The XX Factor: What women really think.

Or Let's Return to Langston Hughes?

I love that Woolf quote, Judith, and it's sadly apt, lo this century later. And I think you're right that's both Hillary's own doing and a product of how she's been treated. But I wonder about your claim that she has weathered horrors and Obama's hasn't. Yes, she wore the straitjacket of being the first lady, which was never more strangling than in Bill Clinton's White House. But Obama is a 46-year-old black man with an amazingly unconventional and also difficult past; see his autobiography. Forgive me if you were talking about their public and recent political personas and experiences rather than their whole selves and lives, but since I don't like the race-and-gender-suffering one-upsmanship, I can't help pointing out that Obama knows a real trial when he sees one. His have been different kinds of crucibles, and maybe that explains why he's sunny Jane Austen, but maybe it's more apt to think of him as a black writer with a light and wry side, like Langston Hughes (who Rosa reminded us of the other day.)

I'm curious: Does the comparing of your racism as worth than my sexism, and vice versa, distress any one else? Or is it just me who sees this as singularly unproductive?

Virginia Woolf On The Sins Of Our Heroes (or Heroines)

In "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf talks about how the struggle to be heard and taken seriously by a dismissive and mocking world leaves ugly traces in a writer's work-- how it distorts reasoning, undermines arguments, sharpens the tone. Woolf is talking about novels written by female writers of the past, but it seems to me that she could be talking about books by Germaine Greer or sermons by Jeremiah Wright or, I can't help thinking, the shifting self-presentations of Hillary Clinton:

One has only to skim those old forgotten novels and listen to the tone of voice in which they are written to divine that the writer was meeting criticism; she was saying this by way of aggression, or that by way of conciliation. She was admitting that she was 'only a woman,' or protesting that she was 'as good as a man.' She met that criticism as her temperament dictated, with docility and diffidence, or with anger and emphasis. It does not matter which it was; she was thinking of something other than the thing itself. Down comes her book upon our heads. There was a flaw in the center of it. And I thought of all the women's novels that lie scattered, like small pock-marked appes in an orchard, about the second-hand bookshops of London. It was the flaw at the center that had rotted them. She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.

 

[Then Woolf says of the two writers she feels have managed to wriggle free of these conditions, Jane Austen and Emily Bronte:]

 

What genius, what integrity it must have required in the face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking. ... They alone were deaf to that persistent voice, now grumbling, now patronising, now domineering, now grieved, now shocked, now angry, now avuncular, that voice which cannot let women alone, but must be at them, like some too conscientious governess...