Hillary Clinton was just named one of Time’s ‘Women Who are Changing the World,’ but that didn’t stop her from blaming sexism as one of the facets that tanked her campaign.
In a new interview, Time’s cover girl suggested sexism was ‘front and center’ throughout her run, as she tried to explain how her biography was just as compelling as her husband’s and President Obama’s.
‘My husband had a powerful story to tell about his upbringing and his background, and Barack Obama had a unique and powerful story to tell,’ she said, as the two ex-Democratic presidents overcame poverty and racism, respectively.
‘Few people would find my story quite so compelling or dazzling because i came of age as a young woman in the middle of the country in the middle of the last century,’ she said. ‘But I think my story, like the stories of so many women of my time, is as inspiring as any other – and it really is the story of a revolution.’
Hillary Clinton is Time’s latest cover girl, named among the magazine’s ‘Women Who are Changing the World’
Clinton argued that she came to age when the role of women was changing dramatically.
‘It’s an important piece of our history that needs to be retold and understood so that the young men and women coming behind us understand that the movement toward women’s equality is just as urgent and vital as ever,’ she noted.
On the campaign trail, Clinton would talk about not being able to get a credit card without a man’s signature or being told by NASA that no women need apply to go into space.
In the Time piece she talked about sexism’s continued existence in politics and in the workplace.
She warned that President Trump’s administration wasn’t going to make it any better.
‘We have to guard against backsliding, especially with this Administration – turning the clock back on women’s roles in everything from business and politics to the military,’ she said. ‘But we also have to just recognize that we still have work to do to change attitudes. And we need more role models.’
‘You can’t, as the saying goes, imagine doing something that you can’t even see,’ she added.
She also suggested that women weren’t rising to the top because the expectations to be perfect were so high.
‘There are no perfect people,’ she noted. ‘So many articles about me always say, “Oh well, she’s flawed.” Well name a person who isn’t!’ Clinton wrote.
‘But that was part of the whole diminishment: Don’t listen to her, don’t follow her, don’t vote for her. Let the other guys entertain you and go on their merry way, flaws from and center,’ she wrote, a likely allusion to now President Trump.
In recent weeks, as chunks of her new book, What Happened, have come out, Clinton has received criticism for not fully bathing in the blame many Americans think she deserves.
She maintains that stance in the Time piece as well.
‘In my upcoming book I try to sort out what I could have done differently, what my campaign could have done differently,’ she said.
‘But you also have to recognize that you had an unprecedented intervention by an FBI director. You had a foreign adversary successfully influence the election. You had voter suppression aimed primary at African Americans and young voters. And you had sexism, which was front and center,’ she ticked off.
‘We have to prevent those things from ever happening again,’ she concluded. ‘And some of those are long-term challenges.’