Reply #183: You made my point!

[Divernan]

Your daughter is getting input/feedback of people's negative feelings for Hillary. She hears people saying they don't want Hillary for president because of what they consider "bad" behavior of Hillary's. Your daughter interprets that as Hillary would be a "bad" president, and then your daughter makes the connection that if Hillary would be a bad president, and Hillary is a woman, that ergo propter, ALL women are not good enough to be president.

Consider this, please, for your daughter's sake. What if you had a son who came home upset because he heard all the criticisms of George Bush and that Bush was a bad president, and your son then came to the conclusion that "men are not good enough to be president"? What if, god forbid, Hillary was elected president, and made decisions which provoked great criticism - like, for instance, ordering cluster bombs dropped on civilian areas? As a well informed Clinton supporter, you should be aware that she voted against banning these vicious weapons which have maimed and killed hundreds of children in Lebanon alone. You know, little girls just like yours, with their hands blown off, or their legs or arms, or eyes blinded or ears deafened. You know - cluster bombs - the weapon Princess Diana worked so hard to get banned? Maybe that's OK with you that she voted to keep those bombs in US arsenals - because she had to keep her pro-Israel donors happy, and that's one of Israel's favorite weapons against non-Jewish children. Did you know a lot of the kids in Lebanon are Christian?

Our children repeatedly hear and see people of each gender make serious errors, get arrested, jailed, ridiculed in the press. If you accept your daughter's reaction re criticism of Hillary, how long before she reads a story of some mentally ill mother killing or abusing a child and concludes that women can't be good mothers. Or a woman banker is indicted for embezzling, so women can't be bankers. The list of possibilities is endless.

OF COURSE, you would immediately explain to a son that George Bush was only ONE man, and that just because people don't like what ONE MAN does, that therefore the same people don't like ANY man.
You would tell your son that it is sexist to condemn a whole gender for the actions of one of them, and that reasonable, thinking people judge other people on the basis of an individual's actions, not their gender.

What the vast majority of women on this thread have agreed upon is that Hillary's actions undercut all women in that Hillary's actions give amunition to the sexists who will try to generalize her extreme and erratic and selfish political behavior to any and all women.

Are you teaching your daughter that her primary goal in life is to marry a man who can provide her with status and prestige, and to stay in that marriage regardless of how often he cheats on her and humiliates her? Or are you teaching your daughter that women can achieve a meaningful life and take care of themselves on their own? The majority of women will be on their own at some point in their adult lives - whether never married, divorced or widowed. To keep my daughters focused on their educations, I told them that. I also said I hoped that they would find a great guy, and have someone to share their life with, and the odds of that happening were much better if a woman is quite capable of taking care of herself and her husband/significant other knows that the woman is staying with him because she wants to and loves him - and not because she is depending on him to take care of her as if she is an adult child, and/or is afraid to be on her own.

And finally, all of my kids, daughters and son, and my professional relatives and friends are all Democrats. So are my two women doctors, and I'm working on my dentist. I accept that you don't care one whit about my female relatives and friends. That's OK - they're all grown up and taking very good care of themselves.

But I DO care about your little girl (and all little girls). I've got a long list of things I should be doing with my time right now, instead of answering you. I'm doing it because I know you love your daughter very much, and I hope to convince you to handle the situation which this election presents to you in a way that does not result in your daughter feeling bad about it. You know it will stay like this throughout the primary and the general election, and that's a long time for a child to feel bad. I don't envy you having to explain the world to a child right now.

If you choose to continue to support HRC and you want your daughter to have political awareness, that's fine. I took my kids to McGovern rallies decades ago, and that encouraged political activeness in them. But please explain to her that Hillary, like all political candidates, gets criticized. You can tell her you don't believe what is said about Hillary, or that you base your vote on something other than the issues criticized - but that some people (maybe even you) hate George Bush for his political actions, but that doesn't mean that you hate all men. And that people who think Hillary is "bad", whatever that means to your daughter, do not think all women are bad. In fact, you can repeat what you have read on DU - Obama's supporters, men and women, do not object to a woman president - just this particular woman.