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?