This past week, the Democratic National Convention took place in Philadelphia and was nationally televised. This is my first time being old enough to vote, and I am interested in the election this year, so I was thrilled to watch it. The night of July 26, Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared in a live video feed before the massive crowd to give a very short speech before her acceptance of the nomination the next day. In these brief few words, she said something that very much struck a chord with me.
“And to the little girls who stayed up late to watch me,” she said with a smile. “I may be the first female president -- but one of you will be next.”
I grew up in a very supportive, feminist community -- everyone around me was vocal about the strength women and girls possessed. “Girls can do anything [boys can do]” was a familiar phrase in my life as a child. While I, of course, agreed with this rhetoric, it was a little confusing; why would you need to emphasize it? Doesn’t everyone just know that?
It was confusing until a moment I experienced while on vacation with my family. We had gone to Monticello, a small town in Indiana (and I mean small town; the population is approximately 5,000 people) where my dad grew up, and where his parents and siblings still lived. We were in my grandmother’s dining room, chatting before we were to eat dinner. It was politics talk amongst the adults; Bush was president at the time, but I didn’t know much else. I was about nine years old. At some point in the conversation, my grandmother said something that I found to be quite shocking.
“No woman could ever be president. It’s a man’s job.”
This statement didn’t make any sense to me. Why wouldn’t a woman be able to do a man’s job? Can’t girls do anything boys can do? The fact that an adult woman in my life, whom I had grown up being taught to respect without question, had scorned every female in the room including herself, was troubling.
As I grew older, I learned much more about the history of women being valued less than men since the beginning of time. My grandmother, born in 1919, has some old-fashioned beliefs. I learned why the phrase “girls can do anything boys can do” was so prevalent -- it was because there were people like my grandmother, who disagreed with that idea, and it was the duty of the other adults in my life to help me and other little girls fight that idea.
Hillary Clinton is fighting that idea.
Whether or not you think Hillary Clinton will be our next president, or whether or not you think she’ll be a good president, is beside the point. She has made history by becoming the first woman to win a major party nomination. She is proving to every little girl out there that she, too, can do something incredible, like become the President. We need little girls to know that they can do anything boys can do -- not only that, but we need to give them proof.
