Twenty-five years after she burst onto the scene as a whip-smart but highly polarizing would-be first lady of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton did something no other woman has. After a grueling and invigoratingly close campaign, she stands alone
Twenty-five years after she burst onto the scene as a whip-smart but highly polarizing would-be first lady of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton did something no other woman has. After a grueling and invigoratingly close campaign, she stands alone as the Democrat Party’s presumptive nominee to be president of the United States.
Her achievement transcends politics. It marks a moment of celebration in a nation that took 143 years — longer even than it took to end slavery — to give women the right to vote, and which has been nearly as slow ever since in affording them an equal place in politics, at work or in the church.
It was just three years after the close of the Civil War when 200 women tired of feeling second class convened at Seneca Falls, N.Y. It was America’s first women’s right conference and the women, along with about 40 men who joined the second day, ended up agreeing on 12 resolutions calling for specific rights. All but one were unanimous. But the exception was the ninth, a resolution calling for the right to vote for women. Many there feared that was too big a step, and would subject the conference to ridicule.
With help from famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the resolution ended up passing. But its critics were right. Reactions to the idea nationwide were scathing.
Still, from that simple resolution was born the women’s suffrage movement that would, half a century later, result in the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote. Texas became the first of only three former Confederate states to ratify the amendment, and in 1920 women were granted the full franchise here for the first time.
It is against that backdrop that we pause to celebrate the fact that 97 years after women got the vote they will face a choice this year that is not limited to a choice between men alone. The name of one of the candidates will be that of the woman who cut her teeth in politics by helping register Latino voters in South Texas in 1972 on behalf of George McGovern.
That woman is Hillary Clinton, and she stands as America’s first major-party presumptive nominee for the presidency. Love her or loathe her, we acknowledge the grit, the guile and the guts that carried Clinton through a remarkable journey to stand today with a fighting chance to become leader of the free world.
Voting for Clinton just because she is a woman, of course, would be foolish. So would selecting her merely because her election would make history on par with that made by President Barack Obama eight years ago. But now is not the time to argue whether Clinton should be president. Nor is it time to revisit the many ways she’s been faulted — sometimes harshly — for keeping a private email server and other mistakes.
There is time yet for all of those things. At long last, we can now tell our daughters they can grow up, just like their brothers, to see their name come Election Day at the top of the presidential ballot.
— The Dallas Morning News
