Hillary Clinton and women’s language

Women relate differently to Hillary. If you’re a blogger and you think you actually blog differently about Hillary than other politicans or candidates, let me know, will you?

When Hillary Clinton was campaigning in New Hampshire this past weekend, several women stopped her with a hearty “You go girl!” To wit,

Mothers brought daughters. Fathers towed along sons, who were urged to absorb the moment. Adult women tucked copies of Clinton’s memoir under their arm, and yelled “You go, girl” from their seats.
“Come on, I’m a ’60s girl,” said Joan Chamberlain, the director of a local Berlin arts group. “She inspires me to hope again.”

In Iowa a few months ago:

“And Hillary herself says, “The fact that I’m a woman the fact that I ‘m a mom that’s part of who I am,” she said at the Des Moines town hall meeting. “But I’m going to ask people to vote for the person they believe will be the best president.”At one point during the Des Moines event, a woman yelled out, “You go girl!,” to which Clinton replied, “You go with me!”

But then I came across this interesting piece in Mother Jones,

Hillary’s “womanhood” is in need of public revelation? What does that say about her? But, more curiously, what does it say about us that Hillary inspires this casual intimacy? Her life, her looks, her politics, her marriage…are all daily grist at the nation’s coffee shops, still, 15 years after she was introduced to America.

I don’t think the intimacy is casual. I think the “You Go Girl!” phenomenon part of the Oprah-fication of the Hillary personality. The overfamiliarity and cult of hyper sisterhood is a powerful way of gaining female voters. But I also think it’s genuine, and it’s really a true exposition of women supporting women. It’s one of the nice ways women talk to each other (and anyone who has been to middle school knows there are plenty of not nice ways women talk to each other too).

Surely, no one owns her womanhood more than Hillary Rodham Clinton. Carol Gilligan, the noted author, scholar, and psychologist, is someone I’m currently studying. She writes about women’s relational tactics and women’s psychological development in many powerful ways, but here she writes something which, I don’t know, doesn’t seem such a stretch when thinking about Hillary Clinton, how Hillary relates to American women, and how American women hear Hillary. I hear Hillary talk casually, as if she knows me, as if she is my friend but also an idol and a mentor, and that is powerful to me precisely because she is a woman. It seems that with Hillary and her female consituents, we’re learning from each other, as Gilligan wrote in “In a Different Voice”:

The differences between women and men which I describe center on a tendency for women and men to make different relational errors — for men to think that if they know themselves, following Socrates’ dictum, they will also know women, and for women to think that if only they know others, they will come to know themselves.