Hillary Clinton: Renaissance Woman by Karen Bartet Read Free Book Online

 
    An Origin Story
     
    Hillary’s father has been described as a ‘rock-ribbed, middle-class Republican small businessman’. The description lends itself well to her official biography being littered with 'across the aisle' appeals to her rivals. Interestingly, her official biography makes no mention of her education beyond the fact that she attended public schools. One might think that straight 'A's were a good qualification for the office of US President but here we run into one of the curiosities of American culture and the West's attitude towards women: You can be smart, but not too smart . You can be country-smart, not city-smart; thoughtful, but not opinionated. Perhaps the symbol of a female president will overturn some of that prejudice.
     
    Rodham was no slouch as a kid, but her decision to attend law school is given no attention by this official biography, although the fact that it was unusual for a young woman at the time is. Other sources expand somewhat on the decision, crediting her parents who, clearly willing to look beyond their conservative values, saw that her intelligence merited a serious, independent profession, whatever her gender. The glass ceiling, referenced by Clinton in her concession speech in 2007, was already beginning to show some cracks.
     
    Her political career began in earnest while at Wellesley College. Another interesting point missing from the official biography is that the young Hillary was politically active from a young age. In fact, her earliest political activities were for the Republicans, a party which she did not completely abandon until her college days, when the increasing division in American eventually saw her joining the Democrats permanently.
     
    Before this, she was president of the Wellesley Young Republicans. She stepped down from this role as the American Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War began to have a serious effect on American society, including Clinton, who no longer felt the Republicans represented the America she wanted to be a part of, though she had not yet moved all the way to the Democratic worldview (after all, during this time, Southern Democrats were still virulently racist).
     
    Her official online biography attributes this stance of racial equality to Rodham's attendance at Dr Martin Luther King’s speech in Chicago. While an official biography necessarily paints with a broad brush, a more considered approach might be to attribute Rodham's pro-Civil Rights beliefs to her father's matter-of-fact conservatism, the fundamental idea of which was that everyone, regardless of gender, race or what-have-you, deserves the chance to get on in life. These old-school conservative beliefs, frequently neglected by today’s foghorn voices of the American right, are very much embodied in Rodham's ideas and career. In any case, by the time she left Wellesley, she had also left the Republican Party for good. She had also already started to come to national attention . Rodham was featured in an article published in Life magazine after giving an impressive speech criticizing Senator Brooke, who had spoken before her at the Wellesley commencement address.
     
    Rodham's relationship with her future husband – and future president – Bill Clinton, whom she met at Yale Law School, seems to have cemented her Democratic leanings, with the two campaigning together for Democratic politicians. Both made concessions to the other over career and education, with Bill cancelling his plans to join Hillary one summer, suggesting an unusual (for the time) equality in their relationship. Indeed, she turned down his first suggestion of marriage as she wanted to maintain her independence from him, and used the name 'Hillary Rodham' until the early 1980s, when she began to be usually known as Hillary Clinton due to conservative voters looking askance at a married woman using her maiden name. This was an early clash with the public and the media that would foreshadow much of