Clinton's victory is a stellar start for feminism – but it is just a start

[niyad]

Clinton's victory is a stellar start for feminism – but it is just a start


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Barack Obama’s presidency has been historic, but it didn’t end racism. We can’t expect the first major female candidate to make sexism disappear


Hillary Clinton’s victory securing the Democratic nomination this week shattered a glass ceiling for women across the country. And with the endorsement of a popular Barack Obama newly in hand, she may be on track to shatter the greatest one of all come November. It’s a sign of feminist progress, and it’s a sign that we’re thinking differently – not just about her, but about the intersection of women and leadership, and even about the sometimes invisible and often insidious ways that gender affects our perceptions of political power.


But Obama becoming the first black US president didn’t mean that racism ceased to be a problem in America. Far from it. And similarly, Clinton’s victory this week doesn’t mean that the work of feminism is done. The danger, as we celebrate this most recent milestone for American women and look ahead to the bigger prize of the general election, is that we’ll lose sight once again of just how far we are from gender equality in America.

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A look further back in time at the march of women’s rights provides still further evidence that Clinton’s historic step forward this week is likely to be followed by setbacks for women, both big and small, as well as maddeningly slow incremental progress for gender equity inside and outside of politics. Let’s start with the fact that women in America didn’t win the right to vote until 144 years after the country was founded, and that when they finally did win it in 1920, after years of protracted struggle, it would be more than a decade until the first woman was elected to the Senate. That woman, Hattie Caraway, took office in 1932, and most of the women who followed in her wake were just filling in for dead husbands. The first woman ever elected to the House of Representatives was Jeannette Rankin of Montana; roughly a century later, she’s still the only woman ever elected to Congress from Montana.

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And the barriers go far beyond representational democracy. The gender pay gap persists. Access to women’s healthcare continues to be imperiled. Being a woman in America still means you are less likely to get ahead in your career (women hold less than 5% of Fortune 500 CEO roles). And the disparities are not just apparent at the highest levels, either. We are more likely to live in poverty, for instance. And the quality of life for minority women, on the whole, is considerably worse.

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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/10/hillary-clinton-feminsim-glass-ceiling-2016-us-election