Marianne Williamson is an American spiritual teacher, author and lecturer.
Gloria Steinem is an American feminist, journalist, and social and political activist.
Both of these powerful women have strong feelings and opinions about presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton. Both wrote about the 2016 candidate. These two famous women have different points of view on the woman who served as First Lady, as a New York Senator and as the Secretary of State.
In July 2014, Williamson wrote an Open Letter to Clinton in the Huffington Post and began her piece by recalling a positive personal experience the two shared. After the niceties and polite introduction, Williamson got to the point rather quickly and asked Clinton to consider a few things in case she decided a run in 2016.
After expressing her desire for a woman president and acknowledging Clinton’s undeniable qualifications, Williamson stated most emphatically that those attributes were not enough to get her vote, or the votes of the American people. She mentioned the corruption of Wall Street and said, “And for many of us, we don’t want to vote for you if Wall Street runs you too.”
She went on to say:
“. . . once progressives break free of their codependent relationship with the corporate Democrats, you’re going to have a real problem on your hands too.
STOP NOW. Stop cozying up to the banks, to the chemical companies, to the military-industrial complex, to the party machine, and to all the various financiers who make up the plutocracy now ruining this country. Yeah, I know a lot of them are nice people and that’s cool. But they should not be able to turn the elected representatives of the American people into mere inconveniences they can buy off election after election. And if we have a sense that you’d be just another puppet of the elite, then I don’t believe that you will win. We were fooled once, but I don’t think we’re going to be fooled again.”
Williamson ended her plea with:
“I know you know exactly what I’m saying, because I remember you — a lot of us remember you — when you were raging against the Establishment machine on top of which you’re now so sweetly perched. That machine is not our salvation; it’s our problem. Corporate Democrats might have gained some power for the party, but at the cost of its soul.
And quickly please, Hillary. People are starting to despair.”
Read the entire article HERE.
In direct contrast to what Williamson wrote, The Guardian posted an edited excerpt from My Life on The Road by feminist icon Gloria Steinem, who praised Clinton and gave her a glowing endorsement. The piece titled, Why The White house Needs Hillary Clinton, began with:
“ . . . what clinched it for me was listening to her speak after a performance of Eve Ensler’s play Necessary Targets, based on interviews with women in one of the camps set up to treat women who had endured unspeakable suffering, humiliation, and torture in the ethnic wars within the former Yugoslavia . . . By the time she sat down, she had brought the audience together and given us all a shared meeting place: the simple truth.”
Steinem wrote about inviting Hillary haters to living room events when Clinton was fundraising for her Senate seat and said after the “haters” spent some time with the candidate, “This woman they had imagined as smart, cold, and calculating turned out to be smart, warm, and responsive. Instead of someone who excused a husband’s behaviour, she was potentially, as one said, “a great girlfriend” who had their backs.
Here are some more highlights in the lengthy article published on October 19:
“After she was elected to the US Senate on her own merits, she worked constructively, even with old enemies there, and was solidly re-elected to a second term. I began to hear the first serious talk of Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate. By the time the election of 2008 was in the wind, she had a higher popularity rating than any other potential candidate, Republican or Democrat.”
Steinem noted the double standards applied to Clinton and other female candidates, and how after Obama won in 2008, the media continued to hurl sexist comments about Clinton’s choice of attire as well as general misogynistic propaganda:
“I was angry. I was angry because it was OK for two generations of Bush sons to inherit power from a political patriarchy, but not OK for one Clinton wife to claim experience and inherit power from a husband whose full political partner she had been for 20 years. I was angry because young men in politics were treated like rising stars, but young women were treated like – well, young women. I was angry about all the women candidates who put their political skills on hold to raise children – and all the male candidates who didn’t. I was angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one. And I was angry because the media took racism seriously – or pretended to – but with sexism, they rarely bothered even to pretend. Resentment of women still seemed safe, whether it took the form of demonising black, single mothers or making routine jokes about powerful women being ball-busters.”
Read the entire article HERE.
There you have it – two differing opinions from two intelligent women. What do you think?
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