Last week, we made history.
We, women. We, the United States. We, humanity. We, the people, made history.
For the first time in the history of the United States, a woman was nominated by a major political party for president.
This history is not about political affiliation. To be frank, political parties never mattered less than in the moment when Hillary Rodham Clinton said, to an audience of proud Americans, that she accepted her party’s nomination. And I’ll never forget where I was when it happened. I was tired, knew I should be getting to bed so I could wake up for class the next day, but instead I stayed up just a little longer to see Hillary speak. I was surrounded by some of my closest friends, all of us completely enamored by the spectacle and struggling to find a way to verbalize how profoundly reality was inspiring us.
I never needed Hillary Clinton, or any woman, to accomplish this feat to know that the sky was the limit for me. I was lucky enough to be raised by feminist parents that never tried to limit my dreams in an environment where I felt my dreams were possible. I was privileged, and I know. But so many other girls and women that, like me, stayed up to watch Hillary speak, were not afforded the same luxury of privilege. To be fully aware of how Hillary Clinton impacts a world of women that land everywhere on the privilege spectrum is to be fully aware of reality. Hillary stood on stage and confirmed that it was okay for women to succeed, too.
If I am to have children, they will some day sit in a classroom in which the day’s topic will be the 2016 Presidential Election. Their class will cover a myriad of important election, the nuances, who ran, what was accomplished, but when they get to 2016, their history book will begin a new chapter. Maybe there will be a paragraph or two about Donald Trump’s platform of fear and misogyny, but the lion’s share will be on Hillary. Their books will cover, in depth, Hillary’s 40 year political career, and the day that the United States said “Women, you can be president, too”.
Whether you identify with Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Independents, or somewhere in between, American history is being written in front of you. For many of us, one day, our children will ask us what it was like when Hillary shattered the glass ceiling.
It was so, so good. And that’s an objective opinion.
