 Feminism originated as a struggle for equal rights. It started with voting rights, then expanded to include the dismantling of laws and customs that assumed women were incapable of running their own lives, and so had to be subjected to male overseers. The goal was to achieve for women their autonomy in world with a level social-economic-political playing field. In short, feminism was about achieving the liberal democratic good of individuals with autonomy, human rights, and the equality of opportunity to rise according to their abilities. Shifting social mores, technological innovations, and an expanding economy laid the groundwork for the triumph of what is called “equity feminism” starting in the 1960s. But that was the same time feminism took a sharp turn away from classical liberalism into the illiberal precincts of cultural Marxism, identity politics, grievance-mongering, progressive political advocacy, and New Age silliness like the mythic “women’s way of knowing.” The result today has been the transformation of equity feminism into a subsidiary of a progressive ideology that cares more for political and personal power than equal opportunity for all women. Hillary Clinton’s career exemplifies this change.Feminism’s great weakness has been the way it hides the socio-economic advantages that always have made some women better off than many men.Clinton exemplifies this flaw. She was born and raised in the affluent, virtually all-white Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, Illinois, and attended Wellesley College, then Yale Law––pathways to achievement unavailable to millions of men at the time. As a result of these advantages, she had a promising political career as a left-leaning, feminist Democrat. But then she committed the cardinal feminist sin: she abandoned D.C. to follow BillClinton to Arkansas, letting what feminists deem the bourgeois-patriarchal construct of romantic love, the age-old mechanism for subordinating women, trump her own career From that moment on, Hillary’s success was a secondary effect of Bill’s, a byproduct of happening to marry a brilliant, if amoral, politician. She became one of feminism’s bêtes noires–– the mere appendage of a powerful man, not that different from those Mad Men -era women who achieved wealth and social status not because of their own talents and drive, but because of whom they married or slept with, precisely the behavior feminism opposed as a disguised form of prostitution, the patriarchy’s technique for controlling the threat to its power that talented women posed.Hillary’s subsequent behavior as Bill ascended from governor of Arkansas to president of the U.S. laid bare another big lie of feminism: rather than a principled doctrine that aims to improve the lot and secure the rights of all women, it too often is the instrument of personal careerism and opportunism, a tool for acquiring wealth and power. The litany of scandalsHillary has left in her wake––the billing records of Rose Law firm, the sketchy cattle futures bonanza, the Whitewater skullduggery, and now her exorbitant speaking fees and cadging of millions from foreign governments––all revolve around money-grubbing and influence-peddling for personal aggrandizement.But the scandal that best exposed Hillary’s sacrifice of feminist principle to personal ambition was the “bimbo eruptions” that afflicted Bill from Little Rock to D.C., culminating in the sordid Monica Lewinsky scandal. Despite being publicly humiliated by his serial adultery, Hillary not only stood by her man in subservient Tammy Wynette fashion, but viciously attackedBill’s various paramours, women whom real feminists would have defended as sister victims of a perjurious sexual predator using his political and economic power to exploit them sexually. But Hillary knew her own political future depended on her connection to Bill, so humiliation was the price she was willing to pay for that ambition. More
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