. And this is also Pure Bill, reaching rhetorical eloquence while stumbling on mundane tasks.